Penny Loaves

can we get it together?

2006-03-21T20:38:00.000-05:00

always running, always returning

send me a message if you're interested.

untitled

2005-02-15T07:54:00.000-05:00

I remember when Dance Dance Revolution first hit the market. People really thought we were going to enter a new era of dance dancing. We really thought we could revolutionize things.

We were wrong, of course. In the end we were burdened with the same crappy dance dancing as before. As if the Dance Dance Revolution had never happened. As if nothing had changed in the world of dance dance.

I cry about it sometimes.

louder, louder

2005-02-10T21:55:00.000-05:00

That Friday afternoon I fell asleep to the sound of rain, soaking the ground, melting the snow.

I dreamed. Stumbling alone across bloodsoaked trails, through the first snows of winter, through the dying gasps of autumn, of friendship, of love, I dreamed. Haunted? Perhaps, though these three years it's often felt more as though I've returned to that barren, forsaken plain than it to me. To the tired, lonely, the despairing of spring, that bleak sky calls: to rest, to death. Dying, sleeping, I dreamed.

I awake on a bed of marble, on cliffs of ivory, above shining seas of glass.

I am alone.

------
look, contribution!

by the way, if you've only heard of Jorge Luis Borges in context of a high-school "spanish culture" lesson, you really check him out. it's well worth your while, i promise -- especially if the measure of "your while" can be taken from the five minutes you just spent reading this brainshit.

"modern"

2005-02-07T23:45:00.000-05:00

The new MoMA has amazing architecture. Each corner has a blue-tinted floor-to-ceiling window that allows one to see everything from a top-down view of people on the street to the tops of the adjoining 53rd/54th St. skyscrapers and beyond into the New York skyline. The rooms project infinite space in each direction around the frames of the paintings hung on them, in a very un-Japanese filling of space (though the white-rules-all aesthetic is resolutely Eastern minimalist). Each floor past the second has a catwalk from which there is an overlook onto the second floor lobby, onto a broken obelisk and a beautiful three-panel Monet scene. Above is a cutaway look at people going down the stairs, a dynamic artwork in and of itself. In the other direction is the immaculate sculpture garden, visible from a number of vantage points around the museum. It's all very sleek and subtly brilliant.

They still have trouble with the word 'modern,' though. For the love of god, give 'Starry Night' to another museum already.

A gaping hole

2005-02-02T20:47:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that the English language does not seem to have an adjective describing a person who has to go to the bathroom.

the great black hope

2005-01-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

By far, the best politician--no, statesman--this country currently has and has had in a while, Democrat or Republican. May God bless Barack Obama.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama

Three Rivers Press © 2004 by Barack Obama
ISBN: 1-4000-8277-3 Available for purchase at Amazon.com

Excerpt

Preface to the 2004 Edition

Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review . In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.

Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book's publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.

I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.

A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review . Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.

Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher's interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book's re-publication. For the first time in many years, I've pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine -- that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research.

What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela -- in slow, sturdy steps -- emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates -- around guns and abortion and rap lyrics -- seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton's Third Way, a scaled-back welfare state without grand ambition but without sharp edges, seemed to describe a broad, underlying consensus on bread-and-butter issues, a consensus to which even George W. Bush's first campaign, with its "compassionate conservatism," would have to give a nod.
Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share.

And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.

It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow -- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

What I do know is that history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried -- it isn't even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life -- the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us -- is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.

The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees -- a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate.

The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published.

She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world's economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.
We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

Excerpt totally illegal; the image with the quote used a photo from Mariya's Xanga.

college essay? fuck no!

2004-12-29T19:43:00.000-05:00

the following isn't going to any colleges. i just thought i'd write a georgetownesque college essay.

You can see pictures of it on the news right now, the destruction along the coastlines of India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, drowned bodies have hidden themselves amidst the rubble, thrown back ashore by the tsunami that had pulled them into the ocean. Bulldozers shovel hundreds of unidentified corpses into massive graves and funeral pyres. Thousands of homeless children search desperately for food, shelter and their parents. This is only a small fraction of the images of this recent, natural brutality. As of this moment, the death toll is already climbing past 57,000, and it shows no signs of faltering.

I have relatives in Malaysia who were spared by the earthquake and ensuing tidal wave that shook the shorelines of Asia. Luckily, they were a safe distance away from the damage, in Korea, where they were spending their vacation. I was relieved to know that they never saw the macabre scene that was afflicting several nations. However, there are still victims in a relatively untouched country like Malaysia, where there are at least 65 people whose lives were taken away by this catastrophe. It makes me feel almost selfish to harbor favoritism for those to whom I am close, instead of showing compassion and lending a helping hand to all those who have been severely affected by this traumatizing event. There are those who would just read about this incident in their newspaper, feel a fleeting breath of pity for those who faced devastation and then forget about it after doing nothing else. There are even those who would brush this off as another episode of a succession of events where thousands of lives are lost. I realize that I am a culprit of such thoughts and inactions. It?s wrong to be so heartless.

The most sympathetic contributors to the earthquake and tsunami survivors are those who hold personal relations with these battered victims. However, worldly insight causes many to be concerned with such affairs where humanitarian aid is needed. I know now that I walk along liminal paths toward both dimensions. Having felt a foreboding sense of familial loss, I became aware of the hardships of human life in many parts of the world. Most of the world isn?t as pampered as I am. It is only right for them to have of chance to experience the kind of comfortable life that I have taken for granted.

I hope that these events are having a reverberating impact on people on this side of the globe, where many are often unaffected by the news of cataclysmic events occurring thousands of miles away. Many are doing what little they can to support the survivors who are doing just that--surviving. Along with those who have felt this wave of charity beat gently against their psyche, I am also providing alms to those who need it. As I kindle this newfound sense of altruism, I wish with optimism that the resounding echoes of this human tragedy never fade from memory, and that they will continue to pulsate as a symbol of beneficence in a time of great crisis.

Godspeed, Médecins Sans Frontières.

they forgot to mention the animated homosexual pornography

2004-12-28T13:09:00.000-05:00

with any hope, this will only be a festering, if not unstoppable, monster that will go away once it has had its fill.

and you know it's because girls in america want only to watch tall skinny boys make out with each other.

asia

2004-12-27T20:16:00.000-05:00

=(

It makes one feel very small to know that, despite all of our technological advances, we are still very much at the mercy of Nature's primal whims.

haiku redux

2004-12-26T01:17:00.000-05:00

clicky wicky

in case you haven't been paying attention

2004-12-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, 60 people were killed in Iraq and 120 more were wounded as a result of two separate car bombing attacks, one in Najaf and one in Karbala. Later that day, three election officials in Baghdad were dragged into the middle of a street and shot point-blank by unmasked gunmen.

There's also this.

eulogy

2004-12-20T21:02:00.000-05:00

Eventually my guilt for threadjacking Vlad's post outweighed my dislike of multiple newsposts, so I decided to delete my completely unrelated comment and post it below.

In other news, SuprNova.org is apparently "down for the count" according to Penny Arcade, a bit of information which is more immediately distressing although possibly less relevant in a big-picture sort of worldview -- which, incidentally, we in the United States frown upon when we are bothered to consider it.

I haven't been able to find any reports confirming Penny Arcade's analysis, but here's a copy of Retspan's (a French antipiracy organization) initial press release about the then-impending lawsuit, and what SuprNova admin Sloncek had to say about it at the time.

SuprNova.org, for those of you who didn't know, was a sort of clearinghouse for BitTorrent trackers of pirated movies, applications, and music. I hear it also had a few legitimate uses, though I have no first-hand experience with those.

Just thought I'd compress the news threads into as few posts as possible. [Edit: Obviously, didn't work out.] Go read some of Nathan's imitation Japanese poetry, the rest of you. Incidentally, some thoughts on the appropriate English translation of the Japanese form. I remember reading a much better analysis of the same subject a few weeks ago, but Google isn't giving me anything.

God, I just finished downloading two files using SuprNova trackers today. I can't help but imagine that this is what it feels like to have a conversation with a friend not suspecting in the least that just the next hour he will temporarily inhabit the same strip of pavement as an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

whee! helicopters!

2004-12-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4109423.stm

haiku

2004-12-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

i tell you my dreams
in case you hear one and say,
i dreamt you were there

lech...not that it has to do with anything.

2004-12-15T20:12:00.000-05:00

what is it we improve ourselves for?

i've been thinking about it, and i think college is just a way to make things easier for people later in their lives.

from the blogger that brought you anger comes more anger

2004-12-14T19:14:00.000-05:00

The higher education system in America is a load of fucking bullshit, and should be entirely discarded in favour of burning every single person involved in perpetrating it. On the stake.

No, I didn't get rejected- I haven't even applied yet.

EDIT: So apparently, or so I'm told, he was offered admission despite not applying, and didn't take it because he doesn't want to go. Instead, he wants to go to my first choice school.

ugh

2004-12-13T23:23:00.000-05:00

Is there anything that encapsulates the state of America better than this idea: that men have emotion and reaction bred out of them, encouraged to respond with a Hemingwayian stoicism to every event that comes their way (or be branded "prissy pussy gays"), and are then put to death for not being emotional enough when their wife disappears?

Unbelievable.

In other news, I dominated the Dr. Mayers's room Rock-Paper-Scissors scene today with an insanely powerful strategy: R-R-R-S. Try it out sometime. It's damn near infallible.

parables

2004-12-13T01:01:00.000-05:00

"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things." --Zuangzi, by Chaung Chou.

In the Lotus Sutra there's a story of a wealthy man whose son is in his burning house. He tells the child to come out, but the child has no conception of a burning house, and so he stays inside. The man calls out and promises new toys and treats, luring the child out. The father lied, but it was the only way to get his kid out of the burning house. Promise us eternal life, promise us an end to suffering--maybe it has to be done in order to get us out. Our stuff is burning. Our children are burning. Our selves are always, always, burning.

There's a Hindu parable about a man who dreamed that he married a beautiful woman, and in the dream he experiences sixty years of their marriage--imagine his surprise when he wakes up to find that only a few minutes have passed. Yet somehow, later on, he comes across the children he fathered in the dream. I wish I knew more about this story.

Excuse me, guys

2004-12-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone, it's good to be part of the family. I'll post some artwork from time to time, but mostly I'm here to screw up the serv--webmaster the site.

So... Ben expressed interest in getting rid of the lime green stuff, but I'd like input from everyone on how I'll mess with the code. Do you guys want major changes? Keep the same layout but change the colors? No change at all, shut up go away? Since Blogger was redesigned by Stopdesign it uses clean, standard code, and I can pretty much make any edits imaginable. If you want it to use a different Blogger template, just let me know which one. My favorites are the ones by Mr. Bowman. Remember, it wont have to look exactly like it, I'll make magic happen if requested.

Anyhoo, this place is full of sexy people, so I'll stop sullying it's pages with my plebeian dialect.

light study

2004-12-11T20:49:00.000-05:00

ein stumpfer schatten

umgebungslicht

sie marschieren

i can't become another casualty. i can't, i can't, i can't.

choices

2004-12-10T01:37:00.000-05:00

escape to nowhere

gray skies are a perpetual sight.

fortitude

2004-12-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

clicky again

this is more or less what an asian city looks like. with the exception of singapore and shanghai. those places are just weird. way too spacious.

the rest of the entry is down here, guys.

he smiles at me and mumbles, "you should go study," whenever i offer to put up the christmas lights for him. he's my landlord, and he mumbles because he has parkinson's disease. but he wakes up early every morning to check up on the grapes he ferments in the shed in his backyard, and every november, picks out the giant vegetables in the garden he planted during the spring months. he grumbles whenever i offer to help him walk to his garage. he's not as fast as he used to be, but he knows he can make it on his own. even if he needs a cane.

fabulous muscles

2004-12-06T20:46:00.000-05:00

clicky

some of you may have seen this photo. i'm going to post a few more. just because i feel like it. korea's full of busy power lines. they're everywhere.

clicky again

and again

it was all bullshit anyway

hearing from princeton in about a week

2004-12-06T13:54:00.000-05:00

On sunny days, the space is naturally lit by rays from a hidden skylight softened by the plastic covering and the bluish texture of the walls, and a screen-covered window which lends its own gentle glow. Even the tiled floors and walls reflect the muted sunlight, slipping into shadow near the entrance. At the end of the corridor-shaped room, illumated by the ambient light, for all the world like some holy grail awaiting a battered traveler, anticlimatically, incredibly, is a sky-blue porcelain toilet seat of no distinctive make.

This is one of the rooms in my house.

I'll leave the allegorical nuances to more literary minds.

sideways

2004-12-04T21:21:00.000-05:00

One of the perks of having a driver's license is that I can see a movie whenever I want and not get the why-must-i-be-your-chauffeur spiel from my parents. One of the perks of living in Tenafly is that whoever owns the local theatre has excellent taste in films.

I wonder if it's a bad sign if I watch the character Paul Giamatti tends to always play and think, "Jesus, that's me right there."

so i was wondering

2004-12-02T21:58:00.000-05:00

Where do you guys want to take this blog?

Personally, I'd like to make it as multidimensional as possible; I picture a mix of partisan political trash-talk, overly detailed "day in my life" accounts, weird literary experiments and maybe a photograph or two if we could dig them up, and it makes me smile.

Also, I wonder if there are any more invitations that should go out? Eric, could you ask Shannon if she got the email?

This is the sort of thing I'd post privately if only I could figure out how and meanwhile make those stupid "1 comment------>s<------" tags* go away. Argh.

*I'd just like to clarify, the thing that triggers the OCD is the "s" in the word. It may perhaps have been slightly unclear and I wanted to make sure. Again, it's the "s" I'd like removed. Not from all the comments, you understand. Just the ones with-

I wonder if they have medications for this sort of thing.
-----

Oh, one more thing on my wish-list in case any of you have a penchant for webmastering and blogspot allows it: I think it'd be cool if you could edit your signature for a post. So, like, instead of that 10:15 nonsense that it says down here right now, I could write something like "icewolf34 shooby-dooby-doo shooby-dooby doos at 10:15PM. Or maybe it's a good thing that I can't do that after all.

how'd they do that?

2004-12-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

Sorry I'm adding to the glut of political posts on this blog...

"The closest black woman to most of the liberals accusing Rice of being
incompetent is the maid they periodically accuse of stealing from the liquor
cabinet. " --Ann Coulter's 12.01.04 column

What the...? Did you just see that crazy jujitsu? How the hell is it that they've managed to paint us as the Upper East Side bourgeois pigs? We're the Chardonnay-sipping country club bastards? I feel like something just whizzed by me at Mach 2 and I'm whipping my head to the side. Remember when we were the part of the political spectrum that was jivin' with the labor unions, the farmers, and the inner city folks? It really wasn't so long ago--how the hell have they managed to paint us as them so quickly?

2004-12-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

fair and balanced

2004-12-01T10:51:00.000-05:00

So last night at around 11:30 I was getting some tea when I saw FOX News on the handy-dandy IO Digital Cable-enabled TV we now have in the living room. O'Reilly was on. I don't really watch him (or any of FOX news, for that matter, seeing as they're pretty much anathema to any liberal), but I decided to check it out. I mean, it can't hurt to figure out how the other side operates, right? What arguments do FOX News marshal to make their constituency think the way they do? It's an interesting thing to find out. So I sat down to see what Dirty Bill O. was up to.

A half-hour later, I still had no clue, and now I'm even more confused about just what the hell is going on. What I sat down to watch was an interview where they discussed the choices in clothing of Bush and Kerry during the campaign. The Presidential campaign. You know, the one that ended a month ago?

The weirdest thing was that they were discussing the differing choices, and they were using images from the 'town hall' debate, and Bush and Kerry were wearing the same suit! Same colour! Same cut! What- the- fuck?

Here's what I'm talking about-
INTERVIEWEE: President Bush's choice of the two-button suit is wise for his figure, tall, and the dark blue colour complements very well. It's very authoritative [ . . . ] I also thought Kerry looked very sharp in the debates.
O'REILLY: What images did Kerry's attire during the debates present?
INTERVIEWEE: Well, the way I think of Kerry's clothing image is, it's very Ivy League... it's very Harvard greens... but it's also very snappy and sharp. Looking at the debate suit, you can see him, two-button suit, in a dark blue.
O'REILLY: Did you think that his image was less authoritative than President Bush's?
INTERVIEWEE: No, I would say that it was also authoritative.

No shit, Sherlock!

They didn't like Kerry's makeup, though. "Orange is not a good colour for a Presidential candidate."

Later, O'Reilly did an e-mail answer section. This is where he shines, I guess (I don't count telling the people you're interviewing to "shut up" as a shining moment, honestly). He projects the sort of integrity that, regardless of what is coming out of his mouth, even I have to respect, and I can only imagine the kind of credibility gained among people who already agree with him. He manages to answer attacks with a good degree of humility. Example: Tom from Virginia e-mails him saying "Bill, hate to say this but Tom Brokaw will be remembered long after you are a distant memory." BR says: "You're probably right, Tom, but I don't think you hated to tell me that." And smiles. Brilliant.

Apparently he made a big to-do on the show about that school in the middle of nowhere with the cross-dressing day, which is just stupid. Not to mention a stupid move by the mother who started the whole fiasco in the first place. You want to "clean up" America's schools? I've got an idea: how about giving some thought to the drug trade that uses them as a primary source of income?

So that was O'Reilly. Nice e-mail answers, weirdly off-point discussions about clothes (!?), and a great closing line:

"And don't forget to go to our website and vote in our poll- 'Is Canada a friend of the United States?'"

am i being tactless?

2004-11-29T19:05:00.000-05:00

there are quite a few hispanic immigrants who can speak korean as well as i can. i guess it's because they all work at korean restaurants, hair salons, and manicure parlors. it's interesting how no koreans seem to bother learning spanish at all, even if ninety percent of the workforce they employ happens to consist of spanish-speaking individuals. i guess one wouldn't need to care if they depend on the money he or she gives after a long day of wiping tables, cleaning floors and throwing out the garbage. they're like those slave robots in the animatrix. one day they'll all start a revolt or something.

has it ever occured to you

2004-11-27T20:31:00.000-05:00

that "What say you?" is only one word-swap away from "What you say?" One easy step from Aragorn Elessar* to Sihyung Lee.

*I didn't know about the "Elessar" part either, but this helpful website was more than happy to enlighten me. No asking about how I found it.

somewhere between iraq and michael jackson on the scale of importance

2004-11-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

A bit of trivia, and then a question for you guys.

While valiantly avoiding anything vaguely resembling a college application today, I found a few rather useless websites discussing the origin of the popular children's rhyme "Pop goes the Weasel." The consensus seems to be that the rhyme is broadly about the ruinous practice of pawning one's belongings ("two to one you won't get your stuff back" was apparently the pawnbroker's motto -- perhaps not the optimal corporate slogan), and more specifically about a poor bastard who's drank too much (the "Eagle" in the rhyme is apparently the name of a London tavern) and has to pawn his tools (the "weasel") to pay his tab. "Popping," by the way, is slang for pawning, vernacular which seems to have survived in certain parts of England to this day.

Which calls to mind the colossal credit-card debt of the average American, as well as our staggering amount of debt as a nation, but I really didn't mean to start this line of debate.

Anyways, I was going to ask if any of you happened to know if there's any connection between the children's song "London Bridge is falling down" and GK Chesterton's "The Old Song" -- from which, incidentally, I derived the title of this blog.

By the way, "Pop Goes the Weasel" goes like this, in case you missed out on this completely unnecessary part of your childhood.

and his buttons were made of penny loaves

2004-11-26T16:35:00.000-05:00

there's a bit too much thought in most of these posts.

Question. Answer.

2004-11-26T13:53:00.000-05:00

children live what they see and what they're taught. if you grow up around war and that's all you see, that's what you'll do, because that is what is done. older children can follow other paths, but small children don't know there are other ways of living yet. they merely do what their elders do. rather than sanctimoniously bemoaning the fact that, simply, iraqi children are inured to what they grew up in (just as kids who grow up in the projects play with needles), focus on how to change what they grow up in. maybe the next generation -even this generation's younger half- will be lucky enough to grow up around something else. then you'll see different toys.

the little soldiers

2004-11-26T08:27:00.000-05:00

NPR's Ann Garrels (Naked in Baghdad) had a story on today's Morning Edition about the popularity of toy machine guns among children in Iraq (scroll down until you see it). Toy stores in Baghdad are doing brisk business with plastic AK-47s and submachine guns--the more realistic, the more popular. In the piece, an American soldier marvelled at the detail of the detachable magazines, the butts, and the trigger mechanisms.

The danger is obvious given how jittery GIs are in a battlefield environment where the enemy is indistinguishable from the civilian, and so American troops more and more find themselves confiscating caches of real and toy weapons. Yet parents don't seem to care that their children play with toys that could get them killed, and in fact buy the toys for them.

Some have mused that insurgents are distributing the weapons in order to have images of a dead Iraqi five-year-old, killed by American bullets, show up on al-Arabia or CNN. As far as I can tell, there's no proof of this, but it has the trappings of yet another brilliant PR strategy on the part of the insurgents--something that, if successful, would mean one more obstacle towards elections in January.

But putting the politics aside, there's something more interesting in this story. Why would a society that has known nothing but violence for the past generation--from the Iran-Iraq war to the regime of Saddam, to the current quagmire--become so enamored with the icons of their suffering? Why would Iraqi children, some of whom have probably seen more violence than any American kid watching FCC-regulated television, not be scarred by even the sight of a toy AK-47? Maybe it's simply that universal urge in all young boys to want to be warriors--even I, a rabid pacficist, played soldier when I was younger. Children don't quite fully grasp war, perhaps even when it's right in front of them, because they don't quite fully grasp mortality.

On this day, the outset of the holiday shopping season, I propose an American-Iraqi toy exchange program . Iraqi children would mail their toy guns to American children, and in exchange American children would send over their Gameboys, their board games, their stuffed animals, their soccer balls. We have plenty of peace over here, and over there they don't have enough. Top that, Santa.

I mean, I can understand the menacing lasers, but...

2004-11-26T00:08:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder why evildoers are always hellbent on establishing some colossal Orwellian database indexing all known information about your person from your credit card number to your preferred brand of toothpaste?

I suspect it has less to do with world domination than it does with moments like these, when I'm desperately and obsessively endeavoring to discover the link between an Academy student living in Ridgefield Park and a multiuser Paramus High School blog. It's a bit like having a splinter in the brain, at least in some unknown dialect of English in which "splinter" denotes a small nuclear device.

This, in case that wasn't clear enough, is driving. me. insane.

the thing about political blogs

2004-11-25T16:20:00.000-05:00

is that nearly all of them think that they are far more important than they actually are.

also, hi

2004-11-24T21:09:00.000-05:00

I've been spending a bit of time recently exploring the online blogging community. I realize these aren't exactly the New Kids on the Block - when FOXNews is already blaming them for the nation's woes, you can be pretty sure that, aside from probably being completely faultless, they're also around to stay.

I was first introduced to this phenomenon while googling, of all things, a quote from Spiderman. Something about great responsibility coming along with the ability to climb walls with only the aid of augmented hair follicles, or something. For the priviledge of accidentally discharging gooey webs from his wrists to snag lunch trays and the like, Peter has to stop the neighborhood kids from playing in traffic, thereby losing his job and his girlfriend and halting the progress of natural selection in one fell swoop. Sweet deal.

Anyways, I discovered what can only be described as an Objectivist analysis of the superhero archetype in American graphic novels, which was fascinating to say the least and a definite appeal to my geek-ego to go a bit further. Turns out I've stumbled across some sort of libertarian pro-free-market blogring, which proceeded to eat the rest of my productivity during my internship today.

Also, the author of the first blog I found not only refers to himself as Unqualified Offerings (the name of the blog) but also calls his wife Mrs. Offerings. Mrs. Offerings! If that's not fucking legitimacy, I don't know what is.

hello, world

2004-11-24T18:40:00.000-05:00

Content coming soon, I promise. We promise, hopefully.