benazir bhutto

i'm about to slip into perilously "serious talk" right now, but i've been having a hard time shaking the assassination of bhutto this past week. i'm terrified to see what happens to pakistan in the next weeks/months/years without her. she wasn't perfect and she wasn't even good (in the moral definition of the word), but does pakistan have a chance without her?
but it's not even fear of the country's future that gets me the most. it's the loss of a truly brave woman. her "extraordinary degree of physical courage" was remarkable, and not just "for a woman." it's the kind of exceptional courage that is rare and that made her so powerful. it's also a quality not enough women leaders possess, and now that she's dead because of it, who knows how long it will be until we see another.
i think what i'm feeling right now can most accurately be described as despair, but i'm sure it will pass as soon as next depressing news item happens. sigh.

christmas joy

shopping isn't horrible. it's the parking that is. here is a perfect example of why parking this time of year sucks:



this is a diagram of the target parking lot. the man shown is a chubby waddler who was carrying an overstuffed dunhams bag back to what i was assuming was his car. i did my little SUV stalking move and followed him from basically the target exit, across two lanes of traffic, then almost to the end of the lane--where he then CUT ACROSS THE LANE, presumably looking for his car.

why was this SO annoying? if you notice the drawing, you'll see that he was walking in the lane farthest to the side. don't you think if you parked your car in that particular lane, you'd remember? i mean, the guy walked all the way from dunhams, to the last lane, only to double back looking for god knows what.
adding to the irritation was his slow and laborious pace. plus he kept on doing this thing where he was pulling up his pants, but also making it look like he was walking toward a particular car. WRONG EVERY TIME.

i wanted to ram him with my car, but channeling the christmas spirit, i just moved on. more reports of holiday shenanigans to come.

dc public transit loves color-coded emoticons

New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet U metro stop was super cute the other week.

this is beyond pop/soda

you don't need to move to a different country to experience culture shock. all you have to do is move away from michigan. this chain email did a lot of the work for me (#5 is one of my faves), but here are two more michigan revelations that have recently blown my mind.

1. did you know there's no such thing as devil's and angel's night outside of detroit? my whole life i truly believed october 30th was synonymous with arson (in the city) and petty vandalism (in the suburbs). imagine my surprise when i found out NO ONE ELSE DOES THIS. no one brings in their pumpkins before sundown on the 30th and no one fears getting the bejesus toilet papered out of their front lawn. also, no one else celebrates only 62 reported fires in one night.

2. only michiganders eat pączki on fat tuesday. have you lived anywhere else where there were so many polish people around? maybe chicago, but down south (dc), the only fried dough we eat are dunkin donuts and krispy kreme. most people couldn't even tell you what a "poonchky" was.

i clearly am not as cultured as i thought i was.

we're famous?

usnews makes it on fishbowl dc, and my blog is frighteningly google-able.

utility is king

is it wrong that i genuinely think this is a great idea? asians are so smart sometimes.



the caption on the bottom: "make your children work for their keep"

holiday party extravaganza

jesse's and my work holiday parties were back-to-back this week, and we brought each other as guests, usually introduced as "hi, this is my roommate (not gf/bf) ali/jesse."
some differences in how a stodgy news magazine and the RIAA operate, at least on the holiday party level.

location
usnews: tony and joe's, a nice georgetown waterfront restaurant. all 150 of us had the place to ourselves.
RIAA: ibiza, a "high-energy hotspot" with two separate rooms, a 2nd level balcony and, a rooftop patio that fit the lobbying group and all its 1,000 or so closest friends like the MPAA, soundexchange and etc. this place occasionally hosts foam parties.

food
usnews: very solid and tasty, maybe 10 choices or so. great carrot cake.
RIAA: about 20 different choices, every genre imaginable, and a chocolate fountain. but their shrimp wasn't as big.

booze
usnews: free wine and beer from 6-9.
RIAA: free everything from 5-10. top shelf mixed drinks and jaeger bombs included.

dress
usnews: slacks and a button down for men, black dresses for women.
RIAA: slutty.

typical conversation
usnews: "it just distresses me that the bush administration insists on promoting manned flight. i mean, deep space and dark energy is where it's at."
RIAA: "dude, his wife just had a baby and she is smoking. my wife better be that hot after popping one out."

entertainment
usnews: big cam and the lifters, a cover band featuring a former usnews copy editor as their keyboardist
RIAA: wyclef jean. for real.

visual proof
usnews:


RIAA:



good times.

my continuing education

through the work DL, i found out about MIT and yale's free courses online. my current goal is to take advantage of this soon. we'll see how motivated i am.

kiefer sutherland loves the writers strike

jack bauer has gotten another (his 3rd) DUI, and probably can't work from jail for 48 days. but luckily for him, this writer's strike delays any sort of prospect for new TV or shooting episodes.

i am pretty despondent about the strike. even if they agree on something tomorrow (which is impossible since talks have collapsed once again), it's not as if new episods will start popping out right away. i could watch reality tv, but i'd rather (gasp) read a book. if i wasn't horribly busy, i'd cry myself to sleep right now.

there's a chance i may end up happy

turns out that us man-hating feminists can in fact be happy in relationships. is this a load of crap? i suspect that if you are a man-hater, your ultimate relationship would be relatively stable—you've already weeded out the worthless types that can't handle it.
i guess the trouble is finding someone who can put up with you in the first place.

punching boy scouts

using a sawed-off shot gun, three robbers stole $350 bucks from boy scouts and their dad while they were selling christmas trees. already, that's so wrong, but on top of that, one of the exhibits of "human waste" punched a 13yo in the face.

i'm sorry, but there have got to be better people to rob than boy scouts, even if they do hate gays.

michigan vs florida

michigan and florida are stripped of their democratic national convention delegates for next year.

michigan and florida are playing in the capital one bowl this year.

are the two connected? which one is worse? at this rate, michigan is going to start being as crappy of a state as florida. it might even get its own category in fark, heaven forbid.

we should all be like amsterdam

when it comes to the drug problem, maybe that's what i'd do if i could start this country over from scratch. plus we'd all ride bikes like crazy people.

rolling stone has a very good story about how we lost the war on drugs. i like it because it reaffirms everything i kind of already thought, but had a really hard time articulating. instead, i regurgitate:

As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade - if it was possible to separate the two - perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

and if slate's jack shafer likes it, so do i.

sic semper tyrannis

i took latin, so i think it's about time i ran for president.
all joking (har har) aside, this is true:

Because Latin is a dead language, not in a constant state of flux as living languages are, there’s no wriggle room in translating. If you haven’t understood exactly what a particular word means or how a grammatical rule works, you are likely to be, not off, but just plain wrong. There’s nothing like this challenge to teach you how to navigate the reefs and whirlpools of English prose.

considering this is the current most e-mailed story, there must be a lot of latin students out there. should be a good presidential fight.

when teddy bears attack

you know the incredible story about the english teacher in sudan who was imprisoned because she named a teddy bear "muhammad?"

i have theory on the real reason for the uproar: it was sudan's war on drugs.

facebook sucks

i don't even care about the advertising and how it's quickly turning evil. rather, it's been taking forever to load, if it loads at all. did fbook piss off some hacker who is now messing w/ the system? for some reason, it's what i'm assuming.

still sick. almost too sick to blog.

almost.