The Administration and the Fury

One of the funniest things I've ever read.

Warning to my conservative friends: this is intensely satirical with a pro-left bias...

If William Faulkner were writing on the Bush White House.

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Thailand update

I received the official offer from TASC. They increased their offer to 400 USD per month, which is a more acceptable amount for a stipend, but still very low when you consider car and debt payment obligations.

The will also provide the plane ticket, transportation costs (train and taxi fares), health insurance, lodging, a cell phone, phone calls to the US via VOIP, and some international travel to (most likely) Bangladesh and/or Vietnam.

My flight leaves on March 8th; I'd fly out of BR on March 6th for North Carolina to visit family. For those of you (like myself) that are temporally challenged, that is one week from Sunday.

I wrote back that I would accept their offer, but that I will require mo' money if this extends beyond 6 months. Assuming the accept that caveat, the deal is done.

It would be tight working in Bangkok and making those monthly payments while earning only 400/month. I will have to borrow money; so, I turned to my parents. I talked to them for about 30 mins this morning, and they have agreed to help. I don't ask them for much, so they were willing to help when I asked this time. They will assume my car payments for 6 months. That leaves me just having to handle CC debt and insurance, which is very doable.

I can't thank them enough, their help is what will make this trip possible for me. I just hope it's the last time I have to borrow money for a long time... I'm ready to start making some again.

So, let me take a moment to say that leaving Baton Rouge like this is both exciting and sad. I've come to love and depend upon my family and friends here, and leaving is not easy. But, at the same time, this is a very exciting opportunity that will let me travel and do some good in the world. When we were in high school, we all use to dream of actually helping the world in some way. Save the whales, stop the nukes, feed the hungry, yada yada yada. At least I think we all did, I know I did. And then we grow up and mostly just do whatever we stumble into as a career, earning income to buy stuff, get married, live the American dream. Well, in some ways, surrounded by people I enjoy, I've come to appreciate that life, and it is hard to give it up. But on the other hand, I now have the opportunity to actually live that highschool dream... and experience other cultures while I'm at it. It's what I am meant for; it's the right choice. But I will greatly miss everyone here while I'm doing it.

Thupt

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Which Prince are you?

You scored as Around The World In A Day Prince. You're the Around The World In A Day Prince. I think you may need to see a shrink. Obviously not skilled in fashion, but you are creative and innovative. Which Prince ERA are you? created with QuizFarm.com

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Flustered

Just got off the phone with Mike and Ross, of Thailand fame. The good news: they want me over there, and they are planning on the possibility of me joining them full time (in a professional capacity). The bad news: they offered a stipend 25% less than what I estimated. The good news: that amount could increase in their final offer, to arrive via email within 2 days time.

I'm am both excited and tremendously disappointed. If I don't get more money, I won't be able to afford my car payments. I may not be able to go at all. Selling the car is an option... but it will only reduce the debt, not eliminate it. Here's praying they significantly increase their offer.

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Monty Python & Finding Humor in the Absurd

Last night I introduced my niece and nephew to Monty Python. I don't actually have any of the movies, but I do own four old cassettes of their skits. When I was young I use to listen to these (with many of you) , have them all memorized, and just crack up. It was "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" all over again last night as I was playing some of the old skits for them. I just kept cracking up. And now, as I think about it, I realize how totally absurd the Python humor is, and how my youthful Python indoctrination has influenced my adult sense of humor.

In "Spam", this lady at a cafeteria is listing menu choices to a customer, and they all have Spam in them. As she lists all the Spam on the menu, a group of Vikings behind her starts chanting "Spam spam spam spam!" and then breaks into song. Meanwhile the cafeteria lady is screaming "shut up! shut up! stupid vikings!"

It's just so surreal, but it cracks me up everytime I hear it. And I realize that I love that kind of surreal, slapstick humor, and don't particularly go in for the Jim Carey/Farelly brothers style of physical comedy, which is more about laughing at individuals than about laughing at the absurdity of life. I find so much of the Carey/Farelly brothers stuff distateful and cruel... even though both styles of comedy feature animal cruelty and extreme characters. That's probably why I like "Noises Off" so much... the humor comes in how people handle a crazy situation, rather than making the people crazy themselves. Well, maybe just a little bit :)

Thupt.

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The AARP is EVIL!!!! (Bill O'Reilly says so!)

A transcript of his blistering expose: http://www.unitedseniors.org/full_story.cfm?article_id=100&category_id=5

O'Reilly presents such incontrovertible evidence of the AARP's coercive liberal agenda as:

"Guess who’s on the cover of the latest magazine. Our pal Richard Gere."

I f'ing hate Richard Gere, that gerbil loving hippy.

The Times' take:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/politics/21social.html?pagewanted=all

And the homepage of USA Next:
http://www.unitedseniors.org/

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Monday update

So, Toni and I saw Constatine over the weekend. We all liked it... may post a real review a bit later, but probably not. Rottentomatoes has it just below 50%... even Ebert didn't like it, and he's a sucker for a Hollywood action movie. I think there's a cynicism and unforgiving attituded towards Keanu Reeves these days... he has to make a really exceptional movie for people to give it a good review. So many of the articles from Rottentomatoes complained about either Reeve's acting, the bitterness of his character and how unlikeable he is, or about the plot being either too simple or too full of holes.

I don't know, I'm usually pretty critical when it comes to movies, but I really liked it. It was fun, well paced, Keanu did fine and his character was a hoot. I mean, he flips off the devil, of all things! Besides, you are entitled to be bitter if you know you are going to hell in a few months.

The weekend was a good one... from a geek point of view, that is. Got some magic cards, leveled an everquest character up (without spending all my time doing it), won a few games at Halo2, got out and did some yard work, studied some statistics for a few hours (practice constructing ANOVA models, oh joy!)... the biggest news, though, is that I received another email from Mike, the guy in Thailand who is considering me for an internship. Looks like that is going to happen, assuming "we can work out the details" (Mike's words). He also wants me to "start thinking about when is the earliest [I] can come." Hmmm... immediately?

So now we start another week. Hopefully it will be a good one,. for me and my sister, who is also hoping to hear some good job news. Keeping my toes crossed...

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Feeds Added

Added site feeds, both RSS and Atomic. If you use Firefox, you can simply click on the little feed button located in the bottom right of your browser window to add feeds from this website to your Bookmarks. It's pretty cool, really.

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Tsunami videos...

These are emotionally devasting to watch...

http://roel.net/movies/tsunami/

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Bill O'Reilly on Fresh Air

This is both interesting and frustrating to listen to. It's an interview with Bill O'Reilly by Terry Gross. Terry asks him some really tough questions - asking him about statements he's made in the past - and Bill spends most of the time on the defensive. The guy is so full of it. Pick just about any topic they discuss and do a modicrum of research and you'll find that he is dead wrong.

For example, in one segment he accuses the Times book reviewers of being biased because they always give glowing reviews to left-wing partisans and never even review his books. As an example, he cites Janet Maslin's review of Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? Terry interupts him and gives a quote from the review where Ms. Maslin writes that Dude, Where's My Country? is a bumper sticker that doubles as a book. Mr. O'Reilly retorts that overall it is a favorable review, that if you read the last paragraph you would know that (implying that Ms. Gross had not read the entire review).

Well, I did read the entire review. It's posted here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E1DD133CF935A35753C1A9659C8B63

Guess what? The review, while not devastating, is more negative than positive, and the quote that Terry Gross used was from the last paragraph:

"In 'How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law,' Mr. Moore has some specific hints. He recommends agreeing that men and women are different, that animals don't have rights, that granola is fattening and that a little sunlight is actually good for your health. 'We have a namby-pamby way of saying things,' he writes, along with 'a hoity-toity view of religion.' He asks readers to recognize that ''this arrogance is a big reason the lower classes will always side with the Republicans.'

Mr. Moore has marshaled all of his impassioned, populist bluster to effecting that change. That makes 'Dude, Where's My Country?' a bumper sticker that doubles as a book."

Throughout the review, Ms. Maslin paints Moore as a self-aggrandizing blow hard:

"In his latest book, Michael Moore reveals the identity of his favorite political candidate: someone who bracingly advocates 'a free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we need to fear.' Oh, wait a minute -- he's talking about himself."

But you don't even have to leave the interview to find refutation of his claims. Bill O'Reilly contradicts himself. Terry makes reference to a report in which Mr. O'Reilly falsely claimed to have won a Peabody. Mr. O'Reilly calls that completely fallacious, and the proceeds to explain that, in fact, he had actually said that he won a Peabody but that he mispoke and meant to say a Pope; he then said that he had corrected himself on his radio show numerous times. First of all: how can something be true (he claimed to have won an award which he did not) and fallacious? Secondly, it seems doubtful that this false claim would actually be a mistake - when is the last time you, or anyone, is honored with an award and then forgets which award was won?

Eventually Bill O'Reilly walks out of the interview. He's such a hypocrit... Terry Gross may have asked him tough questions, but she always let him give a complete response, without denigrating him. She let him say anything he wanted to, in full... which is far more than can be said for Bill O'Reilly, who has a habit of interupting, talking over, denigrating, and even censoring interviewees (by "ending the interview").

Give it a listen if you have some time.

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Oh, here's the problem.... you've got this thing set on evil!

You may remember a little movie franchise called "The Terminator", starring a semi-famous actor who is currently the governor of California. That movie was based upon the premise that humans had created a line of killer robots that they sent into battle to fight their wars. In Terminator 3, we see how these robots come to be controlled by a central artificial intelligence and then turn on their human creators. We also get to see, in that movie, the very first terminator model ever created, the appropriately named T1.

The T1: Science Fiction

It's not unusual for science fiction writers and scientist to come up with the same ideas. William Gibson imagined cyberspace, today we have the internet. Star Trek imagined teleportation, and today's scientists have used quantum mechanics to teleport energy waves, and thus, they say, matter. Video phones have long been a staple on space faring vessels of all kinds, and today we use them to conduct high profile business meetings, trainings, and even make life easier for the deaf. But battle bots? Is that feasible?

It probably would not suprise you that the prospect of sending a machine into battle instead of a live human has been a goal of the US Army for over 30 years. After all, machines are more obedient, never tire, and drastically cheaper to own and operate that a real person. But did you know that a large chunk of the funding that is being requested for remaking the Army this year is actually going towards a research project for developing robotic soldiers? Would it suprise you that the largest military contract ever awarded by the US government, 127 billion dollars, is going not for missle defense but towards this robotic force? Would it suprise you that these contractors are saying that we could have "a robot that looks, thinks and fights like a soldier" by 2035? No? How about this: the first machine-gun toting, programmed to kill robot will enter active duty, not in 30 years, but in April. Of this year.


SWORDS: Science Fact

With gun-toting killer robots roaming earth, book me on the first shuttle to Mars, please.

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Review: Hide and Seek

Rober Deniro lends heft to any movie that he is in. Dakota Fanning, who many admire for her work in Taken, but who I had never seen before, plays her role well. But she's not given a great deal to do for the first 80% of the movie. She pretty much spends her time not talking to people, staring straight ahead with those big eyes in an onimous, creepy way; and generally just acting as a point of mystery for her dad. She admits as much fo Famken Jannsen when she says that she and her "imaginary" friend Charly are playing a game trying to upset her daddy.

During most of this time Robert DeNiro carries the movie. He gives the movie an emotional center, as we empathize with a dad who is struggling to deal with the loss of his wife and an increasingly distraught and uncommunicative daughter. When the plot twist finally arrives and the action kicks up, Dakota Fanning is finally given more to do and she delivers.

Fine acting by the two leads asside, this is a movie that was a huge disappointment. The movie is punctuated by a series of trips to the family bathroom, where, each time, an unpleasant suprise is found in the tub and a new ominous message is written in crayon (red crayon, of course, to make us think of blood). These bathroom trips contain all of the tension, and the rest of the movie (until the reveal) is spent just following DeNiro and Fanning in their everyday life. Dad gets a new girlfriend who has to try to win his daughters approval; Dad gets a parking ticket; they meet the neighbors... not exactly edge of the seat stuff. But most of these scenes are played for tension, as Dakota Fanning stares ominously and the music builds to a crescendo. All of these turns out to be false leads. This is a movie that is chock full of red herrings.

Worse, you can predict them as red herrings. I'm not one that typically tries to figure out a movie, but this one was so obvious that even I was able to guess what would happen. The first "scare" turns out to be nothing more than the family cat leaping across the camera... despite the fact that we had never seen the cat before. That is, the cat is used exclusively for the cheap scares, and when it's not doing that, it is no where to be seen. There is one shot that contains the cat, purring in front of a fire, that doesn't have it being used in some "scary" way. These cat scares are utterly predictable, though.

Equally predictable were the folks that would get killed. I won't go into it, in case you do see it and are somehow able to shut off your brain, maybe it will be a suprise. But the same is true of the "twist." A good 15 minutes before the reveal I leaned over to Toni and whispered "I wonder if..." and of course that turned out to be the case. This particular plot twist would have been suprising and rewarding 10 years ago, but by now it has become almost a cliche, as numerous other movies have attempted the same gimmick. And it is a gimmick, let me assure you. The wool is pulled over the audience's eyes with gleefull exuberance by the director, and when the truth is revealed it just made me feel cheated. In a movie like the Sixth Sense, the ending is a suprise because the director withholds certain information from the audience, but never does the director lie or fabricate information. In this movie, the director delibrately shows false images to the audience. The story is not strong enough to support the mystery through honest means; rather to make it work, it resorts to presenting scenes that aren't really happening. After the reveal the false scenes can be justified, but it is just a justification rather than an intricate and honest means of plot development.

I had a similar reaction after Ocean's 12, though not quite as strong. (Warning: Oceans 12 spoilers ahead) In that movie the whole audience is led to believe that the main heist is busted, and much of the screen time is spent on this bit of misdirection. We only learn in the reveal, through flashbacks, that the real heist already happened and what the audience had been watching was all staged. But in that movie, at least, what was being shown to the audience actually occurred. In this one, probably a good 15 mins of screen time is devoted to shots of activities that never actually occured.

As you can tell, I'm disappointed in Hide and Seek. I think DeNiro has been coasting for years, and this movie is another sub-par effort. The last great movie he's made, in my mind, was Ronin back in 1998. Since then we've had a string of films in which he has been exploiting the image of all the great work he's done in the past for comedy (in Analyze This, Analyze That, Meet the Parents, Showtime, Shark Tale, and *shudder* The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle). It's time for him to get back in the saddle and start making classic movies again. Having Robert DeNiro in a film still guarantees that there will be great acting... but it no longer guarantees that it will be a great movie.

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I'm outraged at all this outrage

The New York Times > Technology > Resignation at CNN Shows the Growing Influence of Blogs

What have we come to? Is being partisan a worse crime than, at the least, manslaughter due to negligence and, at the most, outright murder? I feel like a stranger in my own country.

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Beans

When I started this silly blog, I had a fit of honesty and wrote more than I should have. At the time, I assumed it would just be for me, and I'd be anonymous, and any poor sap that happened to stumble into the page would get a whole saga of one man's hopes and fears. But then, in a moment of impulse, I sent the link to three others, and my little secret coffessional all of a sudden wasn't so secret anymore.

So now I see that I have to say something about my "waiting for luv" comment or else I'll never get any peace. Hm.

Where to start? OK, let's try to do this a little bit differently. I'll morsel out bits and pieces of the story, one at a time, but backwards. It'll be like Memento... but not as violent :)

What I'm waiting on is an instant message reply. I seriously doubt it ever comes... since it hasn't come yet. However there's this woman I know that is currently living in the Philippines. We haven't corresponded much since she moved there, about 6 months ago. In fact, we hadn't spoken at all till about 3 weeks ago. But, at that time, I wrote her about my job situation. I thought she might know someone that works at an NGO or with the Asian Development Bank (which is based in Manila). So I re-opened contact with her after a several month period of complete silence.

It was awkward, to be sure. But she said she'd check around for me. After a couple of days I wrote to let her know that I may have found something in Thailand. BTW this all takes place via Yahoo! instant messaging. She writes back that she hasn't found anything yet, but that she thinks I should come to Manila. I could stay at her beach house, and it would be easy for me to find a job.

Now this is was a bit of a shocker to me. I wrote her back that I wasn't looking just for a job, but for the right job; and that this one in Thailand would be perfect, and that I couldn't pass it up if I obtain it. And then I wrote "But if you were to come to Bangkok..."

That was it. I couldn't figure out a good way to complete that hypothetical, so I just left it dangling there.

That was a week ago. I haven't heard from her since.

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One week later, the earth shifted

Yesterday, Sunday, I had grown frustrated enough at the lack of a response from this fella in Bangkok that I decided to send another email. I wrote a message to my teacher, asking her if she had heard from this NGO and if they were still considering me.

I did not receive a reply from her, but this morning I did have a message from the head guy at the NGO. His name is Mike. He asked me a couple of questions about my experience with large data sets (over 10,000 records) and with graphical design/writing.

At this point I start to panic. Large datasets? I have no experience with large datasets! The most I've done is about 100 records. And graphical layouts? Does looking at centerfold layouts count? I could only think of one word to describe my position, it begins with an "f" and ends with a "ucked".

But, as it turns out, after supressing the panic attack I banged out a response that wasn't all that terrible. After getting some feedback and putting it through a couple of revisions, I think I finished up with something that is pretty good. I feel positive about it, anyway, and I think my chances of landing this thing are strong. I just hope it's not another week before I hear back from him again. I really want this job.

Thupt.

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Day 6 and Counting...

I woke up this morning and, as I do every morning, hurry over to my computer to see if I have a response from the guy that is supposed to grant me an internship. And, as I do everymorning, I walk away disappointed.

It has now been 6 days since my teacher sent an "electronic introduction" to the two of us. I wrote him the very next day, and have not heard a peep from him in return. My teacher says to give him time, that he is slow in responding to emails, and that he likes to carefully think things over. In the meantime, my life is in limbo waiting for him to come to a decision.

I also want to send my thoughts and prayers out to Elizabeth and her family who are going through some very difficult trials right now. Really puts things in perspective... here I am all worried about a job and random relationship issues, when real trouble is hitting one of my friends. God be with you, Elizabeth.

On the national front, it seems the Marines are having trouble finding new recruits... there's plenty of speculation that the draft may be reinstated (see Derf's blog as an example). What folks fail to realize is that a military draft can be a far more equitable way to get upper and middle class families to share in the burden of military service than our current "all volunteer" army. I don't want to ramble on about something that people already know about, but if anyone reading this wants me to elaborate on why a voluneer army is inequitable, just post a reply and I'll go into it.

Of course, its easy for me to say that now, when I am too old and decrepit to get drafted. I think the fear of the draft stems alot from the uncertainity of it all, combined with the horrible images put in our heads from the Vietnam anti-war protests/progaganda. I know I used to have nightmares about getting drafted (when I was a kid). My preferred solution is to have something like Israel has... where everyone serves two or three years between high school and college. That way there's less discrimination torwards the poor and the uncertainity of the draft is removed.... everyone goes, its just part of being a citizen. Oddly enough, even though the repercussions would be the same (young people forced to go into the military), removing that lottery element somehow makes it more appealing and acceptable to me. I'm curious what everyone else thinks... please comment on if you have the same reaction.

Finally, I could go on for pages about this, but I'll limit it to just a single sentence... I think our national patriotic respect for the military and those who serve in the military is moving towards glorification; and that is bothersome, it reminds me alot of ancient Rome.

Thupt.

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Confessions of a godless heretic

Just to illustrate how far adrift I've gone from my god-fearing ways...

As I was walking down the corridor here at the illustrious Louisana Tech Park, on my way to quench my thirst with a cool, refreshing sip of water, I passed by this woman that works down at the far end of the hall. This woman is... oh, about 50... and usually very properly dressed in business attire. We will frequently say our passing hellos and that's about the extent of our relationship.

Today, however, I found myself staring at her as she walked towards me in the hall. She looked as if she had been digging in the dirt, or had perhaps absent-mindedly placed her hands on her face after having handled a busted pen. You see, there was a rather large smudge of black right in the center of her forehead.

I stared at this spot, so prominently displayed on this normally austere woman, a good 5 seconds before I realized that I was doing so. And then, as we were passing each other, I came *this close* to venturing beyond my customary "hello" to alert this person of the blemish upon her forehead. But just as I opened my mouth, some tiny part of my memory sprang into action and I remembered that Christians the world wide (or is it just Catholics?) commemorate the day after Fat Tuesday (in which drinking and debauchery are expected and celebrated) by smudging a bit of ash on their faces.

Now, I don't think that I have ever smudged a little bit of ash on my face... well, not for any religous reason, anyway. I have several times smeared blue ink all over my cheeks. And I once hung baloons off of my ears. But that's probably not relevent here. I'm just glad that I remembered this bit of information before I said anything out loud which might cause some
unwarranted attention from our government.

Kristy writes "etcetera" after all her posts. I like that. But often times there doesn't seem to be anything else to say that would naturally follow, and so I'm left wondering what exactly the "etcetera" would be. Nonetheless, I'm exceedingly jealous of it and so am therefore introducing my own little catch signature term:

Thupt.

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Rummy's Got a Secret - He's hiding up to $40 billion in defense spending. Let's find it. By Fred Kaplan

Rummy's Got a Secret - He's hiding up to $40 billion in defense spending. Let's find it. By Fred Kaplan

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What's going on... the beginning of a diary

In the absence of anything remotely interesting to say, I'll use this space as a diary.

I am currently waiting for two events to occur. One has to do with love, the other with a career.

As I have just recently graduated with my masters in International Development, I am now looking to make the 40K of debt that I accrued obtaining that degree serve some use. So, I will either take a job or get a phd. Both options are turning out to be more problematic than I anticipated. The Tulane department from which I took classes is in some difficult straits, since a number of their grants have expired this year and new funding has not yet been acquired. There are other issues as well which I won't post about (just in case anyone actually reads this), but it all adds up to an uncertain future for the department. Which means that they are really not accepting phd candidates anymore... and they are even less likely to grant money to those that they do admit.

So, where does that leave me? Waiting for the department to get its shit together so it can admit me and grant me a tuition waiver. That will happen, at the earliest, in Fall of '05.

Unfortuantely, in June of '05 I have to start paying back student loans, unless I can somehow get a deferment. What about work, then? Getting a good job in the field of international development is proving tricky... I could sit behind a desk and file paperwork, sure, but that's not why I went back to school. Obtaining a position as an anylist or a field worker requires experience... experience which I don't have. How can I get experience? I could volunteer... but I don't think my lenders will appreciate me working for free.

Fortunately, I have this wonderful teacher who has really tried to help me out. Resources are scarce so her actual success rate is low. However, she may have found something ideal for me. She has contacts with this group based in Bangkok that deals with preventable injuries to children. It's a well-established NGO that works all over SE Asia. It's called TASC, and you can visit its webpage here: http://www.tasc-gcipf.org/

She's trying to set me up with an internship/fellowship with TASC. I'd be doing data analysis and have opportunity to both travel and work on policy advocacy at the national level. It sounds just wonderful. Anyway, to make a long story short, I sent them my resume and am waiting to hear back. The feedback from my teacher leads me to believe that they are ready to invite me over, but I haven't yet heard back from TASC itself. So until I do, it remains a pipe dream.

Man, I figured writingin a BLOG would be short a quick... but explaining the whole situation, which, I imagine, is the interesting part, takes a number of words, and I should get back to work. I guess you'll have to wait till a later post to learn about the other thing I'm waiting on... the part that has to do with LUV.

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Day 2 . . . pat myself on the back

So I've had a number of ideas about what to do with this little corner of the web. I think the only way that I'll make it last is if I write for me, not for anyone else. So should I write essays? I'd like to do a little research on those ribbon-magnets that people put on their cars. Pictures? Should it be personal or more topical? Ah, the possibilities are endless.

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My first post...

...but will it be my last? Or will this be yet another abandoned product of my wandering curiosity?

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