another thing about the yasavi mausoleum in turkestan

one visit to the mausoleum equals one-third of a visit to mecca. in 2000, mrs. noz and i went to the great mosque in kairouan, tunisia. one visit to that site is said to equal one-seventh of a visit to mecca.

being non-muslim, i'm not allowed to go to mecca. but i wonder if there are other places in the world with some kind of mecca exchange rate. by my calculations i am 47.619047619047619% of the way to a hajj. that's almost half-way! not bad for a heathen. can i do the whole thing just by visiting other sites around the world? or would i have to go back to turkestan or kairouan to top off my current total?

the bumpy road from turkestan

last night, after spending the day wandering around the amazing timurid mausoleum of khoja ahmed yasavi, i found myself in a car on a foggy rutted icy mountain road, driven by an extremely aggressive driver who would avoid potholes by violently jerking the wheel from left to right, often veering into the other lane as cars came straight towards us. on the radio blared a bad dance remix of "i will survive". i kept thinking: this is why i love traveling in the developing world.

i think mrs. noz was less amused.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan

the first letter of kazakhstani license plates indicate where the car is from.

A is for almaty city
B is for almaty province (but not almaty the city)
D is for aktobe province
H is for zhambyl province (which includes taraz)
X is for south kazakhstan

i've also seen C, N and S, but i don't know where they are from yet.

and for some reason kazakhstani license plates use latin characters, even though boththe russian and kazakh languages use cyrillic.

to turkestan!

we're off to turkestan tomorrow. except we've been in turkestan ever since we arrived in central asia. this whole chunk of the world, basically former soviet central asia, northern afghanistan and western china was once known as turkestan.

tomorrow, however, we're going to the small city west of here that is also called "turkestan". technically its full name is hazrat-e-turkestan, which means "the saint of turkestan". the saint in question is khoja ahmad yasavi. his giant mausoleum is in the town and that's what made the place a major pilgrimage destinations after his death. i guess all those pilgrims got tirds of saying "i'm going to hazrat-e-turkestan" and shortened the name to just "turkestan", even though odds are that's where they probably were before they even started pilgrimming.

it's like if brussels changed its name to "the capital of europe". and then, after a while, everyone just started callin it "europe". which, i suppose, is sort of like what they do in cairo.

whatever it's called, we're going tomorrow. (to turkestan, not brussels or cairo). so there.

propaganda works

that's what i'm learning from this trip.

not because of anything the kazakh government is doing (though they do have their propaganda). no, it's because of the way our family and friends are reacting to the photos of our orphanage visits here. they keep commenting to our photos about how happy noz jr. looks, how often he smiles, how comfortable we seem to be in handling him, et cetera.

during our visits there are uncomfortable moments and noz jr. isn't always happy or smiley. during those moments we tend not to pull out the camera. and in those rare instances that we do catch a cranky baby on film, we often don't include those pictures in the dispatches home.

all they're seeing is the highlight reel and so they're convinced it's nothing but highlights. with a little trick photography and/or photoshop, i bet i can convince everyone that i can fly.

ipad

once again i've missed all the hype over here in kaz, so maybe i'm not fully understanding all of its wonderful features.

but basically the ipad just looks like a really big harder-to-carry iphone/ipod touch. right?

virtual blogrollin'

the lords of blockistan won't let me edit my template. until i find a workaround that works, until the block disappears again, or until i get home (whichever comes first), please pretend that a tale of two springs is on my blogroll.

UPDATE: template edited.

a fine whine, aged another year

thanks to a now-spammed comment of my idiot troll, i am reminded that the state of the union address just happened. my lack of interest is really just consistent with my usual tradition of ignoring the speech and then whining about how stupid it is and not worth watching the day after. being in kazakhstan, this year it's even easier to ignore fake non-events like the SOTU. i got to miss not only the speech, but also all of the ridiculous pre-speech build up.

history buffs, i give you my SOTU-whine archive: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

and now it works

yesterday i noticed that wordpress blogs were no longer blocked here. this site was still inaccessable without using an out-of-kaz proxy. today i noticed another blogspot site worked so i tried this url and it loaded without a problem. (atrios and mustang bobby are still blocked).

a week ago i was corresponding with someone who lived in kaz for a while and she said the block might be lifted after some period of time. and so it has. at least for now. i was getting use to my workaround, but it is much faster and easier to post the old fashioned way again. inshallah, it will stay that way.

UPDATE: ...and now it doesn't work.

the block is back. oh well, i guess it just wasn't working this morning for a few hours.

we're all neo-hooverites now

there seems to be this weird sense, at least among the beltway brahman, that the u.s.' current economic woes are caused by deficit spending. that's what president obama seems to be cravenly caving in to right now.

which means we're just going to repeat the same mistake that made the great depression so great. i'm not really sure where this idea comes from. and by caving into it, all it does is reinforce an economic theory that was discredited almost 80 years ago. there's no actual political benefit to doing it, nor is there likely to be any economic benefit either. so why does the idea have any appeal at all?

ADDING: and see what brad delong wrote. i don't see how the fact that it is a fake plan to tackle the deficit makes it any better.

do svidanya avatar

every once in a while i think about some of the cultural touchstones from home that i am missing because i am away. i'm pretty sure i have missed my chance to see avatar on the big screen, for example. the dubbed-in-russian version was playing here. and i was planning to see it. i figured that watching it in a language i don't understand was the best way to see a bloated special-effects centered film. that way i could watch the pretty pictures and not be bothered by things like the plot, which i know anyway just from seeing the previews months ago.

this morning i found out that i missed my chance. avatar has left town, some moscowood blockbuster i never heard of is in the one cinema in town. i'm having a hard time convincing myself that i should care.

ghosts of winter

over the past week, it has been amusing to watch local women try to walk on the icy sidewalks. they are so fashion-conscious here. even their winter boots often have high heels. usually i would see them walking in clumps of two or three, gripping each other's arms for mutual support as they walked. practically every other step, one would slip. but as long as someone wasn't slipping in the clump they wouldn't all fall over. it seemed to work okay, but it was hard not to wonder if a better solution would have just been more sensible boots.

now the snow has mostly melted. the last two days have been rainy, turning our 20 cm (8 inches) of snow into a slushy mess. and now most of that slush has even washed away. but the ghost of the heels are the last to go on the sidewalk. all over the place the pavement is showing, except the packed ice that is the imprint of a high heel.

it looks even stupider from halfway around the world

surveying the headlines from afar, i have learned that the republicans now control the senate, in that they have 41 seats to the democrats' 59. [adding: e.g.]

i also learned that the democrats are effectively out of power, in that they only hold the most seats in both houses of congress and the presidency.

saddest of all is that it's not just the media that learned these lessons. the democratic leadership seems to think so as well.

notella

happiness is a loaf of uzbek round bread and a russian knockoff of a popular hazelnut-chocolate spread.


we call it "notella"

democrats: the only thing going for them is they're better than the GOP

so to review: the president is talking about going with a scaled down version of the watered down version of a compromise to a fall-back plan.

it's not like this is his only option. the house could simply pass the senate version that already passed as-is. or the senate leadership could use reconciliation to pass the house version (or something else that is better than the current senate bill) with its 50-vote majority.

but of course, neither the president nor the democratic leaders in congress would go for either of those options. instead, they'll go back to wooing on of the senators from maine, even if it means giving up any remnants of real reform in the process.

end

with the brown victory in massachusetts, i believe this is the first time since 2005 that the republicans have flipped a seat in congress from democrat to republican. is that right? am i forgetting any other election?

the democrats had an amazing run. i don't know if there is any precedent for a party to go that long through two even numbered election years without losing a single seat to the opposing party. all runs must end. i just never would have imagined it would have ended for the democrats in massachusetts.

which means that the senate bill will end up being the health care reform bill. normally, the house and senate would hash out their differences in conference committee, but with 41 senators promising to filibuster any health reform bill, the dems in the house will just pass the version that already passed the senate, thus avoiding the necessity of having another senate vote. the senate bill was the suckier of the two bills, but from what i can tell from kazakhstan, it's better than nothing.

a lot of things were wrong with the entire health reform effort, most of it the fault of the democratic leadership. but if kennedy hadn't been too sick to participate in the early negotiations and then died before the final vote, it might have been a better senate bill. if not for this loss in mass, there would have been a chance to improve it in conference.

not really a democracy

there used to be this debate about how democratic the iranian system really is. on one side, you had people pointing out that the system has elements of democracy. the president, for example, is elected democratically. prior to 2009, iranian elections were generally pretty clean and had sometimes resulted in the election of someone other than the preferred candidate of the clerical elite. mohammed katami, for example, was elected and then reelected as president despite the fact that he ran both times as a reformer. mahmoud ahmadinejad wasn't the mullah's choice when he first ran and won in 2005.

on the other side, you had people pointing out that even if the elections that are free and fair when the vote is cast, they're not really democratic because the mullah got to pre-screen the candidates. essentially, they have the power to declare anyone who wants to run as not sufficiently islamic, thus denying their place on the ballot before anyone even begins to campaign.

of course, the above debate is now a bit of an anachronism. while it's not certain exactly who should have won the 2009 election, it is now pretty widely accepted that it was anything but free and fair. but the general question remains: is a system really a democracy when the government gets to exclude the candidates it doesn't like?

which is what i keep thinking about when i read about the exclusion of prominent iraqi politicians from the upcoming national elections. can we really say that the u.s. has instilled a democracy when the ruling government has the power to do that? i guess i'm on the same side as kenneth pollack and michael o'hanlon in this one.

winter wonderland

we really haven't had much of a winter since we left aktobe. it's been so warm here, i have barely used all the winter gear we hauled to kaz.

until yesterday morning when the rain turned to snow. then it snowed and snowed and snowed. it snowed for the rest of the day, throughout the night and didn't stop until this morning.






purdy. i love this shit.

ugh

the blocking of sites keeps getting tighter and tighter. now pretty much every blogspot/blogger site is blocked. it looks like they blocked the sites that had a non-blogspot url first (that's what eschaton and bark bark woof woof have in common--sorry mustang bobby). the block now seems to extend to wordpress sites (which knocks out access to mrs. noz's site, the main way we are staying in touch with friends and family) and youtube (sorry family, no more cute videos for you!)

it's a little ironic. for once i'm not mostly writing about politics, and it's only now that i am having problems with government censorship. there have been a few news stories about an end of 2009 crackdown on the press, but i haven't found anything about the recent blog blocking. certainly nothing like the fuss that happened when kaz blocked livejournal in late 2008.

obviously, i have found a way to bypass the block, but i keep having to tweak my strategy every time i make an attempt. google translate doesn't work as a proxy anymore. which means i need to stop revealing my bag of tricks online.

for next recess

i don't understand why president obama doesn't just fill the three vacant NLRB seats with a recess appointment. congress isn't in recess now, but it has had several recesses since senator mccain put a block on the becker nomination. if obama wanted to he had several chances to get more board members seated in the past year.

actually, i don't think obama has made any recess appointments yet, even though a lot of his nominees are not yet confirmed. it may a reaction against the overuse and abuse of recess appointments by his predecessor.

i agree that recess appointments shouldn't be allowed to seat a nominee who would be voted down if he or she came to a floor vote. but that doesn't mean that there should never be a recess appointment. the whole point of having recess appointments is to put appointees in place while congress is unable to vote on them, to assure that the government can continue to function until the senate can schedule a vote. currently the NLRB is unable to fully function absent a recess appointment. it seems like a perfect example of why recess appointments are sometimes necessary.

maybe obama is waiting for the supreme court to rule. but that will take at least a year. plus the issue before the court is only whether the current board can issue decisions in cases where the two remaining members agree. it wouldn't permit the board to function in all the cases where they don't. for that they need a third member. for that it will need a recess appointment.

baby steps

we are now guardianship council approved! woo-hoo!!! all we need to do now is get a court date, survive the court hearing, wait for the fifteen day appeal deadline to pass, then go to almaty and wade our way through u.s. immigration bureaucracy, and then we actually get to come home.

after we left the guardianship council hearing, i asked our local coordinator how long it would be before our court date. she laughed and said "a long time."

how did i know?

yesterday i was walking down the street and saw three people walking ahead of me. i could tell they weren't locals somehow and as i walked behind them i tried to figure out why i was so sure. it wasn't what they were wearing-- they were all in dark winter coats, like everyone around here. it wasn't their the fact that they all white people and did not look central asian. they could have all been russian, common enough anywhere in the former soviet union.

maybe it was their walk? but i couldn't identify anything in particular about that the way they walked would have clued me in.

so then i passed them. after i did that i could hear their conversation. it was english, north american accent (i.e. american or canadian). i spun around and said "hi". one from chicago the other two from california.

rassling with the kaz internets

at the start of this trip i mentioned that whenever i try to access eschaton and bark bark, woof woof from this country i get an error message, which suggests to me that the sites might be blocked. initially i had no problems accessing my own blog. but then after posting a few days in aktobe i i started getting that same error message. i figured out how to evade the block (if indeed that is what it was), but it was cumbersome and tiresome. luckily, the block only applied to public computers at internet cafes. when i used my own laptop at a cafe with wifi, i had no trouble getting my site.

then we moved from aktobe to taraz. the blocks on atrios and mustang bobby remained, but whatever was preventing me from seeing my own site was no longer a problem. that is, until about two days ago. suddenly there's that error message again. i fell back on my old aktobe tricks to get around the block. and it worked, but was still a pain in the ass to do. and unfortunately, unlike aktobe, there do not appear to be any cafes with wifi in this town--so that workaround won't work. (my big discovery still hasn't produced a convenient place to camp out and type with the laptop).

but if it is a block, it is really erratic. i typed in the url for this place just now and the error message is gone. suddenly i can access my site and blog all i want. (atrios and mustang bobby still get the same error). i wonder how long this will last?

you go right back up there and get me a toddler

we hadn't seen noz jr. in over a week. last we heard he was in the hospital. it was very frustrating.

then today, we finally were told we'd be allowed to visit him in the hospital. but first we had to go to the orphanage to pick up the doctor. it was only with the orphanage's doctor that we would be allowed into the hospital to see him.

so off we went, me and mrs. noz, the doctor, our translator and the driver, from the orphanage to the hospital. we parked in an alley behind the facility and the doctor went in first. "we must wait" said the translator.

so we waited. mrs. noz asked the translator to give us the name of the hospital. all week we had been trying to find out where noz jr. was without success. "it is a children's hospital, i do not know the name" said the translator. "it's 'CHOT'", i said to mrs. noz, trying to be helpful.

then the driver made a noise like he saw something in his rear view mirror. i turned around and saw the doctor running, literally running, towards the car with a bundle in her arms. she opened the back door of the car, threw noz jr. into my lap, jumped in the front seat and told the driver to go. we sped back to the orphanage. i whispered to mrs. noz, "this feels like a baby-napping."

in fact, the baby was not napping. he was looking at me and mrs. noz, as confused as we were.

when we arrived at the orphanage, i got out of the car, baby still in my arms. "quickly into the baby house" said the translator, further reinforcing the baby-napping vibe of the moment. i ran inside as instructed.

mrs. noz later pointed out that the doctor was probably running from the hospital and the translator probably urged me to hurry inside when we reached the orphanage because it was freezing cold outside. noz jr. had just gotten over pneumonia and even when he was well, the locals seem to have a crazy obsession with keeping him warm¹

so yeah, that's probably what was going on. but it's a much better story if you go with the baby-napping angle.

-------------------
1- in our first meeting he was wearing multiple layers of warm winter clothes and was wrapped in a blanket. this was in a room that was so hot i had to strip down to a t-shirt to be comfortable. the boy was obviously sweating, but they kept telling us to throw another blanket on to keep him from being cold.

making flying suck more

i keep hoping that the flight security folks will calm down as time passes and ease up a bit before we try to fly back to the u.s. but the more i read about this stuff, the less optimistic i get.

they will make anything into vodka here

it's not just for AK-47 anymore.

politically motivated overreaction

this should be read by everyone. i continue to be puzzled by these demands that we add a bunch of new cumbersome and inconvenient security measures that can't be expected to stop any new attacks.

is it possible for our political system to produce rational responses to events like the attempted christmas day bombing? it really seems like the answer is no.

(via explananda link candy)

wi-find

i don't know why i didn't try this sooner: earlier today i walked around town using mrs. noz's ipod touch as a portable wifi detector. i found a bunch of open networks by our hotel, none of them seem to be coming from any official internet cafe. i suspect the signals are coming from private apartments, where someone has set up a wireless router and didn't bother to password protect the signal.

but hey, works for me. my current mission is to find a cafe or restaurant within range of an open wifi signal. somewhere i can sit with the laptop that isn't the middle of the snowy street.

our circuitous information pipeline

we actually got news about noz jr. today. our translator came by the room and told us that he is still in the hospital but that his flu is better. he is out or about to come out of the intensive unit or pod or whatever, and that we can visit him on sunday. that will be seven full days after all contact between him and us was cut off.

then just now we got an email from our coordinator in the u.s. mentioning that she heard he was recovered from pneumonia.

pneumonia? how did our person in the u.s. get an actual diagnosis when we never have? the u.s. coordinator got her information from the country coordinator in almaty. and he presumably got that information from the regional coordinator here in taraz. so while the regional coordinator told her boss in almaty, she never bothered to tell us right here in the same city, even though we've been asking for news every day. so instead of information traveling from regional coordinator to us here in taraz, the news went from regional coordinator in taraz, to country coordinator in almaty, to program coordinator in pennsylvania, and back to us here in taraz.

but at least our limbo period now has an end date. only two more days to go.

mmmm turkey

i had read that turkey was working to build stronger ties with their long-lost turkic cousins in central asia before i came here. now that i'm here there are signs of it everywhere. there are turkish products, turkish schools, turkish things just keep coming up. plus the turks have almost cornered the market of cheap cafes. almost all of them serve turkish food and most have some turkey-related name.

political observations from an out-of-touch guy

so i've been a little out of touch with the news. my online access is limited and since we left aktobe i can't watch any news in a language that i know. but today i had some extra time so i surfed around some news sites and blogs. here are some brief political thoughts from a guy who is basically out of touch:

(a) why do conservatives completely shit their pants whenever there is even an attempt at terrorism? the failed underwear bombing was almost two weeks ago and they're still flipping out about it. the bottom line is that, even if it had worked, it would not have been a very effective attack. taking down a single passenger get would be a horrible tragedy, but it would be rather pathetic in terms of bringing down american imperial power. it doesn't even have the symbolic effect of a WTC or pentagon attack. the idea that we should chuck out our entire legal system because of such a pathetic attempt, and an attempt that failed, is completely absurd. and yet, that's what the folks on the right seem to be doing, at least the people posting over at the national review site. are they really so easily frightened? or are they pretending to be complete cowards to make some political hay?

(b) i just don't see the massive losses for democrats that everyone seems to be predicting in the upcoming congressional election. yes, the dems will probably lose some seats. that's what always happens in off-year elections. with only a handful of exceptions, the party with the white house loses seats in the mid-terms. that's just how things work. but there is no real chance of republicans getting a majority in either chamber. i don't get why something this normal is being treated like some looming calamity for the democrats.

(c) along those lines, why is everyone considering chris dodd's retirement to be a bad thing for democrats? connecticut is a pretty blue state these days, the biggest risk for the dems would be for the scandal-ridden dodd to run again. from where i sit (and admittedly kazakhstan is not the best seat), having a different democrat run for the seat increases the chances that the democrats will hold onto it.

if i didn't have disappointment, i wouldn't have any appointments

another day, more waiting.

but hey, merry christmas everyone! the date stamp says 1/6, but right now over here it's 1/7, or rather 7/1. which is like 12/25 (or 25/12) for the orthodoxly inclined. no, not that orthodox.

before we left, i heard that new years day was the big kahoona of holidays here and that january 7th was something that was just celebrated by the russian orthodox believers. but people seem to be treating this as a holiday. the internet cafe opened late this morning (the horror). for lack of a better idea, we were going to hike out to the big mall they call the "small" today. but hey, even a walk through a holiday-shuttered ghost town is better than no plan at all.

drinking liberally-taraz

i forgot to mention last week. the inaugural meeting of the taraz, kazakhstan chapter of drinking liberally was a smashing success. well at least it wasn't a total disaster in that it happened. okay, attendance was a little low. but i blame that on the complete lack of promotion for the event, other than my mentioning it to mrs. noz just before i left. mrs. noz bowed out. so it was me alone in the hotel bar drinking an overpriced not-very-good bottle of georgian wine.

DL-taraz take two was last night and it was an even bigger success (even though this time i barely mentioned it to mrs. noz) there were four of us having beers at some restaurant (i forgot the name of the restaurant). okay, maybe no one but me knew it was drinking liberally. but still, we all ordered beers with dinner! and it was tuesday! and i'm pretty sure the two americans we had dinner with are liberals! that's a 300% increase in attendance from last week!

at this rate of growth we'll hit 64 attendees in just two weeks!!! that's larger than DL-philly usually gets. suck on that mithras!

doing the limbo

here we stand, stalled out just after bonding day three.

it seems that every possible thing that at every step, everything that could go wrong with our application inevitably does. we left home three weeks ago today. in terms of our progress, we are four days into an approximately 2 month long process and are not currently moving forward at all.

calendar 5/20/2011

it's nice to know that there's no reason for me to believe in jesus for at least another sixteen months.

this tarazi life

it's a strange life here for us in kazakhstan. our day basically revolves the two hours a day that we get to visit the orphanage. they don't bother to tell us until the day before what time we will go. it seems to be either in the morning (e.g. 9:30-11:30) or afternoon (e.g. 3:00-5:00), but it's early. maybe they'll spring another time slot on us at some point.

the two hours is bonding time with noz jr. but at any time, some caretaker can walk in and take him away from us. that's happened almost every time we've been there. we're not allowed to feed or change his diaper. just play and hold him. if anything else comes up, away he goes. and, of course, that cuts into our two hours of bonding time. yesterday's "two hours" were comprised of a half hour of waiting after we arrived (they told us he was being fed). at the end of the wait they brought him in and put him in mrs. noz's arms. about 20 seconds later a nurse came in and said he needed an injection because he is sick. so away he went for another 20 minutes. we got to play with him for a little while. then they took him to be changed and they told us we should just go. total actual time: about 45 minutes. today was even worse. this morning we arrived at the orphanage and were told that he was too sick for visitors. a car came and took us back to the hotel. total actual time: 0

and then there's the rest of the day. even if we go for the full 2 hours, that leaves another 22 with little to do. we don't have the internet in our room. it's a lot of time to make up errands to run, watch movies or, well, even i'm not sure how i pass all that time. it's a big change of pace from my normal overscheduled life back home. a day or two of this would be refreshing, but i'm not sure what i will do with myself for the next 1-2 months.

fun with cyrillic

i've been in this town for almost a week and i still keep thinking that every other place i see serves tapas.

grading my 2009 predictions

i did pretty well predicting what would happen in 2008. but 2009 was harder. a new administration was coming in, it was not clear at all what kind of presidency obama would have. here's my grade of each of my 2009 predictions:

1. all, or almost all of obama’s cabinet nominees will be confirmed by the senate (that is, no more than one will be rejected or withdrawn). also if one is rejected or withdrawn, the replacement will be confirmed.

wrong. pretty spectacularly wrong, in fact. although none were rejected, several were withdrawn at even the faintest peep of controversy. unfortunately, that pretty much set the tone for this first year of his presidency.

2. the prison at guantanamo bay will be closed before the end of the year.

wrong. actually, i'm a little surprised that i made this one, it seems so unrealistic from where i sit today. sucked up in the post-election optimism, i guess.

3. at least one supreme court justice will announce his or her retirement in 2009 (though the retirement might not go into effect until next year)

right. if i had taken a guess which one would be the retiree, i doubt i would have picked souter. i probably would have went with stevens (who is probably next). luckily, i didn't try to guess, so the prediction is right.

4. some kind of major health care reform bill will pass both houses of congress in 2009, but it won’t be a single payer system.

right. i may have gotten this one right just by the accidental way that i worded the prediction. a major health reform bill has passed both houses of congress, they're just not the same bill. but wording counts, i'm going to count this as accurate.

5. the NLRB still won’t have a full complement by the end of 2009 (currently there are only 2 members on the 5-member board).

right. when last i checked, obama had nominatees for all three missing members, but none had been scheduled for a confirmation vote.

6. the employee free choice act will not pass the senate.

right. see? i wasn't overly optimistic.

7. there will be significantly (i.e. at least 40k) fewer u.s. soldiers in iraq by the end of the year than there are now. but the withdrawal rate will be below the one-division-per-month rate that obama promised during the campaign.

half-right. there are significantly fewer u.s. soldiers in iraq at the end of 2009 than there were at the end of 2009, and the withdrawal rate has been less than the one-division per month rate. but as near as i can tell, the difference is troop levels between the two years is less than 40 thousand: in september 2008 president bush announced that he would keep troop levels at 146k through the end of 2008. there are currently approximately 115k u.s. soldiers in iraq.

8. roland burris will be a u.s. senator by the end of the year, as will al franken.

right. remember all that noise about how the democratic leadership would never seat him?

9. but caroline kennedy will not.

right. that whole caroline kennedy should be appointed to replace hillary clinton idea seems like a distant memory now.

10. the economy will continue to tank in 2009, with the economy shedding jobs for at least the first six months of the year. the dow will end up being higher at the end of the year than it is now.

right. economy tanked, jobs shed and the dow was 8776.39 on december 31, 2008 and it closed yesterday at 10,428.

11. there will be an effort to repeal, or at least undo a substantial portion of the bankruptcy reform act (by that i mean the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005). the effort will at least get as far as having a bill in congress, though it may not get out of committee.

wrong, at least not one that i'm aware of. it would have been a good idea for someone to try it though. especially with the economy tanking.

12. the price of oil will be higher at the end of 2009 than it is at the end of 2008.

right! in december 2008, oil was down to $30.28 a barrel. yesterday, it is trading at $79.36

13. hamas will still be in control of gaza by the end of 2009.

right. i wrote these predictions in the middle of operation cast lead, when the future of gaza was the question of the day. now most people, at least most people in the u.s., have gone back to not giving a shit.

14. bibi netanyahu will be prime minister of israel.

right. again, when i wrote this the israeli election hadn't happened yet and tsipi livni was trying to use the gaza offensive to win hawkish votes from bibi. i didn't think it would work and it didn't.

15. israel will not attack iran in 2009 (neither will the u.s.) and the standoff over the country’s nuclear program with the international community will continue.

right. i make some version of this prediction every year. why stop now? it's the gift that keeps on giving.

16. thailand will get yet another new prime minister in 2009.

wrong. the current prime minister of thailand is still abhisit vejjajiva. he has been in the position since december 17, 2008. that'll teach me to try to predict something about thailand. what do i know about thai politics?

17. the maliki government will lose ground in the provincial elections to be held later this month.

wrong. actually, he did rather well.

18. osama bin laden and ayman zawahiri will still be "at large" on december 31, 2009.

right. another gift that keeps on giving. (not that i want them to stay at large. i just mean that predicting they will not be caught is a pretty safe bet)

19. there will be some kind of coordinated armed action by the international community against the somali pirates.

wrong. as far as i can tell, there was no serious discussion of ever doing this.

20. the number of u.s. forces killed in afghanistan in 2009 will be higher than the number of u.s. forces killed there in 2008.

right. 106 american soldiers were killed in afghanistan in 2009, more than double the 51 who were killed in 2008.

21. and on a personal level, we’ll still be waiting for this to happen, but this will actually come to fruition in the coming year. that is mrs. noz and i will set foot in central asia at some point during 2009.

i'm going to count this as right. it is true that our kazakh adoption has not finished yet. technically, there is no adoption until we get the decree several weeks or maybe months from now. but the second sentence saves me. by clarifying that "to happen" is defined as setting foot in central asia, we've clearly done that! our feets are still here now. and yeah, we're still waiting for this, as predicted.

extra just-after new year prediction: mahmoud ahmadinejad will lose next summer's election in iran.

wrong. if i were in a charitable mood, i guess i could argue i was right because ahmadinejad probably did not get a majority of the vote. but we don't know that for sure and, in any event, he was declared the winner. when i made the prediction, i don't think i foresaw a stolen election. before 2009, iranian elections were largely above-the-board. Once the candidates passed the pre-election screening, the government generally honored the results even when their favored candidate didn't win. they let khatami serve two terms and ahmadinejad himself wasn't the mullah's choice when he was first elected in 2005. the 2009 election was a major break with this regime's history, i didn't foresee that happening at all.

overall, i got 14.5 right and 7.5 wrong. 65.909% accuracy, which is significantly worse than my 83.333% score from last year.

eventually, i'll put up my 2010 predictions.

new year

new year is a big deal here, perhaps the biggest deal of the year. our place in taraz is just a few blocks from the central square and ever since we arrived it has been all decked out for the new year celebration, with amusement park-style rides, carnval games and treats roasting on an open flame.

i had heard that on new years eve the locals stay up all night going to parties and at midnight they all converge on the central square. so at 11:30 pm last night, i went over to see what i could see.

it was not nearly as crowded as i expected, hardly the whole town. i think there were more people at the dinner hour than at midnight. but people were there of all ages, toddlers walked by with their grandparents. it didn't matter how late it was.

at midnight the air around me exploded. literally. everyone around me had some form of fire cracker. all of a sudden rockets streamed across the square leaving a trail of sparks in their wake. the ground exploded on every side of me. fireworks left tracers across my field of vision from all sides. i felt like a war movie. i got hit by a few sparkling debris from all the explosions. it only hurt a little bit. for some reason i wasn't afraid to be there, but i kept thinking: this is very dangerous.

none of the kids or their parents seemed concerned. at the edge of the square was a parked ambulance. the driver looked bored.