→ this is a re-post from my old blog

An English naval officer was marooned on a remote island in the South Pacific. He had befriended a native man to whom he was constantly trying to prove his superiority. For the Englishman, everything was a contest. This puzzled the native, for whom life was fun, like a game.

One day the Englishman, in a typical fashion, threw down a challenge to the native. Pointing out a spot about half a mile down the beautiful sandy beach, he announced, “We will have a competition from here to that distant point.”

The native agreed. The Englishman, always taking charge of things, set up the conditions: “We will train in our own style, privately, for two weeks. On the fourteenth day, we will compete.”

When the day arrived, they took their places on the starting line and set off. With his usual intensity, pushing himself to the limit of his physical ability and grimacing with the strain, he drove himself through the sand until, gasping for breath, he lunged for the finish line. Exhausted and soaked in sweat, he turned to see how his opponent was doing.

To his joy and amazement, the native was only about halfway to the finish line. The Englishman watched him float gracefully along the shoreline with long, comfortable strides, a smile on his handsome face. When he finally pranced across the finish line he found the Englishman jumping and down and shouting “I won! I won!”

The native looked at the Englishman in disbelief. “What? You won? No, I won, I was the most beautiful!”

from
Body, Mind, and Sport: The Mind-Body Guide to Lifelong Health, Fitness, and Your Personal Best

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In this Japanese name, the family name is Toyotomi.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣 秀吉^?, February 2, 1536 – September 18, 1598) was a daimyo in the Sengoku period who unified Japan. He succeeded his former liege lord, Oda Nobunaga, and brought an end to the Sengoku period. The period of his rule is often called the Momoyama period, named after Hideyoshi’s castle. He is noted for a number of cultural legacies, including the restriction that only members of the samurai class could bear arms. Hideyoshi is regarded as Japan’s second “great unifier.”^[1]

Early life

Very little is known for certain about Hideyoshi before 1570, when he begins to appear in surviving documents and letters. His autobiography starts in 1577 but in it Hideyoshi spoke very little about his past. By tradition, he was born in what is now Nakamura-ku, Nagoya (situated in modern-day Aichi District, Owari Province), the home of the Oda clan. He was born of no traceable samurai lineage, being the son of a peasant-warrior named Yaemon.^[2] He had no surname, and his childhood given name was Hiyoshi-maru (日吉丸^?) (“Bounty of the Sun”) although variations exist.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi had been given the nickname Kozaru, meaning “little monkey”, from his lord Oda Nobunaga because his facial features and skinny body resembled that of a monkey .

Many legends describe Hideyoshi being sent to study at a temple as a young man, but that he rejected temple life and went in search of adventure. Under the name Kinoshita Tōkichirō (木下 藤吉郎^?), he first joined the Imagawa clan as a servant to a local ruler named Matsushita Yukitsuna. He traveled all the way to the lands of Imagawa Yoshimoto, daimyo of Suruga Province, and served there for a time, only to abscond with a sum of money entrusted to him by Matsushita Yukitsuna.

Rise to power

Around 1547 he returned to Owari Province and joined the Oda clan, now headed by Oda Nobunaga, as a lowly servant. He became one of Nobunaga’s sandal-bearers and was present at the Battle of Okehazama in 1560 when Nobunaga defeated Imagawa Yoshimoto to become one of the most powerful warlords in the Sengoku period. According to his biographers, he supervised the repair of Kiyosu Castle, a claim described as “apocryphal”^[3], and managed the kitchen. In 1561, Hideyoshi married Nene who is Asano Nagamasa’s adopted daughter. He carried out repairs on Sunomata Castle with his younger brother Toyotomi Hidenaga and the bandits Hachisuka Masakatsu and Maeno Nagayasu. Hideyoshi’s efforts were well received because Sunomata was in enemy territory. He constructed a fort in Sunomata^[4], according to legend overnight, and discovered a secret route into Mount Inaba after which much of the garrison surrendered.

Hideyoshi was very successful as a negotiator. In 1564 he managed to convince, mostly with liberal bribes, a number of Mino warlords to desert the Saitō clan. Hideyoshi approached many Saitō clan samurai and convinced them to submit to Nobunaga, including the Saitō clan’s strategist Takenaka Hanbei.

100 Aspects of the Moon #7, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: “Mount Inaba Moon.” The young Toyotomi Hideyoshi (then named Kinoshita Tōkichirō) leads a small group assaulting the castle on Mount Inaba; 1885, 12th month

Nobunaga’s easy victory at Inabayama Castle in 1567 was largely due to Hideyoshi’s efforts, and despite his peasant origins, Hideyoshi became one of Nobunaga’s most distinguished generals, eventually taking the name Hashiba Hideyoshi (羽柴 秀吉). The new surname included two characters, one from one of Oda’s two other right-hand men, Niwa Nagahide and Shibata Katsuie.

Hideyoshi led troops in the Battle of Anegawa in 1570 in which Oda Nobunaga allied with future rival Tokugawa Ieyasu (who would eventually displace Hideyoshi’s son and rule Japan) to lay siege to two fortresses of the Azai and Asakura clans.^[5] In 1573, after victorious campaigns against the Azai and Asakura, Nobunaga appointed Hideyoshi daimyo of three districts in the northern part of Ōmi Province. Initially based at the former Azai headquarters in Odani, Hideyoshi moved to Kunitomo, and renamed the city Nagahama in tribute to Nobunaga. Hideyoshi later moved to the port at Imahama on Lake Biwa. From there he began work on Imahama Castle and took control of the nearby Kunitomo firearms factory that had been established some years previously by the Azai and Asakura. Under Hideyoshi’s administration the factory’s output of firearms increased dramatically.^[6] Nobunaga sent Hideyoshi to Himeji Castle to conquer Chūgoku region in 1576.

After the assassinations at Honnō-ji of Oda Nobunaga and his eldest son Nobutada in 1582 at the hands of Akechi Mitsuhide, Hideyoshi defeated Akechi at the Battle of Yamazaki.

At a meeting at Kiyosu to decide on a successor to Nobunaga, Hideyoshi cast aside the apparent candidate, Oda Nobutaka and his advocate, Oda clan’s chief general, Shibata Katsuie, by supporting Nobutada’s young son, Oda Hidenobu.^[7] Having won the support of the other two Oda elders, Niwa Nagahide and Ikeda Tsuneoki, Hideyoshi established Hidenobu’s position, as well as his own influence in the Oda clan. Tension quickly escalated between Hideyoshi and Katsuie, and at the Battle of Shizugatake in the following year, Hideyoshi destroyed Katsuie’s forces^[8] and thus consolidated his own power, absorbing most of the Oda clan into his control.

In 1583, Hideyoshi began construction of Osaka Castle. Built on the site of the temple Ishiyama Honganji destroyed by Nobunaga,^[9] the castle would become the last stronghold of the Toyotomi clan after Hideyoshi’s death.

Nobunaga’s other son, Oda Nobukatsu, remained hostile to Hideyoshi. He allied himself with Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the two sides fought at the inconclusive Battle of Komaki and Nagakute. It ultimately resulted in a stalemate, although Hideyoshi’s forces were delivered a heavy blow.^[4] Finally, Hideyoshi made peace with Nobukatsu, ending the pretext for war between the Tokugawa and Hashiba clans. Hideyoshi sent Tokugawa Ieyasu his younger sister and mother as hostages. Ieyasu eventually agreed to become a vassal of Hideyoshi.

Pinnacle of power

Kaō of Hideyoshi

Like Nobunaga before him, Hideyoshi never achieved the title of shogun. Instead, he arranged to have himself adopted into the Fujiwara Regents House, and secured a succession of high imperial court titles including, in 1585 the prestigious position of regent (kampaku)^[4]. In 1586, Hideyoshi was formally given the name Toyotomi by the imperial court.^[4] He built a lavish palace, the Jurakudai, in 1587 and entertained the reigning Emperor Go-Yozei the following year.^[10]

Afterwards, Hideyoshi subjugated Kii Province^[11] and conquered Shikoku under the Chōsokabe clan.^[12] He also took control of Etchū Province^[13] and conquered Kyūshū.^[14] In 1587, Hideyoshi banished Christian missionaries from Kyūshū to exert greater control over the Kirishitan daimyo.^[15] However, since he made much of trade with Europeans, individual Christians were overlooked unofficially. In 1588, Hideyoshi forbade ordinary peasants from owning weapons and started a sword hunt to confiscate arms.^[16] The swords were melted down to create a statue of the Buddha. This measure effectively stopped peasant revolts and ensured greater stability at the expense of freedom of the individual daimyo. The 1590 Siege of Odawara against the Late Hōjō clan in Kantō^[17] eliminated the last resistance to Hideyoshi’s authority. His victory signified the end of the Sengoku period. During this siege, Hideyoshi proposed that Ieyasu currently controlled five provinces were submitted, and Ieyasu receive the eight Kantō provinces that Kitajo ruled. Ieyasu accepted this proposal. and Date Masamune pledged loyalty to the Hideyoshi.

In February 1591, Hideyoshi ordered Sen no Rikyū to commit suicide.^[18] Rikyū had been a trusted retainer and master of the tea ceremony under both Hideyoshi and Nobunaga. Under Hideyoshi’s patronage, Rikyū made significant changes to the aesthetics of the tea ceremony that had lasting influence over many aspects of Japanese culture. Even after he ordered Rikyū’s suicide, Hideyoshi is said to have built his many construction projects based upon principles of beauty promoted by Rikyū.

Following Rikyū’s death, Hideyoshi turned his attentions from tea ceremony to Noh, which he had been studying in the Komparu style since becoming kampaku. During his brief stay in Nagoya Castle in what is today Saga prefecture, on Kyushu, Hideyoshi memorized the shite (lead roles) parts of ten Noh plays, which he then performed, forcing various daimyō to accompany him onstage as the waki (secondary, accompanying role). He even performed before the Emperor^[19].

The stability of the Toyotomi dynasty after Hideyoshi’s death was put in doubt with the death of his only son Tsurumatsu in September 1591. The three-year-old was his only child. When his half-brother Hidenaga died shortly after his son, Hideyoshi named his nephew Hidetsugu his heir, adopting him in January 1592. Hideyoshi resigned as kampaku to take the title of taikō (retired regent). Hidetsugu succeeded him as kampaku.

Decline and death

His health beginning to falter, but still yearning for some accomplishment to solidify his legacy, Hideyoshi adopted the dream of a Japanese conquest of China that Oda Nobunaga had contemplated, and launched two ill-fated invasions of Korea. Though he actually intended to conquer Ming China,^[20] Hideyoshi had been communicating with the Koreans since 1587 requesting unmolested passage into China. As allies of Ming China, the Koreans at first refused talks entirely, and in April and July 1591 refused demands that Japanese troops be allowed to march through Korea. In August, Hideyoshi ordered preparations for invasion.

In the first campaign, Hideyoshi appointed Ukita Hideie to the field marshal, and had them go to a Korean peninsula in April, 1592. Konishi Yukinaga occupied Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty on May 10, and in only four months, Hideyoshi’s forces had a route into Manchuria and occupied much of Korea. Korean king Seonjo of Joseon escaped to Pyongyang, and requested military intervention from China. In 1593, Ming Chinese Emperor Wanli sent an army under general Li Rusong to block the planned invasion of China and recapture the Korean peninsula. Li recaptured Pyongyang, and surrounded Seoul. Ishida Mitsunari massed Japanese forces in Seoul and haltedLi Rusong and his forces with a serious counterattack. The war reached a deadlock, and after the conclusion of a cease-fire agreement, Japanese troops retreated to Japan.

The birth of Hideyoshi’s second son, Hideyori, in 1593 created a potential succession problem. To avoid it, Hideyoshi exiled his nephew and heir Hidetsugu to Mount Kōya and then ordered him to commit suicide in August 1595. Hidetsugu’s family members who did not follow his example were then murdered in Kyoto, including 31 women and several children.^[21]

After several years of negotiations (broken off because envoys of both sides falsely reported to their masters that the opposition surrendered), Hideyoshi appointed Kobayakawa Hideaki to lead the invasion forces, but their efforts on the Korean peninsula met with less success than the first invasion. Japanese troops remained pinned in Gyeongsang province. By June 1598, The Japanese forces fought with desperation, turning back several Chinese offensives in Suncheon and Sacheon as the Ming army prepared for a final assault. The Koreans’ unexpected talent for guerrilla warfare, aided by the fact that they were fighting on their homeland, continually harassed Japanese forces. While Hideyoshi’s last battle at So-chon, was a major Japanese victory, all three parties to the war were exhausted. and Hideyoshi himself now accepted that the war could not be won. He told his commander in Korea: “Don’t let my soldiers become spirits in a foreign land.”^[1], Toyotomi Hideyoshi died in August 18, 1598. His death was kept secret by the Council of Five Elders to preserve morale, and Japanese troops were withdrawn from the Korean peninsula.

Because of his failure to capture Korea, Hideyoshi’s forces were unable to invade China. Rather than strengthen his position, the military expeditions left his clan’s coffers and fighting strength depleted, his vassals at odds over responsibility for the failure, and the clans that were loyal to the Toyotomi name weakened. The dream of a Japanese empire encompassing Asia ended with Hideyoshi. The Tokugawa government not only prohibited any military expeditions to the mainland, but closed Japan to nearly all foreigners during the years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was not until the late 19th century that Japan would again fight a war against China through Korea, using much the same route that Hideyoshi’s invasion force had used.

After his death, the other members of the Council of Five Regents were unable to keep the ambitions of Tokugawa Ieyasu in check. Two of Hideyoshi’s top generals Katō Kiyomasa and Fukushima Masanori had fought bravely during the war, but returned to find the Toyotomi clan castellan Ishida Mitsunari in power. He held the generals in low esteem, and they sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu. Hideyoshi’s underaged son and designated successor Hideyori lost the power his father once held, and Tokugawa Ieyasu was declared Shogun following the Battle of Sekigahara.

Cultural legacy

Toyotomi Hideyoshi changed Japanese society in many ways. These include imposition of a rigid class structure, restriction on travel, and surveys of land and production.

Class reforms affected commoners and warriors. During the Sengoku period, it had become common for peasants to become warriors, or for samurai to farm due to the constant uncertainty caused by the lack of centralized government and always tentative peace. Upon taking control, Hideyoshi decreed that all peasants be disarmed completely.^[22] Conversely, he required samurai to leave the land and take up residence in the castle towns.^[23] This solidified the social class system for the next 300 years.

Furthermore, he ordered comprehensive surveys and a complete census of Japan. Once this was done and all citizens were registered, he required all Japanese to stay in their respective han (fiefs) unless they obtained official permission to go elsewhere. This ensured order in a period when bandits still roamed the countryside and peace was still new. The land surveys formed the basis for systematic taxation.^[24]

A replicated Osaka Castle has been created on the site of the Hideyoshi’s great donjon. The iconic castle has become a symbol of Osaka’s re-emergence as a great city after its devastation in World War II.

In 1590, Hideyoshi completed construction of the Osaka Castle, the largest and most formidable in all Japan, to guard the western approaches to Kyoto. In that same year, Hideyoshi banned “unfree labor” or slavery;^[25] but forms of contract and indentured labor persisted alongside the period penal codes’ forced labor.^[26]

Hideyoshi also influenced the material culture of Japan. He lavished time and money on the tea ceremony, collecting implements, sponsoring lavish social events, and patronizing acclaimed masters. As interest in the tea ceremony rose among the ruling class, so too did demand for fine ceramic implements, and during the course of the Korean campaigns, not only were large quantities of prized ceramic ware confiscated, many Korean artisans were forcibly relocated to Japan.^[27]

Inspired by the dazzling Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, he also constructed a fabulous portable tea room, covered with gold leaf and lined inside with red gossamer. Using this mobile innovation, he was able to practice the tea ceremony wherever he went, powerfully projecting his unrivaled power and status upon his arrival.

Politically, he set up a governmental system that balanced out the most powerful Japanese warlords (or daimyo). A council was created to include the most influential lords. At the same time, a regent was designated to be in command.

Just prior to his death, Hideyoshi hoped to set up a system stable enough to survive until his son grew old enough to become the next leader. A Council of Five Elders (五大老, go-tairō^?) was formed, consisting of the five most powerful daimyo. Following the death of Maeda Toshiie, however, Tokugawa Ieyasu began to secure alliances, including political marriages (which had been forbidden by Hideyoshi). Eventually, the pro-Toyotomi forces fought against the Tokugawa in the Battle of Sekigahara. Ieyasu won and received the title of Seii-tai Shogun two years later.

Hideyoshi is commemorated at several Toyokuni Shrines scattered over Japan.

Ieyasu left in place the majority of Hideyoshi’s decrees and built his shogunate upon them. This ensured that Hideyoshi’s cultural legacy remained. In a letter to his wife, Hideyoshi wrote:

Names

Because of his low birth and high nobility, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had quite a few names throughout his life. At birth, he was given the name Hiyoshi-maru 日吉丸. At genpuku he took the name Kinoshita Tōkichirō (木下 藤吉郎^?). Later, he was given the surname Hashiba, and the honorary court office Chikuzen no Kami; as a result he was styled Hashiba Chikuzen no Kami Hideyoshi (羽柴筑前守秀吉^?). His surname remained Hashiba even as he was granted the new uji or sei (氏 or 姓, clan name) Toyotomi by the emperor. His name is correctly Toyotomi no Hideyoshi. Using the writing system of his time, his name is written as 豐臣 秀吉.

The Toyotomi uji was simultaneously granted to a number of Hideyoshi’s chosen allies, who adopted the new uji “豊臣朝臣” (Toyotomi no asomi, courtier of Toyotomi).

The Catholic sources of the time referred to him as “emperor Taicosama” (from taikō, a retired kampaku (see Sesshō and Kampaku), and the honorific sama).

His nickname was “Monkey” (Saru), allegedly given by Oda Nobunaga because of his facial resemblance to a monkey. This recognition directly contributed to the popular image of Toyotomi Hideyoshi being a monkey styled person, both in appearance and mode of behaviour.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In this Japanese name, the family name is Tokugawa.

Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康^?, January 31, 1543 – June 1, 1616) was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but remained in power until his death in 1616. His given name is sometimes spelled Ieyasu, according to the historical pronunciation of we. Ieyasu was posthumously enshrined at Nikkō Tōshō-gū with the name Tōshō Daigongen (東照大権現^?).

Biography

Early life (1543–1556)

Tokugawa Ieyasu was born in Okazaki Castle in Mikawa^[1] on the 26th day of the twelfth month of the eleventh year of Tenbun, according to the Japanese calendar. Originally named Matsudaira Takechiyo (松平竹千代), he was the son of Matsudaira Hirotada (松平広忠), the daimyo of Mikawa, and Odainokata (於大の方), the daughter of a neighboring samurai lord Mizuno Tadamasa (水野忠政). His mother and father were step-siblings. They were just 17 and 15 years old, respectively, when Ieyasu was born. Two years later, Odainokata was sent back to her family and the couple never lived together again. As both husband and wife remarried and both went on to have further children, Ieyasu in the end had 11 half-brothers and sisters.

The Matsudaira family was split in 1550: one side wanted to be vassals of the Imagawa clan, while the other side preferred the Oda. As a result, much of Ieyasu’s early years were spent in danger as wars with the Oda and Imagawa clans were fought. This family feud was the reason behind the murder of Hirotada’s father (Takechiyo’s grandfather), Matsudaira Kiyoyasu (松平清康). Unlike his father and the majority of his branch of the family, Ieyasu’s father, Hirotada, favored the Imagawa clan.

In 1548, when the Oda clan invaded Mikawa, Hirotada turned to Imagawa Yoshimoto, the head of the Imagawa clan, for help to repel the invaders. Yoshimoto agreed to help under the condition that Hirotada send his son Ieyasu (Takechiyo) to Sumpu as a hostage. Hirotada agreed. Oda Nobuhide, the leader of the Oda clan, learned of this arrangement and had Ieyasu abducted from his entourage en route to Sumpu. Ieyasu was just six years old at the time.^[2]

Nobuhide threatened to execute Ieyasu unless his father severed all ties with the Imagawa clan. Hirotada replied that sacrificing his own son would show his seriousness in his pact with the Imagawa clan. Despite this refusal, Nobuhide chose not to kill Ieyasu but instead held him for the next three years at the Manshoji Temple in Nagoya.

In 1549, when Ieyasu was 7,^[2] his father Hirotada died of natural causes. At about the same time, Oda Nobuhide died during an epidemic. The deaths dealt a heavy blow to the Oda clan. An army under the command of Imagawa Sessai laid siege to the castle where Oda Nobuhiro, Nobuhide’s eldest son and the new head of the Oda, was living. With the castle about to fall, Imagawa Sessai offered a deal to Oda Nobunaga (Oda Nobuhide’s second son). Sessai offered to give up the siege if Ieyasu was handed over to the Imagawa clan. Nobunaga agreed and so Ieyasu (now nine) was taken as a hostage to Sumpu. Here he lived a fairly good life as hostage and potentially useful future ally of the Imagawa clan until 1556 when he was age 15.^[2]

Rise to power (1556–1584)

In 1556, Ieyasu came of age, and, following tradition, changed his name to Matsudaira Jirōsaburō Motonobu (松平次郎三郎元信). One year later, at the age of 16 (according to East Asian age reckoning), he married his first wife and changed his name again to Matsudaira Kurandonosuke Motoyasu (松平 蔵人之介 佐元康). Allowed to return to his native Mikawa, the Imagawa ordered him to fight the Oda clan in a series of battles. Ieyasu won his first battle at the Siege of Terabe and later succeeded in delivering supplies to a border fort through a bold night attack.

In 1560 the leadership of the Oda clan had passed to the brilliant leader Oda Nobunaga. Yoshimoto, leading a large Imagawa army (perhaps 20,000 strong) then attacked the Oda clan territory. Ieyasu with his Mikawa troops captured a fort at the border and then stayed there to defend it. As a result, Ieyasu and his men were not present at the Battle of Okehazama where Yoshimoto was killed by Oda Nobunaga’s surprise assault.

With Yoshimoto dead, Ieyasu decided to ally with the Oda clan. A secret deal was needed because Ieyasu’s wife and infant son, Nobuyasu were held hostage in Sumpu by the Imagawa clan. In 1561, Ieyasu openly broke with the Imagawa and captured the fortress of Kaminojo. Ieyasu was then able to exchange his wife and son for the wife and daughter of the ruler of Kaminojo castle.

For the next few years Ieyasu set about reforming the Matsudaira clan and pacifying Mikawa. He also strengthened his key vassals by awarding them land and castles in Mikawa. They were: Honda Tadakatsu, Ishikawa Kazumasa, Koriki Kiyonaga, Hattori Hanzō, Sakai Tadatsugu, and Sakakibara Yasumasa.

Ieyasu defeated the military forces of the Mikawa Monto within Mikawa province. The Monto were a warlike group of monks that were ruling Kaga Province and had many temples elsewhere in Japan. They refused to obey Ieyasu’s commands and so he went to war with them, defeating their troops and pulling down their temples. In one battle Ieyasu was nearly killed when he was struck by a bullet which did not penetrate his armor. Both Ieyasu’s Mikawa troops and the Monto forces were using the new gunpowder weapons which the Portuguese had introduced to Japan just 20 years earlier.

In 1567, Ieyasu changed his name yet again, his new family name was Tokugawa and his given name was now Ieyasu. In so doing, he claimed descent from the Minamoto clan. No proof has actually been found for this claimed descent from Seiwa tennō, the 56th Emperor of Japan.^[3]

Ieyasu remained an ally of Oda Nobunaga and his Mikawa soldiers were part of Nobunaga’s army which captured Kyoto in 1568. At the same time Ieyasu was expanding his own territory. He and Takeda Shingen, the head of the Takeda clan in Kai Province made an alliance for the purpose of conquering all the Imagawa territory. In 1570, Ieyasu’s troops captured Tōtōmi Province while Shingen’s troops captured Suruga province (including the Imagawa capital of Sumpu).

Ieyasu ended his alliance with Takeda and sheltered their former enemy, Imagawa Ujizane; he also allied with Uesugi Kenshin of the Uesugi clan—an enemy of the Takeda clan. Later that year, Ieyasu led 5,000 of his own men supporting Nobunaga at the Battle of Anegawa against the Azai and Asakura clans.

In October 1571, Takeda Shingen, now allied with the Hōjō clan, attacked the Tokugawa lands of Tōtōmi. Ieyasu asked for help from Nobunaga, who sent him some 3,000 troops. Early in 1573 the two armies met at the Battle of Mikatagahara. The Takeda army, under the expert direction of Shingen, hammered at Ieyasu’s troops until they were broken. Ieyasu fled with just 5 men to a nearby castle. This was a major loss for Ieyasu, but Shingen was unable to exploit his victory because Ieyasu quickly gathered a new army and refused to fight Shingen again on the battlefield.

Fortune smiled on Ieyasu a year later when Takeda Shingen died at a siege early in 1573. Shingen was succeeded by his less capable son Takeda Katsuyori. In 1575, the Takeda army attacked Nagashino Castle in Mikawa province. Ieyasu appealed to Nobunaga for help and the result was that Nobunaga personally came at the head of his very large army (about 30,000 strong). The Oda-Tokugawa force of 38,000 won a great victory on June 28, 1575, at the Battle of Nagashino, though Takeda Katsuyori survived the battle and retreated back to Kai province.

For the next seven years, Ieyasu and Katsuyori fought a series of small battles. Ieyasu’s troops managed to wrest control of Suruga province away from the Takeda clan.

In 1579, Ieyasu’s wife, and his eldest son, Matsudaira Nobuyasu, were accused of conspiring with Takeda Katsuyori to assassinate Nobunaga. Ieyasu’s wife was executed and Nobuyasu was forced to commit seppuku. Ieyasu then named his third and favorite son, Tokugawa Hidetada, as heir, since his second son was adopted by another rising power: Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the future ruler of all Japan.

The end of the war with Takeda came in 1582 when a combined Oda-Tokugawa force attacked and conquered Kai province. Takeda Katsuyori, as well as his eldest son Takeda Nobukatsu, were defeated at the Battle of Temmokuzan and then committed seppuku.

In late 1582, Ieyasu was near Osaka and far from his own territory when he learned that Nobunaga had been assassinated by Akechi Mitsuhide. Ieyasu managed the dangerous journey back to Mikawa, avoiding Mitsuhide’s troops along the way, as they were trying to find and kill him. One week after he arrived in Mikawa, Ieyasu’s army marched out to take revenge on Mitsuhide. But they were too late, Hideyoshi—on his own—defeated and killed Akechi Mitsuhide at the Battle of Yamazaki.

The death of Nobunaga meant that some provinces, ruled by Nobunaga’s vassals, were ripe for conquest. The leader of Kai province made the mistake of killing one of Ieyasu’s aides. Ieyasu promptly invaded Kai and took control. Hōjō Ujimasa, leader of the Hōjō clan responded by sending his much larger army into Shinano and then into Kai province. No battles were fought between Ieyasu’s forces and the large Hōjō army and, after some negotiation, Ieyasu and the Hōjō agreed to a settlement which left Ieyasu in control of both Kai and Shinano provinces, while the Hōjō took control of Kazusa province (as well as bits of both Kai and Shinano province).

At the same time (1583) a war for rule over Japan was fought between Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Shibata Katsuie. Ieyasu did not take a side in this conflict, building on his reputation for both caution and wisdom. Hideyoshi defeated Katsuie at the Battle of Shizugatake—with this victory, Hideyoshi became the single most powerful daimyo in Japan.

Ieyasu and Hideyoshi (1584–1598)

In 1584, Ieyasu decided to support Oda Nobukatsu, the eldest son and heir of Oda Nobunaga, against Hideyoshi. This was a dangerous act and could have resulted in the annihilation of the Tokugawa.

Hideyoshi and Ieyasu played ‘Go’ at this board.

Tokugawa troops took the traditional Oda stronghold of Owari, Hideyoshi responded by sending an army into Owari. The Komaki Campaign was the only time any of the great unifiers of Japan fought each other: Hideyoshi vs. Ieyasu. In the event, Ieyasu won the only notable battle of the campaign at Nagakute. After months of fruitless marches and feints, Hideyoshi settled the war through negotiation. First he made peace with Oda Nobuo, and then he offered a truce to Ieyasu. The deal was made at the end of the year; as part of the terms Ieyasu’s second son, O Gi Maru, became an adopted son of Hideyoshi.

Ieyasu’s aide, Ishikawa Kazumasa, chose to join the pre-eminent daimyo and so he moved to Osaka to be with Hideyoshi. However, only a few other Tokugawa retainers followed this example.

Hideyoshi was understandably distrustful of Ieyasu, and five years passed before they fought as allies. The Tokugawa did not participate in Hideyoshi’s successful invasions of Shikoku and Kyūshū.

In 1590 Hideyoshi attacked the last independent daimyo in Japan, Hōjō Ujimasa. The Hōjō clan ruled the eight provinces of the Kantō region in eastern Japan. Hideyoshi ordered them to submit to his authority and they refused. Ieyasu, though a friend and occasional ally of Ujimasa, joined his large force of 30,000 samurai with Hideyoshi’s enormous army of some 160,000. Hideyoshi attacked several castles on the borders of the Hōjō clan with most of his army laying siege to the castle at Odawara. Hideyoshi’s army captured Odawara after six months (oddly for the time period, deaths on both sides were few). During this siege, Hideyoshi offered Ieyasu a radical deal. He offered Ieyasu the eight Kantō provinces which they were about to take from the Hōjō in return for the five provinces that Ieyasu currently controlled (including Ieyasu’s home province of Mikawa). Ieyasu accepted this proposal. Bowing to the overwhelming power of the Toyotomi army, the Hōjō accepted defeat, the top Hōjō leaders killed themselves and Ieyasu marched in and took control of their provinces, so ending the clan’s reign of over 100 years.

Ieyasu now gave up control of his five provinces (Mikawa, Tōtōmi, Suruga, Shinano, and Kai) and moved all his soldiers and vassals to the Kantō region. He himself occupied the castle town of Edo in Kantō. This was possibly the riskiest move Ieyasu ever made — to leave his home province and rely on the uncertain loyalty of the formerly Hōjō samurai in Kantō. In the event, it worked out brilliantly for Ieyasu. He reformed the Kantō provinces, controlled and pacified the Hōjō samurai and improved the underlying economic infrastructure of the lands. Also, because Kantō was somewhat isolated from the rest of Japan, Ieyasu was able to maintain a unique level of autonomy from Hideyoshi’s rule. Within a few years, Ieyasu had become the second most powerful daimyo in Japan. There is a Japanese proverb which likely refers to this event “Ieyasu won the Empire by retreating.” ^[4]

In 1592, Hideyoshi invaded Korea as a prelude to his plan to attack China (see Japanese invasions of Korea [1592–1598] for more information about this campaign). The Tokugawa samurai never took part in this campaign. Early in 1593, Ieyasu was summoned to Hideyoshi’s court in Nagoya (in Kyūshū, different from similarly spelled city in Owari Province), as a military advisor. He stayed there, off and on for the next five years. Despite his frequent absences, Ieyasu’s sons, loyal retainers and vassals were able to control and improve Edo and the other new Tokugawa lands.

In 1593, Hideyoshi fathered a son and heir, Toyotomi Hideyori.

In 1598, with his health clearly failing, Hideyoshi called a meeting that would determine the Council of Five Elders who would be responsible for ruling on behalf of his son after his death. The five that were chosen as regents (tairō) for Hideyori were Maeda Toshiie, Mōri Terumoto, Ukita Hideie, Uesugi Kagekatsu, and Ieyasu himself, who was the most powerful of the five. This change in the pre-Sekigahara power structure became pivotal as Ieyasu turned his attention towards Kansai; and at the same time, other ambitious (albeit ultimately unrealized) plans, such as the Tokugawa initiative establishing official relations with Mexico and New Spain, continued to unfold and advance.^[5]

The Sekigahara Campaign (1598–1603)

Hideyoshi, after three more months of increasing sickness, died on September 18, 1598. He was nominally succeeded by his young son Hideyori but as he was just five years old, real power was in the hands of the regents. Over the next two years Ieyasu made alliances with various daimyo, especially those who had no love for Hideyoshi. Happily for Ieyasu, the oldest and most respected of the regents died after just one year. With the death of Regent Maeda Toshiie in 1599, Ieyasu led an army to Fushimi and took over Osaka Castle, the residence of Hideyori. This angered the three remaining regents and plans were made on all sides for war.

Opposition to Ieyasu centered around Ishida Mitsunari, a powerful daimyo but not one of the regents. Mitsunari plotted Ieyasu’s death and news of this plot reached some of Ieyasu’s generals. They attempted to kill Mitsunari but he fled and gained protection from none other than Ieyasu himself. It is not clear why Ieyasu protected a powerful enemy from his own men but Ieyasu was a master strategist and he may have concluded that he would be better off with Mitsunari leading the enemy army rather than one of the regents, who would have more legitimacy.^[6]

Nearly all of Japan’s daimyo and samurai now split into two factions—Mitsunari’s group and anti-Mitsunari Group. Ieyasu supported anti-Mitsunari Group, and formed them as his potential allies. Ieyasu’s allies were the Date clan, the Mogami clan, the Satake clan and the Maeda clan. Mitsunari allied himself with the three other regents: Ukita Hideie, Mori Terumoto, and Uesugi Kagekatsu as well as many daimyo from the eastern end of Honshū.

In June 1600, Ieyasu and his allies moved their armies to defeat the Uesugi clan who was accused of planning to revolt against Toyotomi administration (Led by Ieyasu, top of Council of Five Elders). Before arriving to Uesugi’s territory, Ieyasu had got information that Mitsunari and his allies moved their army against Ieyasu. Ieyasu held a meeting with daimyo, and they agreed to ally Ieyasu. He then led the majority of his army west towards Kyoto. In late summer, Ishida’s forces captured Fushimi.

Ieyasu and his allies marched along the Tōkaidō, while his son Hidetada went along the Nakasendō with 38,000 soldiers. A battle against Sanada Masayuki in Shinano Province delayed Hidetada’s forces, and they did not arrive in time for the main battle.

This battle was the biggest and likely the most important battle in Japanese history. It began on October 21, 1600 with a total of 160,000 men facing each other. The Battle of Sekigahara ended with a complete Tokugawa victory.^[7] The Western bloc was crushed and over the next few days Ishida Mitsunari and many other western nobles were captured and killed. Tokugawa Ieyasu was now the de facto ruler of Japan.

Immediately after the victory at Sekigahara, Ieyasu redistributed land to the vassals who had served him. Ieyasu left some western daimyo un-harmed, such as the Shimazu clan, but others were completely destroyed. Toyotomi Hideyori (the son of Hideyoshi) lost most of his territory which were under management of western daimyo, and he was degraded to an ordinary daimyo, not a ruler of Japan. In later years the vassals who had pledged allegiance to Ieyasu before Sekigahara became known as the fudai daimyo, while those who pledged allegiance to him after the battle (in other words, after his power was unquestioned) were known as tozama daimyo. Tozama daimyo were considered inferior to fudai daimyo.

Shogun Ieyasu (1603–1605)

Tokugawa Ieyasu as shogun.

In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of shogun from Emperor Go-Yozei.^[8] Ieyasu was 60 years old. He had outlasted all the other great men of his times: Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, Shingen, Kenshin. He was the shogun and he used his remaining years to create and solidify the Tokugawa shogunate (That was eventually to become the Edo period, about two hundred years under Ieyasu’s Shogunate) , the third shogunal government (after the Minamoto and the Ashikaga). He claimed descent from the Minamoto clan by way of the Nitta family. Ironically Ieyasu descendants would marry into the Taira clan and Fujiwara Clans. The Tokugawa Shogunate would rule Japan for the next 250 years.

Following a well established Japanese pattern, Ieyasu abdicated his official position as shogun in 1605. His successor was his son and heir, Tokugawa Hidetada. This may have been done, in part to avoid being tied up in ceremonial duties, and in part to make it harder for his enemies to attack the real power center, and in part to secure a smoother succession of his son.^[9] The abdication of Ieyasu had no effect on the practical extent of his powers or his rule; but Hidetada nevertheless assumed a role as formal head of the bakufu bureaucracy.

The Tokugawa clan crest

Retired shogun (1605–1616)

Ieyasu, acting as the retired shogun (大御所, ōgosho^?), remained the effective ruler of Japan until his death. Ieyasu retired to Sunpu Castle in Sunpu, but he also supervised the building of Edo Castle, a massive construction project which lasted for the rest of Ieyasu’s life. The end result was the largest castle in all of Japan, the costs for building the castle being borne by all the other daimyo, while Ieyasu reaped all the benefits. The central donjon, or tenshu, burned in the 1657 Meireki fire. Today, the Imperial Palace stands on the site of the castle.

Ogosho Ieyasu also supervised diplomatic affairs with the Netherlands and Spain. He chose to distance Japan from the Europeans starting in 1609, although the bakufu did give the Dutch exclusive trading rights and permitted them to maintain a “factory” for trading purposes. From 1605 until his death, Ieyasu consulted with an English Protestant pilot in Dutch employ, William Adams^[10], who played a noteworthy role in forming and furthering the Shogunate’s evolving relations with Spain and the Roman Catholic Church.^[11]

In 1611, Ieyasu, at the head of 50,000 men, visited Kyoto to witness the coronation of Emperor Go-Mizunoo. In Kyoto, Ieyasu ordered the remodeling of the imperial court and buildings, and forced the remaining western daimyo to sign an oath of fealty to him. In 1613, he composed the Kuge Shohatto’ a document which put the court daimyo under strict supervision, leaving them as mere ceremonial figureheads. The influences of Christianity, which was beset by quarreling over the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath, on Japan were proving problematic for Ieyasu. In 1614, he signed the Christian Expulsion Edict which banned Christianity, expelled all Christians and foreigners, and banned Christians from practicing their religion. As a result, many Kirishitans (early Japanese Christians) fled to either Portuguese Macau or the Spanish Philippines.

In 1615, he prepared the Buke Shohatto, a document setting out the future of the Tokugawa regime.

Siege of Osaka

Grave of Ieyasu in Tōshō-gū

The climax of Ieyasu’s life was the siege of Osaka Castle (1614–1615). The last remaining threat to Ieyasu’s rule was Hideyori, the son and rightful heir to Hideyoshi. He was now a young daimyo living in Osaka Castle. Many samurai who opposed Ieyasu rallied around Hideyori, claiming he was the rightful ruler of Japan. Ieyasu found fault with the opening ceremony of a temple built by Hideyori—it was as if Hideyori prayed for Ieyasu’s death and the ruin of Tokugawa clan. Ieyasu ordered Toyotomi to leave Osaka Castle, but those in the castle refused and started to gather samurai into the castle. Then the Tokugawa, with a huge army led by Ogosho Ieyasu and Shogun Hidetada, laid siege to Osaka castle in what is now known as “the Winter Siege of Osaka.” Eventually, Tokugawa made a deal threatening Hideyori’s mother, Yodogimi, firing cannons towards the castle to stop the fighting. However, as soon as the treaty was agreed upon, Tokugawa filled Osaka Castle’s moats with sand so his troops could go across them. Ieyasu returned to Sumpu once, but after Toyotomi refused another order to leave Osaka, he and his allied army of 155,000 soldiers attacked Osaka Castle again in “the Summer Siege of Osaka.” Finally in late 1615, Osaka Castle fell and nearly all the defenders were killed including Hideyori, his mother (Hideyoshi’s widow, Yodogimi), and his infant son. His wife, Senhime (a granddaughter of Ieyasu), was sent back to Tokugawa alive. With the Toyotomi finally extinguished, no threats remained to Tokugawa’s domination of Japan.

The end of his life

In 1616, Ieyasu died at age 73.^[2] The cause of death is thought to have been cancer or syphilis. The first Tokugawa shogun was posthumously deified with the name Tōshō Daigongen (東照大権現), the “Great Gongen, Light of the East”. (A Gongen (the prefix Dai- meaning great) is believed to be a buddha who has appeared on Earth in the shape of a kami to save sentient beings). In life, Ieyasu had expressed the wish to be deified after his death in order to protect his descendants from evil. His remains were buried at the Gongen’s mausoleum at Kunōzan, Kunōzan Tōshō-gū (久能山東照宮). After the first anniversary of his death, his remains were reburied at Nikkō Shrine, Nikkō Tōshō-gū (日光東照宮). His remains are still there. The mausoleum’s architectural style became known as gongen-zukuri, that is gongen-style.^[12]

Ieyasu as a person

Handprint of Ieyasu at Kunozan Toshogu

Ieyasu had a number of qualities that enabled him to rise to power. He was both careful and bold—at the right times, and at the right places. Calculating and subtle, Ieyasu switched alliances when he thought he would benefit from the change. He allied with the Hōjō clan; then he joined Hideyoshi’s army of conquest, which destroyed the Hōjō clan; and he himself took over their lands. In this he was like other daimyo of his time. This was an era of violence, sudden death, and betrayal. He was not very well liked, and he was not personally popular. But he was feared and he was respected for his leadership and his cunning. For example, he wisely kept his soldiers out of Hideyoshi’s campaign in Korea.

He was capable of great loyalty: once he allied with Oda Nobunaga, he never went against Nobunaga; and both leaders profited from their long alliance. He was known for being loyal towards his personal friends and vassals, whom he rewarded. However, he also remembered those who had wronged him in the past. It is said that Ieyasu executed a man who came into his power because he had insulted him when Ieyasu was young.

Ieyasu protected many former Takeda retainers from the wrath of Oda Nobunaga, who was known to harbor a bitter grudge towards the Takeda. He managed to successfully transform many of the retainers of the Takeda, Hōjō, and Imagawa clans—all whom he had defeated himself or helped to defeat—into loyal followers.

He had nineteen wives and concubines, by whom he had eleven sons and five daughters. The eleven sons of Ieyasu were Matsudaira Nobuyasu (松平信康), Yūki Hideyasu (結城秀康), Tokugawa Hidetada (徳川秀忠), Matsudaira Tadayoshi (松平忠吉), Takeda Nobuyoshi (武田信吉), Matsudaira Tadateru (松平忠輝), Matsuchiyo (松千代), Senchiyo (仙千代), Tokugawa Yoshinao (徳川義直), Tokugawa Yorinobu (徳川頼宣), and Tokugawa Yorifusa (徳川頼房). (In this listing, the two sons without surnames died before adulthood.) His daughters were Kame hime (亀姫), Toku hime (徳姫), Furi hime (振姫), Matsu hime (松姫) , Eishōin hime (_姫), and Ichi hime (市姫). He is said to have cared for his children and grandchildren, establishing three of them, Yorinobu, Yoshinao, and Yorifusa as the daimyo of Kii, Owari, and Mito provinces, respectively. At the same time, he could be ruthless when crossed. For example, he ordered the executions of his first wife and his eldest son—a son-in-law of Oda Nobunaga; Oda was also an uncle of Hidetada’s wife Oeyo.

The butterfly mon of the Taira is called Ageha-cho (揚羽蝶) in Japanese.

After Hidetada became shogun, he married Oeyo of the Oda family of the Taira clan and they had two sons, Tokugawa Iemitsu and Tokugawa Tadanaga. They also had two daughters, one of whom, Sen hime, married twice. The other daughter, Kazuko hime, married Emperor Go-Mizunoo of descent from the Fujiwara clan.

Ieyasu’s favorite pastime was falconry. He regarded it as excellent training for a warrior. “When you go into the country hawking, you learn to understand the military spirit and also the hard life of the lower classes. You exercise your muscles and train your limbs. You have any amount of walking and running and become quite indifferent to heat and cold, and so you are little likely to suffer from any illness.”^[13]. Ieyasu swam often; even late in his life he is reported to have swum in the moat of Edo Castle.

Later in life he took to scholarship and religion, patronizing scholars like Hayashi Razan.^[14]

Two of his famous quotes:

“Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy burden. Let thy step be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou has past through. Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance forever. Look upon the wrath of the enemy. If thou knowest only what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is like to be defeated, woe unto thee; it will fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather than with others.”

“The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one’s inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to these he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience. And if my descendants wish to be as I am, they must study patience.”

He claimed that he fought, as a warrior or a general, in 90 battles.

In some sources Ieyasu is known to have the bad habit of biting his nails when nervous, especially before and during battle.

He was interested in various kenjutsu skills, was a patron of the Yagyū Shinkage-ryū school, and also had them as his personal sword instructors.

Ieyasu in popular culture

See Japanese historical people in popular culture.

Era of Ieyasu’s rule

Ieyasu ruled directly as shogun or indirectly as Ogosho during the Keichō era (1596-1615).

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing“).^[1] In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.^[2] It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.^[3][4]

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals.^[5] Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

These applications are broadly divided into the following categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Utility Computing, Web Services, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Managed Service Providers (MSP), Service Commerce, and Internet Integration. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.”^[6]

Overview

Comparisons

Cloud computing can be confused with:

1. Grid computing — “a form of distributed computing, whereby a ’super and virtual computer’ is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers acting in concert to perform very large tasks”
2. Utility computing — the “packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility, such as electricity“;^[7]
3. Autonomic computing — “computer systems capable of self-management“.^[8]

Indeed, many cloud computing deployments depend on grids, have autonomic characteristics, and bill like utilities, but cloud computing tends to expand what is provided by grids and utilities.^[9] Some successful cloud architectures have little or no centralized infrastructure or billing systems whatsoever, including peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent and Skype, and volunteer computing such as SETI@home.^[10][11]

Characteristics

In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development). A side-effect of this approach is that overall computer usage rises dramatically, as customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits.^[12] In addition, “increased high-speed bandwidth” makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.

Economics

Diagram showing economics of cloud computing versus traditional IT, including capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx)

Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use. Consumption is usually billed on a utility (resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (time-based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost. Other benefits of this time sharing-style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. In general, users can terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.^[13][14]

According to Nicholas Carr, the strategic importance of information technology is diminishing as it becomes standardized and less expensive. He argues that the cloud computing paradigm shift is similar to the displacement of electricity generators by electricity grids early in the 20th century.^[15]

Although companies might be able to save on upfront capital expenditures, they might not save much and might actually pay more for operating expenses. In situations where the capital expense would be relatively small, or where the organization has more flexibility in their capital budget than their operating budget, the cloud model might not make great fiscal sense. Other factors impacting the scale of any potential cost savings include the efficiency of a company’s data center as compared to the cloud vendor’s, the company’s existing operating costs, the level of adoption of cloud computing, and the type of functionality being hosted in the cloud.^[16][17]

Architecture

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure, as of 2009, consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere that provides access to networking infrastructure. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically offer SLAs. ^[18] Open standards are critical to the growth of cloud computing, and open source software has provided the foundation for many cloud computing implementations.^[19]

History

The Cloud is a term that borrows from telephony. Up to the 1990s, data circuits (including those that carried Internet traffic) were hard-wired between destinations. Then, long-haul telephone companies began offering Virtual Private Network (VPN) service for data communications. Telephone companies were able to offer VPN-based services with the same guaranteed bandwidth as fixed circuits at a lower cost because they could switch traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, thus utilizing their overall network bandwidth more effectively. As a result of this arrangement, it was impossible to determine in advance precisely which paths the traffic would be routed over. The cloud symbol was used to denote that which was the responsibility of the provider, and cloud computing extends this to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.

The underlying concept of cloud computing dates back to 1960, when John McCarthy opined that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility“; indeed it shares characteristics with service bureaus that date back to the 1960s. In 1997, the first academic definition was provided by Ramnath K. Chellappa who called it a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.^[20] The term cloud had already come into commercial use in the early 1990s to refer to large Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks.^[21]

Loudcloud, founded in 1999 by Marc Andreessen, was one of the first to attempt to commercialize cloud computing with an Infrastructure as a Service model^[22]. By the turn of the 21st century, the term “cloud computing” began to appear more widely,^[23] although most of the focus at that time was limited to SaaS, called “ASP’s” or Application Service Providers, under the terminology of the day.

In the early 2000s, Microsoft extended the concept of SaaS through the development of web services^{[citation needed]}. IBM detailed these concepts in 2001 in the Autonomic Computing Manifesto, which described advanced automation techniques such as self-monitoring, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-optimizing in the management of complex IT systems with heterogeneous storage, servers, applications, networks, security mechanisms, and other system elements that can be virtualized across an enterprise.

Amazon played a key role in the development of cloud computing by modernizing their data centers after the dot-com bubble, which, like most computer networks, were using as little as 10% of their capacity at any one time just to leave room for occasional spikes. Having found that the new cloud architecture resulted in significant internal efficiency improvements whereby small, fast-moving “two-pizza teams” could add new features faster and easier, Amazon started providing access to their systems through Amazon Web Services on a utility computing basis in 2005.^[24] This characterization of the genesis of Amazon Web Services has been characterized as an extreme over-simplification by a technical contributor to the Amazon Web Services project ^[25].

In 2007, Google, IBM, and a number of universities embarked on a large scale cloud computing research project.^[26] By mid-2008, Gartner saw an opportunity for cloud computing “to shape the relationship among consumers of IT services, those who use IT services and those who sell them”,^[27] and observed that “[o]rganisations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models” so that the “projected shift to cloud computing … will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and in significant reductions in other areas.”^[28]

Political issues

The Cloud spans many borders and “may be the ultimate form of globalization.”^[29] As such, it becomes subject to complex geopolitical issues, and providers are pressed to satisfy myriad regulatory environments in order to deliver service to a global market. This dates back to the early days of the Internet, when libertarian thinkers felt that “cyberspace was a distinct place calling for laws and legal institutions of its own”^[29].

Despite efforts (such as US-EU Safe Harbor) to harmonize the legal environment, as of 2009, providers such as Amazon cater to major markets (typically the United States and the European Union) by deploying local infrastructure and allowing customers to select “availability zones.”^[30] Nonetheless, concerns persist about security and privacy from individual through governmental levels (e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act, the use of national security letters, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act’s Stored Communications Act).

Legal issues

In March 2007, Dell applied to trademark the term “cloud computing” (U.S. Trademark 77,139,082) in the United States. The “Notice of Allowance” the company received in July 2008 was cancelled in August, resulting in a formal rejection of the trademark application less than a week later.

In November 2007, the Free Software Foundation released the Affero General Public License, a version of GPLv3 intended to close a perceived legal loophole associated with free software designed to be run over a network. Founder and president, Richard Stallman has also warned that cloud computing “will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time”.^[31]

Key characteristics

• Agility improves with users able to rapidly and inexpensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources.^[32].
• Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure^[33]. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).^[34]
• Device and location independence^[35] enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.^[34]
• Multi-tenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:
  • Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)
  • Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)
  • Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilized.^[24]
• Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery.^[36] Nonetheless, many major cloud computing services have suffered outages, and IT and business managers can at times do little when they are affected.^[37][38]
• Scalability via dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely-coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.^[34]
• Security typically improves due to centralization of data^[39], increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels^[40]. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford^[41]. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area and / or number of devices.
• Sustainability comes about through improved resource utilization, more efficient systems, and carbon neutrality.^[42][43] Nonetheless, computers and associated infrastructure are major consumers of energy.^[44]

Layers

Clients

See also category: Cloud clients

A cloud client consists of computer hardware and/or computer software that relies on cloud computing for application delivery, or that is specifically designed for delivery of cloud services and that, in either case, is essentially useless without it.^[45] For example:

• Mobile (Linux based – Palm Pre-WebOS Linux Kernel, Android-Linux Kernel, iPhone-Darwin Linux Kernel, Microsoft based – Windows Mobile)^[46][47][48]

• Thin client (CherryPal, Wyse, Zonbu, gOS-based systems)^[49][50][51]

• Thick client / Web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, WebKit)

Application

See also category: Cloud applications

A cloud application leverages cloud computing in software architecture, often eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, thus alleviating the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. For example:

• Peer-to-peer / volunteer computing (BOINC, Skype)
• Web applications (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
• Security as a service (MessageLabs, Purewire, ScanSafe, Zscaler)
• Software as a service (A2Zapps.com, Google Apps, Salesforce, BigGyan.com)
• Software plus services (Microsoft Online Services)
• Storage [Distributed]
  • Content distribution (BitTorrent, Amazon CloudFront)
  • Synchronisation (Dropbox, Live Mesh, SpiderOak, ZumoDrive)

Platform

See also category: Cloud platforms

A cloud platform (PaaS) delivers a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, generally consuming cloud infrastructure and supporting cloud applications. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers.^[52][53] For example:

• Services
  • Identity (OAuth, OpenID)
  • Payments (Amazon Flexible Payments Service, Google Checkout, PayPal)
  • Search (Alexa, Google Custom Search, Yahoo! BOSS)
  • Real-world (Amazon Mechanical Turk)
• Solution stacks
  • Java (Google App Engine)
  • PHP (Rackspace Cloud Sites)
  • Python Django (Google App Engine)
  • Ruby on Rails (Heroku)
  • .NET (Azure Services Platform, Rackspace Cloud Sites)
  • Proprietary (Force.com, WorkXpress, Wolf Frameworks)
• Storage [Structured]
  • Databases (Amazon SimpleDB, BigTable)
  • File storage (Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Rackspace Cloud Files)
  • Queues (Amazon SQS)

Infrastructure

See also category: Cloud infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) is the delivery of computer infrastructure, typically a platform virtualization environment, as a service.^[54] For example:

• Compute (Amazon CloudWatch, RightScale)
  • Physical machines)
  • Virtual machines (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud Servers)
  • OS-level virtualisation
• Network (Amazon VPC)
• Storage [Raw] (Amazon EBS)

Servers

The servers layer consists of computer hardware and/or computer software products that are specifically designed for the delivery of cloud services.^[45] For example:

• Fabric computing (Cisco UCS)

Architecture

Cloud computing sample architecture

Cloud architecture,^[55] the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, comprises hardware and software designed by a cloud architect who typically works for a cloud integrator. It typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web services.^[56]

This closely resembles the Unix philosophy of having multiple programs each doing one thing well and working together over universal interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the resulting systems are more manageable than their monolithic counterparts.

Cloud architecture extends to the client, where web browsers and/or software applications access cloud applications.

Cloud storage architecture is loosely coupled, where metadata operations are centralized enabling the data nodes to scale into the hundreds, each independently delivering data to applications or users.

Types

Cloud computing types

Public cloud

Public cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.^[34]

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers^[57] “will be typical for most enterprises”.^[58] A hybrid cloud can describe configuration combining a local device, such as a Plug computer with cloud services. It can also describe configurations combining virtual and physical, colocated assets—for example, a mostly virtualized environment that requires physical servers, routers, or other hardware such as a network appliance acting as a firewall or spam filter.^[59]

Private cloud

Private cloud and internal cloud are neologisms that some vendors have recently used to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualisation automation) products claim to “deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls”, capitalising on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns. They have been criticized on the basis that users “still have to buy, build, and manage them” and as such do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management^[58], essentially “[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept”.^[60][61]

While an analyst predicted in 2008 that private cloud networks would be the future of corporate IT,^[62] there is some uncertainty whether they are a reality even within the same firm.^[63] Analysts also claim that within five years a “huge percentage” of small and medium enterprises will get most of their computing resources from external cloud computing providers as they “will not have economies of scale to make it worth staying in the IT business” or be able to afford private clouds.^[64]. Analysts have reported on Platform’s view that private clouds are a stepping stone to external clouds, particularly for the financial services, and that future datacenters will look like internal clouds.^[65]

The term has also been used in the logical rather than physical sense, for example in reference to platform as a service offerings^[66], though such offerings including Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform are not available for on-premises deployment.^[67]

[Ed Note: Last Thursday was hectic. It was the first day of my vacation, I was leaving for Miami and the Bahamas the next morning, and the closest I came to packing? Looking at my suitcase yesterday, pouring a glass of wine, and going to sleep. I had a hair appointment and needed a wax and a polish change ASAP. However, before heading to the International Salon, I dipped into Barnes & Noble to check out the weekly tabloids. Don't judge me. Every woman has her vice! And as these things tend to go, I ran into The Artist. Sigh.]

Veronica Webb to Mary J. Blige, in that infamous interview: Not dealing with shit with men…takes a lot of discipline.

Early May 2009.

I left work early and headed to 18th and Sansom to get a much overdue waxing.  I had been putting it off for about two weeks too long so I finally decided to buckle down and get it done, especially since warmer weather is soon to come.

After hitting Borders for the newest magazines and picking up Kiss the Sky by Farai Chideya, I walked up Walnut Street to window shop. After trying on some dresses at Bebe and Club Monaco, I continued up Walnut Street, peeking in BCBG and Coach, eventually bypassing two sales associates in front of Steve Madden handing out 25% coupons.

I assisted in opening the Walnut Street store as a manager back in July 2006. Even though my 60% employee discount was ripe for the taking, I never really used it. Steve Madden shoes are essentially cheap and not worth the price. In fact, I had customers whose shoes practically dissolved after a few wears. I have a few pairs of the higher priced Steven line but they are rarely worn.

As tempted as I was to peek in and perhaps get a pair of flat sandals (25% off!), I had to keep it moving because the Artist may still work at Steve Madden and I wasn’t looking forward to running into him. Our tentative friendship did not dissolve gracefully.

Christmas Eve 2008.

I am on the much despised Chinatown bus headed to DC (Amtrak’s prices are outrageous due to the holiday season and I just can’t convince myself to hop on a flight, which would be much, much cheaper). I am shifting uncomfortably in my seat because I never, ever travel with less than two bags. It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t bring. The bags multiply like rabbits and I forget they are heavy because I took three pairs of shoes for a mere three day weekend and I carry nearly everything but a car in my handbag.

The (soon to be dubbed) Starving Artist is sitting across from me, scribbling in a manual. He asks to borrow a pen and I hand him my favorite (in fact, the sole kind I use) writing utensil: my uni-ball fine pen. He is suitably impressed and I warn him that I would watch him like a hawk until he returned it .

He smirks. “Good. That means you’ll have something to do.”

I smirk back but I am distracted, still adjusting my bags, when I feel a drop of moisture on my day old press and curl. Of course there would be a leak on the Chinatown bus. Of course it would be over my seat. The bus is crowded and I don’t want to sit by a stranger. The Starving Artist notices the leak and he is bemused. He offers to move over so I could sit beside him.

I hadn’t noticed fully assessed him until I sat beside him. He is the color of a sugar cookie, with the ubiquitious Philadelphia beardgoatee, and a black knit hat covering his bushy curls. He is freckled. His lips are perfect and generous and his eyebrows are fine. He has dark eyes and wide hands.  He’s wearing a leather jacket and that trendy black and white Arafat scarf I despise on heterosexual males over the age of seventeen. He looks like he appreciates Jimi Hendrix, psychedelic colors, and incense, like he is generous with his red wine and weed, but he is able to go to work in the morning, Starbucks in hand.

I am not wrong. Except about the wine. He hates wine.

He is assessing me as well. He returns my pen, but he delivers it with a caveat: “Yeah, I know you. You’re that saditty chick from Steve Madden.”

I turn and face him directly. I recognize him now. I stepped into Steve Madden a few months ago. Feeling all nostalgic, I asked a sales associate about the downstairs stock room. He was surprised I knew about it. I smile. “Who are you calling saditty?”

We spend the whole ride to talking, even though I had packed the Elle with Jennifer Lopez on the cover to avoid such a scenario. We talk about life. Marriage. Children. Fitness. Music. God. Religion. Parents. Siblings. Astrology. The conversation is great but I already know he’s not my type and I’m not his kind. He’s a a musician and an artist, renting a room on South Street. I’m comfortable in the suburbs. I’m not the Earth-goddess-mother type of chick, I give good shoe, and the only instrument I’ve ever held with comfort was my third grade recorder (don’t front on the recorder, Brooklynites!). He’s a story, a story I get to hear as he holds my hand (and I am a fervent, non-touching, personal space advocate) once we leave the Baltimore Travel Plaza.

He tells me that I move him.

It’s what I need to hear but I still recoil. I’m still examining the shards and splinters of a three year relationship. I don’t want to move anyone, unless I’m moved first. And as lovely as this man is right now, as good as he could possibly be for me, I am solid and grounded. The earth may spin underneath my feet but I am the axis, standing still. We exchange numbers and he texts me on Christmas morning while having brunch with his parents. I’m touched but uneasy because his gesture reeks of promise, a delivery I know that I can’t make.

It’s tempting to allow this man to orbit around me, because I am melancholy and the right kind of male attention can soothe any woman’s troubled waters. But I can’t. I can tell he’s needy by nature and nurture. He’s an artist. Feedback is always on the menu, ego massaging a must. And I’m not a licensed massage therapist. I’ve already had messy. Discipline.

Of course, keeping my distance remains more plausible as his star fades. I am irritated when he pops up to meet me when he learns I’m returning to Philadelphia, despite my strict instructions that I’ll be bitchy and tired and not in the mood for company. He’s irritated when I attempt to re-schedule a coffee date, accusing me of not demonstrating the proper enthusiasm (that leaves me incredulous, with a muthafugga please! tiptoeing on my lips. Enthusiasm? I just met you!).

Our last conversation is cordial . I delete his number and texts from my Blackberry so I’m not tempted when the inevitable loneliness comes.

I’ve learned discipline.

[Originally posted March 9, 2008. This re-post has been lightly copy-edited]

“Language of thought” theory (LOT), originally developed by Jerry Fodor in the 1970s, and now championed most famously by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, presumes a pre-literate conceptual language, sometimes called mentalese, upon which our conscious, tangible symbolic language is based. This language of thought is imagined to be innate, and thus a universal substrate for all human language from Algonquin to Finno-Ugric to Brooklynese.

The LOT hypothesis is an outgrowth of Noam Chomsky’s nativist theory of a “universal grammar,” which in its turn was a response to the reigning behaviorist paradigm of the day. Behaviorism never fully rebounded from Chomsky’s critique (though it’s found new expression in the speculative protoscience of memetics) , and we’re all better off for this. But beyond this, nativism has not proved to be very fruitful in our understanding of cognition, serving mostly (through no fault of Chomsky’s) to fortify the sociobiological argument that our cultural norms reflect hard-wired biological determinants, which emerged to help us manage the challenges of our paleolithic beginnings.

There are a number of logical problems with the LOT hypothesis, with perhaps the most obvious being that words, unlike numbers, are not static and precise through time, as they would need to be if they were subject to unconscious translation into and out of mentalese. The number represented by the numeral 2, for example, can be counted on to always be the same. But what is indicated by the modern English words love, doctor, faith, fish, holiday, circus, atom, fairy, wealth and savage, just to name a few, has wildly varied just in the few hundred years we’ve been using this form of the language. If there was some kind of inborn uber-language which determined the meanings expressed in our own spoken languages, it’s difficult to see how it could permit this kind of semantic drift.

The LOT model is built on the metaphor of computer processing, so it is instructive to ask how well a computer would function if different things were intended by the same terms during successive installs of a piece of software. It seems plausible to many of us living now to imagine that human language rests on a logical foundation just like a computer program: after all, we can perform logical calculations, just as a computer can, and most of our expressions appear to be logically grounded. But the question to ask is not what we can do now, but what humans or humanoids could and did do at the dawn of language, at least 50,000 years ago, perhaps much earlier. The rudiments of formal logic didn’t appear on the scene until less than 3,000 years ago, with the Greeks, and weren’t developed into a complex system until the 20th century. This would be a strange course of events if formal logic were built into the structure of our cognition from the start, which is what LOT proposes.

As best we can tell, for the first several thousand years of our existence human cognition took the form of what we now derisively call “magical thinking,” or myth. This is the environment into which language was originally born and given to develop. There is little in the linguistic and ethnographic data to presuppose a rational thought process underlying pre-modern language, and a great deal to suggest something very different.

Ernst Cassirer notes that the primacy of mythological thinking presents a significant problem for the “realist” view. The common line is that myths were erroneous explanations of objects and phenomena, given the lack of adequate tools and resources to understand these objects and phenomena for what they really were. But this description is based on a misunderstanding of mythical thinking; it presumes that from the very first, humans were concerned with explanations. The problem is that to formulate the questions that these explanations are supposed to answer, one must already have a language, and a fairly well-developed one. As Cassirer writes, in Language and Myth (1946):

It seems only natural to us that the world presents itself to our and inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms, each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give it its specific individuality.

But it becomes difficult to see how these forms might have been experienced before there was a language to conceive them in. It would seem that ideation and language require each other. But then we are faced with the problem of winnowing. Cassirer continues:

What is it that leads or constrains language to collect [classes of objects] into a single whole and denote them by a word? … As soon as we cast the problem in this mold, traditional logic offers no support … for its explanation of the origin of generic concepts presupposes the very thing we are seeking to understand and derive, the formulation of linguistic notions.

Cassirer was writing 40 years before Pinker’s first books on language, but provides an apt preemptive critique of the LOT thesis. How would this putatively inborn, genetically determined linguistic structure have supported a conceptual schema so radically different from our own, and so different from what its own nature would predict, for so many thousands of years?

Cassirer provides numerous examples of the slow progression of mythological ideation from the earliest and simplest myths to the appearance of logical reasoning, and we could turn to any prominent cultural anthropologist for additional demonstrations. But there is interesting evidence of a more recent provenance as well, in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who very explicitly asserts that she had close to no inner life at all before she was taught sign language:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind impetus… [N]ever in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation.

We shouldn’t read too much into one self-reported anecdote, of course. Keller was a special case, born with sight and hearing only to lose it at nineteen months, so she was exposed to spoken language for a not insignificant period of time. But it is intriguing to note how non-conceptual her cognition was before she learned to use language.

In the March 10 issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster writes of a similar, though more everyday, predicament when it comes to the most precisely descriptive regions of experience, as in the appreciation of wine, or perfume. He begins with a story about his “discovery,” after long resistance, of what oenophiles call “graininess” in red wine. Before the experience, he had rejected the term as rhetorical overkill–something that many people with less refined palates (myself included) are quick to presume when encountering such seemingly fantastical language. But when he finally noticed graininess (after many failed attempts), he conceded it was the perfect word, and not nearly as figurative as he had imagined. Here’s the interesting part, which I was not expecting to find in a New Yorker article on olfactory perception:

What’s more, in tasting it I realized I’d encountered versions of it–milder, more restrained–before. Now I knew what grainy tannins were. Most taste experiences work like that. A taste or smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don’t have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded.

This is exactly the opposite of the common sense view, that objects and phenomena precede their names (though to be fair, someone had to be the first person to call a wine “grainy.”) Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not before we describe it, and not because we describe it, but as we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we participate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.

[originally posted February 24, 2008. This repost has undergone moderate copyediting for style, and to address a correction pointed out by the author]

Evil Genes: How Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley. Prometheus Books. 459 pages.

One might be forgiven for assuming that the nature versus nurture argument had been quietly settled long ago, with credit and spoils agreeably distributed among all parties. But apparently that’s not what most of us want to hear, as the continuing supply of sociobiology books championing the near-irrelevance of culture seems to show. In psychology, the big names are Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate) and Judith Rich Harris (The Nurture Assumption), both of whom have now favorably blurbed a book by a new footsoldier, Barbara Oakley, professor of electrical engineering at Oakland University. To the cause Oakley’s book contributes, at the very least, a way of encapsulating human nature that everyone can understand. It’s called Evil Genes.

Evil Genes is half personal anecdote, half survey of recent science on the biochemical underpinnings of mood and emotion (Oakley would go further, to say underpinnings of human behavior, but this is exactly the connection the studies do not show). Indeed there is some interesting science in Evil Genes, mostly in the areas of genomics, brain chemistry, and neural imaging. But when you extract what is actually pertinent to Oakley’s thesis, you are left with very little. Certain genes, as we might expect, influence the production of certain neurotransmitters, and the growth of certain areas of the brain. There are studies that suggest that some genetic profiles can sufficiently impact mood, emotion and cognition to dispose a person to psychopathy. Evil Genes cites several such studies.

But here we need to be careful. Genomes are not blueprints. Complex organisms have a profound level of variation available in their genes. Some traits are, admittedly, highly determined by our genes–Mendel’s famous wrinkled and smooth peas, for example, or our own eye and hair color. A handful of diseases, like Huntington’s, are almost inevitable in those carrying the right genes, and in some cases the onset of these diseases can be predicted with considerable accuracy.

But these are misleading examples, and because of them the deterministic aspect of genetic influence is given far more importance, in the popular mind, than is due. For a century, scientists have spoken of genes “for” various traits, though for at least half of that time we’ve known that gene activity is regulated by non-heritable factors, either in the “outside” environment, or within the cell. Though we still talk of programs, blueprints and “hard-wiring,” genetic influences are much more similar to a library of possible texts. In short, genetic determinism, though so eminently compelling to our imaginations, is a scientific model that has outlived its usefulness.

Most genetic determinists give abundant lip service to the complexity of gene regulation in the cell, and to the important role of environments in expressing genetic tendencies. But when the time comes to put it all in everyday terms, these caveats are swept aside. Thus we have Richard Dawkins’ oft-quoted comments about genes as “master programmers” exerting “ultimate power” over behavior. He knows, or should know, the falsity of this, but it helps sell books.

Oakley, too, is careful to emphasize that traits arise from interactions between genes and environments*. To this extent her book is a helpful contribution to our understanding of the genetics of human behavior. But this subtlety falls away where it matters most. We look to the title to distill for us the most important part of a book’s argument. Evil Genes does little, unfortunately, to dispel the common misunderstanding of the genome as a deterministic program, and it’s hard to see how this could be anything but deliberate.

(This is the same gambit used by Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism. Deep in the guts of his text he makes weird disclaimers to the effect of “just because I’m calling liberals ‘fascists’ doesn’t mean they’re always diabolical; in fact liberal fascism is often quite benign.” That’s a supreme act of bad faith, and a pretty big insult to all the people who suffered at the hands of real, non-benign fascism last century.)

Titles matter, because we need to connect even the most complicated explanations of things to basic understandable ideas. In the case of Evil Genes the idea is an old one; it’s the myth of the “bad seed,” the notion that evil is born, not made. The mark of Cain. There’s another, less explicit myth in there too, the myth of the Svengali, wherein evil always manages to get the better of good, through trickery and exploitation. Evil, in this tale, is endowed with a powerful inner magnetism which Goodness does not have the resources to resist.

There’s a certain value to these stories, but it’s not the one that Oakley seizes upon. The lesson of these cautionary archetypes is not about the Evil Other, it is about ourselves. It is about the tension between, in Blake’s proposition, Innocence and Experience. The primary confusion running through Evil Genes is Oakley’s implicit association of “good” with “innocent.” She is trying to combat the naive misconception that people are born “good.” But is this really all that widely held? It seems to me the much more prevalent conception is that humans are born innocent, which is not at all the same. Ironically, the conflation of innocence and goodness falls prey to the same naiveté Oakley sets out to remediate: to identify innocence with goodness is itself innocent. To the extent we can talk about good and evil in any meaningful way, they must be informed by our experience.

A newborn baby can do neither good nor evil. He or she is utterly self absorbed, by nature, in a way that is entirely beyond reproach. We allocate proportionally more responsibility to children as they develop, until we release them as free agents into the world, at around 18. But this is not a process of reactively doling out greater and greater hunks of adulthood until the child’s development it complete. It is an interactive and creative venture. These 18 years are set aside, in our culture, not just to wait for development to be completed, but to build a psyche, an identity (as opposed to a personality, which we can be more comfortable calling “inborn”) that can function in a healthy way. And we spend an enormous amount of energy and money on this process, through rearing, schooling, media, and various other organized activities. A visitor from another planet would have to conclude that we consider that enculturation of children a pretty important activity.

Oakley’s book completely ignores the function of culture and socialization in the development process. The extent of her interest in the social aspect of psychology is expressed in a single sentence:

Psychology, with explanations founded on “defense mechanisms,” “countertransference” and “acting out” can only go so far.

We are not told how far is “so far,” nor are we treated to any explication of the merits (or demerits) of the psychological paradigm. She unnecessarily dismisses the behaviorist “blank slate” model of human nature, which has been out of favor in clinical psychology for half a century. Again, it is an irony Oakley fails to recognize that without the important work the behaviorists did eliminating conceptual structures as a legitimate course of psychological study, the mechanistic view of humanity she favors, in common with luminaries like Steven Pinker and Judith Rich Harris, would not be possible.

I mentioned earlier that the book is half personal narrative, focusing mostly on Oakley’s effort to understand her sister, Carolyn, who she calls a “Machiavellian” personality type, after the classification developed by Christie and Geis in the 1950s. On the one hand the fact that Oakley has written her personal motivation for pursuing this interest right into the through-line of her book is an admirable transparency. But making the venture explicitly personal demonstrates a conflict of interest that deeply mars Oakley’s argument. Though she briefly touches upon some of the recent challenges in the literature, such as identical twin studies, to prevailing nurture-based theories of psychology, when it comes to her own family the topic is (understandably) off limits. By failing to seriously investigate (or even consider) the possibility that Carolyn (who died in 2004) might have suffered some kind of transgressional event in her childhood, Oakley obviates her sister’s history of any illuminatory potential regarding interpersonal causes of psychopathology. Excerpts from Carolyn’s diary throughout the book give the appearance of contributing, somehow, to Oakley’s evil genes thesis. But since Oakley only considers as possibilities that Carolyn had “Machiavellian”** genes, or (in a half-hearted investigation) that her personality was altered by childhood polio, the diary entries serve only a circular, tautological role.

Whatever happened or didn’t happen to Oakley’s sister, most morally and emotionally damaged people have a history of somekind of childhood abuse or neglect. The pattern is demonstrable. It’s possible that some people are born with a more robust genome, and able to thrive after an upbringing that would have twisted the psyche of many another into Gordian knots. It’s not clear to me why we should call the latter a genetic defect instead of calling the former a genetic cushion. In either case, most children raised in healthy homes don’t end up “sinister.” As a culture, we are able to profoundly influence the nurture side of the equation. Why not focus on what is possible, instead encouraging the kind of fatalism that extends from considering human nature as set in stone, out of our hands? Why devote large portions of our discourse to the things we can’t have any influence on? At the very least, scary bedtime stories about monsters go down a lot easier (and result in much better dreams) when the hero or heroine is given something interesting or useful to do.

**We use the word “Machiavellian” today to indicate personal opportunism, but this is not the philosophy Machiavelli espsoused; his counsel of deception and cruelty was meant not for everyman, but for Kings, and not because he wanted Kings to have special privileges for their own sake, but for the greater stability of the state. When we talk about ends justifying means, we rarely remember that to make any sense at all, the ends would have to be something other than whatever might be gratifying at the time–i.e. short-term personal gain.

• This is an updated re-post from my old blog

So Katie, I’m sick of all this dieting, punishing myself in the gym, feeling like a failure all the time, and so consumed with how I look that I am missing out on my family, my friends and my life. You say the only way to have the body and the life of my dreams is simply taking great care of myself … but where do I start?

Decide to Change

The very first step on this amazing journey is to recognise that whatever you are doing now isn’t working. It hasn’t worked for you even though you’ve given it your very best shot. You’ve set goals, you’ve been motivated, you’ve put in the hard work, you wanted it more than anything in your life, and yet you end up falling in a heap over and over again.

You have been strong and committed to the traditional principals of weight loss for a long, long time and yet you still have to push yourself to get to the gym and the smell of hot chips or freshly baked bread makes you weak at the knees. Instead of it getting easier, it feels like it’s getting harder.

Would you Wish This Life on Someone You Loved?

Consider your daily thoughts and actions and ask yourself if you would wish this life on your best girlfriend or on your daughter. If you could swap yesterday with someone you loved, would you be giving them a gift or a day of misery? If you wouldn’t want someone you care for to have to walk in your shoes for one day, then you are not taking great care of yourself.

If you want, more than anything else, for the torture to end then you are ready to change. You have to want it more than being lean, more than a number on the scale and more than feeling in control. You have to hold on to the belief that there is another way, and it will work if you give it a chance.

The Fuck It Diet and Exercise Plan

Then, the next time you are hungry, decide what you would like to eat, add up the calories, fat grams and carbs in your head (because you will) and then say the magic words “Fuck It” and eat it anyway. Then refuse to feel guilty — repeat to yourself : even though I feel like I’ve been bad/weak/indulgent/undisciplined I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

Tomorrow morning when you walk in the door of the gym with your pre-planned training schedule, say the magic words “Fuck this Shit” and go play on a piece of equipment while you read a trashy magazine, get a massage, or go for a slow walk barefoot while listening to your breath and the sounds of nature. Then refuse to feel guilty — repeat to yourself : even though I feel like I’ve been bad/lazy/weak/undisciplined I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

It will feel like you have given up, that you have no discipline, that you will get fatter and fatter by the minute, but you won’t. You have great habits and your body knows that good food and an active lifestyle makes you feel amazing. You have taught it well and it will not let you down.

It may be uncomfortable to take away all the rules and follow your instincts and sometimes things will seem to get worse before they get better [I binged more frequently at the beginning but my binges were less intense and didn't last as long], but I can guarantee that just when it seems like you’re doing everything wrong you will find your miracle.

One day the emptiness inside will disappear, food will just be food, you’ll pass on the chips because you honestly don’t feel like them, and you will move your body because it makes you happier than sitting still.

It’s Like Learning to Drive

It is hard work at the beginning ~ deciding if you’re hungry, choosing what you want, eating mindfully and stopping when you’re full, but it’s like learning to drive. The more you practice, the more automatic it becomes until sooner or later, you don’t even have to think about it any more.

Eating healthy food and being physically active become automatic bodily functions like needing to pee and needing to sleep. You get the urge, you do what needs to be done, then you forget about it and move on to the next more interesting thing.

Is it Worth It?

Once all the pre-occupation with food and exercise is gone you have all this extra time on your hands and space in your head to play with your kids, write a book, paint, sing, hug the cat, and marvel at the miracle of being alive and aware of your blessings. You will be happy, you will be at peace and the beauty you feel inside will manifest itself in the perfect body for you.

Did you know … when something becomes automatic it’s called Unconscious Competence

• the skill becomes so practised that it enters the unconscious parts of the brain – it becomes ’second nature’
• common examples are driving, sports activities, typing, manual dexterity tasks, listening and communicating
• it becomes possible for certain skills to be performed while doing something else, for example, knitting while reading a book
• the person might now be able to teach others in the skill concerned, although after some time of being unconsciously competent the person might actually have difficulty in explaining exactly how they do it – the skill has become largely instinctual
• this arguably gives rise to the need for long-standing unconscious competence to be checked periodically against new standards ~ Conscious Competence Learning Model

Did You Know Part 2 …

• My I’ve Been Exposed photo/post has been featured at We Are The Real Deal and also linked from Mizfit’s site. I am proud to be officially part of the ‘exposed’ trail of fame.

→ photo : extranoise

[Ed Note: I was inspired to re-post after I finally saw Good Hair on Wednesday. I'm a little meh about the movie, mainly because Chris Rock didn't include women with natural hair. And as a woman without any chemicals in my hair, good hair means hair that is healthy and thriving. But Derek J? Leaves me breathless. I never got around to finishing Part II of this particular story. But trust me...it's very, very worthwhile.]

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a Brooklyn mentality.

In a society where beauty is measured by a number on the scale and the label on our clothes, and as part of the so called health and fitness community where body size and muscle definition is the measure of success, intuitive eaters are sometimes seen as the ‘quitters’.

This is a re-worked post from my old blog that needed some updating. At the time of writing it (5 October) I still believed that in some ways I had taken the easy road and quit. Now I know that trusting my body and listening to its wisdom takes just as much dedication, discipline and strength as any externally formulated diet plan.

The Diet Mentality Says …

• I have given up because diet and exercise are too hard and I’m not tough enough
• I have stopped being accountable
• I am a failure because I don’t weigh 55kg

I have not given up my healthy eating behaviours and exercise habits by vowing  to stop withholding  love and acceptance until I reach a certain number on the scales. I am tough enough to face the fact that I only used to feel happy when I was ‘good’, and when I was trying to look like someone else. I am awakening to the realisation that my value lies inside me rather than in my conformity to the cultural myth of physical beauty.

Intuitive eating makes me more accountable than I ever was. Instead of following a plan written by another person, I am listening to the wisdom of my body. I can’t make excuses like ‘carb loading’ and ‘cheat meals’ when I overeat processed food that makes me feel like shit. Each meal is an opportunity to take great care of myself and discover what works for me. I can’t just eat the same thing day in and day out. I have to decide what and how much to eat and then notice how it makes me feel over time. It is constant attention, not stuffing McDonalds in my face while I sit on the couch.

Have I failed to meet my goal of weighing 55kg? Well, I have actually got there twice now, but it only made me continuously hungry and completely exhausted. I didn’t feel healthy — I was constipated, without a period, and in physical pain from my bones sticking out. I learned that looking like someone else didn’t make me beautiful, peaceful or contented.

Competitor Envy

Am I envious of those who eat and train in the manner that allows them to compete? If envy means would I swap places with them, then no. Do I feel admiration and respect? Of course I do because I know how much commitment that particular journey requires. I also know that for me the fleeting feeling of accomplishment didn’t outweigh the pain and was quickly replaced by anxiety about how I was going to stay that lean.

It takes ‘figure athlete’ commitment and discipline to give up chasing the perfect body and focus instead on being healthy, happy and balanced. There is no ‘off season’ when it comes to facing the way I think, my beliefs and my identity. There is pain involved, but the feeling of progress, of continuous improvement and the sense that my hard work is transforming my reality is the most satisfying thing I have ever experienced. It makes going on a diet and chasing a scale number as significant as the colour I choose to paint my toenails.

How will I be remembered?

(a) Katie was always working hard at being in great shape. She worked her arse off in the gym, watched what she ate and looked amazing. She certainly knew how to get what she wanted.
(b) Katie always seemed to be happy. She had this beauty that glowed from the inside. Whenever you were with her, read what she wrote or looked at her photos you were given a glimpse of pure joy. She seemed different to other people because she saw life as wonderful, exciting and magical.

I now know for certain that my purpose lies beyond being working the hardest and looking the best. My purpose is to be different, not because I’m fitter, stronger and leaner than everyone else, but because my unique view of the world gives others a glimpse of the joy of simply being.

Why chase a dream, a goal, an outcome when this moment is as good as it could ever get? We already have all that it takes to have all that we want.

Did you know …

• Super-strict dieting and training such as bodybuilding contest prep, is a stress to the body. When you remove entire food groups from your diet and reduce your calories drastically, you are more likely to develop nutrient deficiencies that can lead to colds, flus, etc. The over-training that is often necessary to reach extremely low body fats can also lower your immune function. ~ Tom Venuto

• A large or sudden drop in body fat levels will decrease a woman’s levels of the hormone oestrogen. At menopause, the production of oestrogen slows to a stop and leads to a substantial loss of calcium from the bones. If the bones are not dense enough to start with, post-menopausal women with low oestrogen levels develop porous bones, or osteoporosis – one of the greatest health problems in western societies. However, the body does not distinguish between different causes of low oestrogen levels, and a young woman whose oestrogen levels fall because of low levels of body fat also loses some of the bone from her skeleton. Women who believe ‘thin is beautiful’ to the extent that they stop producing adequate levels of oestrogen can do permanent damage to the spongy bone in their spines. There is not much beauty in having a spine which becomes bent and painful. ~ Body Fat and Osteoporosis

→ photo : whatmegsaid

• this is a re-post from my old blog. I LOVE this story.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams

(re-post: 2 agosto 2009) (c’è un Ps, leggetelo, da bravi!)

Nella mia compagnia marittima c’è un tizio, Kevin, il cui ruolo è quello, conclamato, dello Scemo. Sedici anni, bergamasco (non che ci sia nulla di male ad essere bergamaschi, a meno di non dover parcheggiare la macchina a Brescia, ma qui parliamo del tipo di bergamasco che passa la serata a sbraitare “figaahh”), alto alto e secco secco, sboccato come un non so cosa, ignorante come una capra cotta, razzista, maschilista, ripetitivo, approssimativo, fascistoide, dotato di un gusto davvero pessimo in fatto di “musica”, spesso involontariamente esilarante.

(Esce con noi perché qui siamo in circa sei persone tra i 15 e i 20, e ci si conosce da una vita e mezzo; inoltre, certe volte averlo intorno è come interagire con un Mago Gabriel personale)

[Esterno. Spiaggia. Notte]

* Traduzione: “non li fa mica, per quel signore dalla pelle scura“.

Ps. scusate per la minestra riscaldata! Domani arriva l’ultima parte del mega-post in 4/4, parola di Giovane Marmotta. Nel mentre, sono lieta di annunciare che ieri abbiamo avuto addirittura 131 visite. Oh, son soddisfazioni [se una è nerd inside]. Vi voglio bene, kind of.

(re-post: 16 agosto 2008) (curiosamente, il 16 agosto successivo sarei diventata la ragazza di qualcuno) (… Rennes-le-Château!)

43 ragioni per cui non vorreste che diventassi la vostra ragazza

1. E’ l’1:55 del 16 di Agosto, e io non solo sono a casa, ma sono anche sveglia e con il computer in grembo. E non mi va nemmeno Internet. Solo per chiarire da subito il fatto che sono un po’ geek e parecchio psicotica (soprattutto la seconda, a mia discolpa).

2. Il motivo per cui sono sveglia e sto scrivendo è che ho la tosse e non riesco a dormire. La tosse. D’estate. Con nove mesi su dodici di scuola. Che spreco. Prendete nota: salute traballante, pessimo tempismo.

3. La ragione per cui la dannata tosse non mi lascia dormire è che in questa dannata casa non c’è una dannata goccia di miele nemmeno a pagare per averla. Presa dalla disperazione, prima, stavo per gettarmi su di un orrendo vasetto di marmellata di mandarino. Fortuna volle che avessi il buon senso di esaminarlo prima ad una distanza conveniente (tre centimetri), e abbandonassi consequentemente l’insano proposito.   Organizzazione domestica – anche materna – pressoché inesistente, vista risibile.

4. Mi piace il metal. Ma anche il jazz. Il punk. Il country. Il gospel. Il blues. Il suol. L’operetta. La musica orchestrale. L’hard rock. Il grunge. I musical. Il rock’n roll. Ho un sacco di opinioni sulla musica, e tendo ad essere aggressiva a riguardo, soprattutto fisicamente. Con grande impiego delle unghie.

5. Mettermi le mani sotto la maglietta è un’esperienza paragonabile a quella di passarvele sul vostro, di petto; anche  un po’ meno, se fate nuoto. Sto ancora aspettando, fiduciosa, il giorno in cui riempirò per bene una prima misura.

6. Uno dei miei cinque libri preferiti è pubblicato nella collana Le Ragazzine (anche se non se lo meriterebbe, onestamente) (dico sul serio). Inoltre, ho diciott’anni compiuti e il mio nazi-dentista non accenna minimamente a togliermi il rimasuglio di apparecchio che alberga sul retro dei miei incisivi inferiori da qualcosa come sette anni. (Però ho un gran bel sorriso, seriamente) (e anche delle gambe da sballo) (99 centimetri dalla caviglia all’anca) (per 1.74 di altezza) (oh, dovevo pur vantarmi di qualche cosa!).

7. Quando ero una mocciosa, di contro, uno dei miei libri preferiti era La Palestina tra Ellenismo e Primo Cristianesimo. Seguito a ruota dalla Storia dell’Arte di Gombrich. Sprizzo saccenza da tutti i pori.

8. La barzelletta che racconto più spesso fa così:
(ponendo la mano destra a pugno sotto il mento, a guisa di barba finta)
-Cos’è questo?
-…
-Un reggimento! E questo? (aggiungendo tre dita della mano sinistra appoggiate alla fronte)
-…
-Un reggimento al fronte!!
-*%&%$£!!!

9. Ho un mio pantheon personale, che comprende:

-Nick Cave
-Keith Richards
-Rachel Nagy
-Angus Young
-Johnny Cash
-Chuck Berry
-Paolo Madeddu
-Bruno Longhi
-Tom Waits
-Eddie Van Halen
-George Carlin
-Fabrizio De André
-Cary Grant
-David Sedaris
-Dan Aykroyd
-Dexter Holland
-Pamela Des Barres
-Kurt Cobain
-Quentin Tarantino
-Kevin “Bloody” Wilson
10. Trovo che il verso più geniale della canzone italiana sia il seguente:

“Scusa, credevo proprio che fossi sola, credevo non ci fosse nessuno con te, oh, scusami tanto se puoi, *signore, chiedo scusa anche a lei*  ma io ero… proprio fuori di me! Io ero… proprio fuori di me quando dicevo… etc.”

E sono pronta a castrare sommariamente chi la pensi diversamente.

11. Spesso sento l’esigenza di avere un po’ di tempo per me stessa. Tipo una settimana o giù di lì. Durante detti periodi, non risponderò a stimoli esterni luminosi e/o sonori che non provengano dal mio walkman. Mi si vedrà spesso indossare occhiali scuri anche in ambienti interni e scarsamente illuminati. Ritornata nel mondo civile, mi rifiuterò di ammettere di essermi comportata in modo anche solo leggermente questionabile.

12. Bevo parecchia Coca-Cola. In effetti, l’idea di non averne in casa è sufficiente a precludermi – e, virtualmente, a precludere a voi – qualsiasi speranza di  chiudere occhio. La caffeina ha su di me un improbabile effetto calmante.

13. Trovo che George Thorogood sia un personaggio di primissimo piano, e che l’ignoranza dei dettagli più minuti della sua carriera sia paragonabile ad una tendenza recidiva alla sodomia zoofila.

14. Nessuno, inclusa la mia unica Mutti, mi sopporta per periodi lunghi. Diciamo più lunghi di una partita di calcio senza supplementari.

15. I logaritmi mi atterriscono, e sono arrivata in 5 Scientifico senza mai essere riuscita a risolvere un singolo quesito di geometria analitica. Non sono in grado di spartire tra Veneto e Lombardia le seguenti città: Padova, Pavia, Mantova. Ignoro quale sia il pensiero di Hume riguardo al mondo in generale. L’unica data storica di cui io mi ricordi con sicurezza è la morte di Napoleone (5.5.1821). Inoltre, non ho la più pallida idea di come si dica “Spirito dei Tempi” in tedesco.

16. Non so usare uno scanner. Né una stampante. Né un videoregistratore, un forno, una lavatrice, un walkie-talkie o una lavastoviglie che non sia quella della mia unica Mutti. Mi limito a minacciare e seviziare chi mi sta intorno affinché si relazioni con l’oggetto incriminato in mia vece.

17. Mia nonna chiama una media di otto nomi diversi, prima di azzeccare il mio. E sì che è il nome più diffuso tra le femmine del mio anno. Alcuni dei nomi attribuitami corrispondono ad animali domestici. Defunti da tempo.

18. Sono palesemente più affezionata ai miei occhiali scuri di quanto potrò mai sperare di esserlo ad un soggetto animato, e non ne faccio mistero.

19. Sono una stronza. Dicono.

20. Sono stordita. Dicono. E hanno ragione.

21. Non reggo la vodka.

22. Quando sono ubriaca divento alternativamente noiosissima o completamente irrefrenabile nella mia ilarità. E sviluppo un timore morboso nei confronti delle biciclette.

23. Non sono mai riuscita a fare una spaccata, frontale o laterale che fosse. Nemmeno a sette anni. Nemmeno con la tizia che ci insegnava seduta sulla schiena. Mai. Sono legata – e negata.

24. Il mio più grande terrore sono i muletti.

25. L’unico film che mi abbia mai veramente spaventata è stato Ewdard Mani di Forbice.

26. Non ho rispetto dei sentimenti altrui.

27. Non sono capace di sacrifici anche minimi.

28. L’ambientalismo mi infastidisce alquanto.

29. Canto spesso – il che non significa che ne sia capace.

30. Tendenzialmente, non capisco la poesia.

31. Ogni volta che parlate con me/compite qualche gesto in mia presenza/lasciate che io abbia di voi un’immagine mentale, rischiate di ritrovarvi in qualcosa delle cosine che scrivo – che lo vogliate o meno.

32. Quando scrivo, la maggior parte delle volte non ho la più pallida idea di dove andrò a parare. Bluffo.

33. Ho letto Via col Vento almeno quattro volte, e sto ancora aspettando un Rhett Butler. Me lo meritò più di quanto se lo meriti Rossella, poco ma sicuro.

34. Ho la tendenza a mordere. Appassionatamente. (Questa va bene anche per: 43 Motivi Per Cui Vorreste Che Fossi La Vostra Ragazza)

35. Non sono poi così brava a disegnare. Copio dai cataloghi EMP.

36. Mi annoio molto in fretta. Riguardo a cose, situazioni e persone.

37. Sono tendenzialmente infedele, e comunque ho una fantasia davvero vivida.

38. Tendo ad innamorarmi sempre e comunque di quello sbagliato.

39. Non sopporto il contatto fisico prima delle nove del mattino – le dieci nei fine settimana.

40. Ho un’autostima che – per citare Woody Allen – è solo una tacca sotto quella di Kafka.

41. Per quanto splendidi voi siate, dovrete sempre competere con Mick Jagger.

42. Se fossi un uomo, sarebbe tutto più facile.

43. Sono plasmabile più o meno quanto un pavimento di granito. Prendere o lasciare, e il consiglio, honey, è lasciare.