While I concede that Ferdinand is a hell of a name to render in katakana, the Japanese phonetic language used for transcribing words in other languages, I think that the translation Stephenson goes with is pretty much god awful. It really doesn't parse, no matter how hard I try. I think something like Faajinando comes a lot closer, but maybe that's just me. It just seems like sloppiness, which doesn't really fit with the meticulous construction of an encyclopedic narrative. Could he be trying to get at something with such a seemingly bad translation?

I love Bobby Shaftoe. I think he is absolutely hilarious in that card-playing, haiku-composing way. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"Damn it, they are still in Africa! You ought to be able to see lions and giraffes and rhinos!" (176) Because really, that's all that Africa has to offer...a nice safari adventure.

"'N-N-N-Norway,' Lieutenant Monkberg says. He looks so pathetic that Shaftoe considers offering him some m-m-m-morphine...Then he comes to his senses, remembers that Lieutenant Monkberg is an officer whose duty it is to send him off to die, and decides that he can jut go fuck himself sideways." (263)

I'm really fascinated by the idea of information flow becoming inadvertantly bi-directional when observation becomes too obvious. Everything turns on the question of praxis. The Allies have to be careful not with how much information they collect via codebreaking, but rather how much of that information they put to use. Information is a funny thing because it relies on the interface between pattern and randomness to be communicative, which is another way to say that data is only meaningful/useful if it can be differentiating from other data. Finding pattern in the noise; it's basically an extremely large-scale sifting process.

This passage relates to a previous blog about the use of the term "Nip" in the novel: "Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir...It is a terrible racist slur." (212)

I thought this passage was particularly interesting because it reminds me of our society's preoccupation with trying to be really politically correct. I know people who are afraid to offend others, so they're hyper-sensitive about using the correct terminology: African American instead of black (which actually offends some people if they're not descended from Africans), Jewish instead of Jew...and so on. A lot of people I know aren't offended by being called black or a Jew, though, because that IS what they are and by trying to be politically correct, I think a lot of terms become overgeneralized. On the other hand, those names aren't derogatory, whereas "chink" and "nip" are.

I thinkt the whole idea of Detachment 2702 is hilarious. It's all a game of "I know that you know that I know that you know..." They have the information and they want to act on it, but they have to pretend like they don't have it. But it gets complicated with the sinking of the merchant ships because the merchant shipping code was broken. The Germans crack the Allies merchant codes. The Allies have cracked the German code so they know this. So then the Allies have to change the shipping code But if they change the shipping code, the Axis will know because they will intercept it and realize it's different. So they will change their code. And then the codes keep changing.

All the books we've read so far have had the theme of connection. In the books we read before Cryptonomicon, the book connects little stories into one cohesive connected network of people whose lives influence each other. Cyrptonomicon has this aspect too. However, Cyrptonomicon focuses a lot on information and Avi and Randy's entire venture in Southeast Asia is to connect civilizations together. The book is about connecting people together and enabling them to pass information to each other in a variety of ways. On page 327, Goto Dengo is being gunned down by American soldiers while in the ocean which is on fire due to an oil spill. He thinks to himself as he is underwater, as a bullet flies in and slows to a stop quickly in the water.

I love Tom's story (359-365) about his fetish for black stockings. I thought the whole thing was hilarious especially the ending when he realizes that she has one too, even if she may not realize what her own fetish is. I started to think about why this story was particularly important to the novel, as in why did the author include this story? It sort of reminded me of Infinite Jest, in that everyone has their own addiction, whether it's tennis, or drugs, or alcoholics anonymous. Later in this section Enoch Root talks to Shaftoe about his connection with morphine. See the first paragraph on page 374. The whole thing is great. Here's a little bit:

As I get deeper into Cryptonomicon, Bobby Shaftoe seems to remind me a lot of Hal Incandenza. Beyond his moments with Glory (which he promptly sets out to forget), Bobby has an automated robotic and detached quality about him. Beginning with the lizard incident, he feels unable to communicate with others except in his military protocol which Stephenson essentially boils down to a sterile enabler for the less pleasant side of soldiery i.e. killing other people. As we see on page 203 Bobby misses the "good old days, back on Guadalcanal" where he was "a free agent" able to accomplish his orders by all means necessary, but now he just takes exact orders with absolutely no freedom.

I thought the scene on the grounded ship, when people like Bobby Shaftoe and Root are trying to figure out if Monkberg is a German spy, was hilarious. I loved how they were all trying to use logic to determine whether or not to destroy the code books:

"'Has anyone ever died,' he [Root] says, 'because the enemy stole one of our secret codes and read our messages?'
'Absolutely,' Shaftoe says.
'Has anyone on our side ever died,' Root continues, 'because the enemy *didn't* have one of our secret codes?'
This is quite a poser" (276).

I thought it was really interesting that they were trying to use all this logic to convict Monkberg of being a spy instead of actual evidence (although they do use some of that, like his self-inflicted leg injury). The logic they were using seemed sort of backwards to me, although I am definitely not a logic/math person.

On page 218, Tom is showing Randy some old Japanese air-raid shelter in a cave in Manila and they have the following conversation.

Randy sits down on the floor and grabs his ankles. He's staring open-mouthed at the books in the chest.
"You okay?" Tom asks.
"Heavy, heavy deja vu," Randy says.
"From this?"
"Yeah," Randy says, "I've seen this before."
"Where?"
"In my grandmother's attic."

I guess I was confused as to whether his relating the pile of books to his grandmother is a general statement, in the way that old people tend to have piles of useless stuff lying around or whether there was another meaning that I didn't get.