So the Chinese bus lines really do exist.
(Round-trips)
NYC-DC – $20
Hartford-Boston/NYC – $30
NYC-Philly – $20
NYC-Albany – $40
East Coast Chinese Bus Lines
– May 31, 2004, 10:28 pm UTCPosted in: Travels
Archive for May, 2004
Free Monday
– May 31, 2004, 11:10 am UTCPosted in: Personal
Things are pretty quiet, given that both Boyk is in LA and Rachel 40 miles to the south. Yesterday I went to a lunch at Buck’s in Woodside with Scoble and Dan Gillmor and some other geeks. Definitely interesting, although Scoble’s son seemed completely bored out of his mind the whole time. Following that, I had a 3 hour battle with Katie Hafner’s computers and trying to install Panther and MS Office 2004, I settled with one copy of MS Office X (2001) on one machine and that’s it. My other CDs didn’t work, and one computer decided that it didn’t want to run Word. Of course, it ran Excel, PowerPoint and everything else fine, but not Word.
Last night I cuddled up to the final episode of Enterprise (Season 3) that I downloaded and watched. Right now I’m 99.5% done with getting Seasons 1 and 2, so I can watch the last four from the first season and all of the second season that I missed when I was abroad. (Yes, I’m a geek.)
Oh, and one other thing totally unrelated. When I was getting on BART the other day, I saw a guy dressed in sneakers, jeans, a button-up shirt (why don’t we have a word for this in English, like chemise?), a fleece vest, and a tie. It just really didn’t work. It’s almost as if he was going to wear a suit, got half undressed, and forgot about the shirt and tie and then put on casual clothes.
Oh, those tax-and-spend liberals
– May 27, 2004, 12:34 am UTCPosted in: Politics
Now this is a tax that I could really get behind.
We would adopt a 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax, the Patriot Tax (along with my wife’s proposal: free public parking anywhere in America for any hybrid or other car getting more than 35 m.p.g.). A Patriot Tax would help pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars and help finance a Manhattan project to speed the development of a hydrogen economy, enabling the public to make a contribution to the war effort while lessening our dependence on foreign oil.
RCR, June 6th in the Mission
– May 26, 2004, 9:33 am UTCPosted in: Music
Doesn’t anyone want to go to the RCR show with me? C’mon . . . It’s only $10!
“Moo mishkilleh, ana sahafi,”
– May 25, 2004, 3:01 pm UTCPosted in: Journalism
This man is my new hero. [Stolen from Saheli Datta]
My only chance was to stay calm, I told myself.
“Moo mishkilleh, ana sahafi,” I shouted — pidgin Arabic for “don’t worry, I’m a journalist.”
It didn’t make any difference. I was frog-marched through the throng at a rapid clip, an Arab TV crew filming what was shaping up to be a juicy scoop –
a live execution of a Westerner.
Mindful that these might be the last shots the world ever saw of me, I did my best to look stoic. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, although a fist from someone in the crowd did, punching me in the head and ruining my attempts at serenity.
. . .
By the time we reached our hotel, the pain in my posterior had long since gone. Reaching into my left trouser pocket, where a patch of blood was slowly spreading, my translator pulled out a small piece of shrapnel that I assumed was the only thing that had hit me.
Were it not for the advice of a BBC TV crew that had also been at the scene, I might never have bothered going to a hospital.
Ten hours later, a medic from the British Army’s field hospital at nearby Shaibah Airfield set the record straight. As an X-ray photograph showed, the shrapnel was merely a fragment of a full-size bullet that had lodged perilously close to my hip bone.
So I saw this t-shirt
– May 25, 2004, 2:56 pm UTCPosted in: Rants
So I saw this t-shirt on the Persians LJ site today and was amused. And then when I clicked “To view other Arabic t-shirts” (even though that one was in Farsi, not Arabic) I came across listings for t-shirts that said: “Kiss me, I’m Arabic.”
C’mon guys, get it right. Arab is the people, Arabic is the language. Is that so hard?
Kowloon Wholesale Fish Merchants
– May 24, 2004, 12:11 pm UTCPosted in: Personal
Well, this weekend was busy and fun. Friday night was spent with Aaron, first getting some Zachary’s on College, and then over at Paul Boutin’s place. Besides feeling really out of place by being at least eight years younger than everyone else, I did learn that Salam Pax has a movie deal. And speaking of which, what’s with this six week hiatus?
Saturday, following picking up Rachel from the airport, I exchanged Lauren & Josh’s graduation gift for Season 1 of Sex and the City on DVD (I had to pay $10 extra, seemed like a fair deal to me), and I went and redeemed Alex and Maria’s graduation gift certificate at REI for an on-sale $100 backpack that I ended up paying $35 for. It’s got 2350 cubic inches of space, not to mention space for my Camelbak, and my assorted gadgets. Thanks guys!
Today I went and took my traffic school test over at a UPS store near my work, a fairly painless system.
This morning I discovered that the business at 1330 Montana Ave. in SM, aka “Kowloon Wholesale Fish Merchants” is actually the offices of Secret Weapon Marketing, the company behind the Jack in the Box ads.
Adieu!
– May 20, 2004, 10:56 pm UTCPosted in: School
I got a C in Econ 100A. I’ll say it one last time. Fuck Econ. I have a perfect C average with my Econ courses here at Berkeley (C+ in Econ 1, C- in Econ 100B) — good riddance. Without you I could have had honors.Oh well, it’s over now.
A few unrelated things
– May 19, 2004, 3:21 pm UTCPosted in: Personal
I was informed by my major advisor that I’m not getting honors, even though I went through all the motions and what not (I didn’t make the GPA requirement). Oh well. I’m still glad I did it.
So over here at my new digs at B2, I have a colleague called Todd Lappin, who apparently is a big fan of international music as I am. I traded him some Tarkan, MC Solaar, Positive Black Soul and others for some Mandarin hip-hop and some French hip-hop which included some music by a group I hadn’t heard of called ATK. They have a song called “J’Fuck”, which I’ve listened to a few times in the last day or so. Pretty catchy. So here’s what I was thinking about it as I was listening to it on the way to work today and I had an interesting thought:
If English is the most widely spoken language (over geographical area, I understand that Mandarin has more actual speakers), and you make the argument that “fuck” is the strongest word in the English language, does that make it the strongest word in current speech? I realize that there are probably stronger words in other languages, they just lack the ubiquity of English. Am I making any sense? What do people think?
Speaking of which, there’s something extraordinarily satsifying about commuting to work. I hope I never loose this feeling of enjoying going to work, and feeling like a productive member of society. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t have to drive to work, but I like hopping on the BART, reading a book, and stepping out a few minutes later at the doorstep of the building where B2 is. Walking out of the underground, the buildings seem even more towering than they already are and their radiance is welcome.
What can you say to this?
– May 19, 2004, 8:34 am UTCPosted in: WTF?
Right Hook, Salon.com
May 19, 2004
The sentiments speak for themselves, but what is perhaps most disturbing is their reach. “Savage Nation’s” syndicated radio host Michael Savage, already infamous for telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die” (MSNBC fired him for that), boasts 6 million American listeners per week, according to the nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters.org. On May 11, while repeatedly calling Abu Ghraib “Grab-an-Arab” prison, he launched into this little tirade:
“I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour[s] — a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them … Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes … They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail.”
The next day Savage added that Arabs were “racist, fascist bigots,” and purported to speak for a majority of Americans regarding the war. He offered several all-American solutions to our problems in the Middle East.
“Right now, even people sitting on the fence would like George Bush to drop a nuclear weapon on an Arab country. They don’t even care which one it would be. I can guarantee you — I don’t need to go to Mr. Schmuck [pollster John] Zogby and ask him his opinion … The most — I tell you right now — the largest percentage of Americans would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on a major Arab capital. They don’t even care which one…
“I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity … It’s the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.”
He also made sure to plug his credentials.
“I’m going to give you one further example from my background as an anthropologist just so that you — I’m trying to put context on this because you can go crazy if you don’t have the context on this, because I’m going to lead up to something of what we must do to these primitives. Because these primitives can only be treated in one way, and I don’t think smallpox and a blanket is good enough incidentally … Smallpox in a blanket, which the U.S. Army gave to the Cherokee Indians on their long march to the West, was nothing compared to what I’d like to see done to these people.”
Bananas and Apricots
– May 18, 2004, 3:28 pm UTCPosted in: Personal
So far, Business 2.0 is great. Factchecking stories have become my duties, and that’s well — you can imagine how that is. But I’m liking it so far, and I have two postings in the B2Day blog here and here.
There are loads of bananas and apricots in the kitchen for the staff today, so that was cool.
Last night I volunteered for the pledge drive at KQED which was fairly straightforward. In the volunteer raffle I won a CD copy of Lord of the Dance. If anyone really wants it, it’s all yours.
That is all.
Seymour Hersh is the new Bob Woodward.
– May 16, 2004, 10:44 am UTCPosted in: Foreign Affairs
Wow, two in a row. The Gray Zone.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. RumsfeldÕs decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of Žlite combat units, and hurt AmericaÕs prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the PentagonÕs operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from RumsfeldÕs long-standing desire to wrest control of AmericaÕs clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, ÒAny suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.Ó The senior C.I.A. official, asked about RumsfeldÕs testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, ÒSome people think you can bullshit anyone.Ó
And yet again, the NYT looks dumb. The Post has a slightly different piece of the same puzzle, but they didn’t get what Hersh got.
The NYT did get Pfc. England’s sworn testimony, though:
The detainees were stripped, handcuffed together, and told to lie on the floor, she said, then forced to run and crawl up and down the hallway. “Was there anything done to these detainees that you felt was `going too far?’ ” she was asked. “No,” she replied.
Anyone else remember this scene from Apocalypse Now:
WILLARD
“I was sent on a classified mission, sir.”
KURTZ
“Ain’t no longer classified, is it?
What did they tell you ?”
WILLARD
” They told me that you had gone totally insane and that your
methods were unsound.”
KURTZ
” Are my methods unsound?”
WILLARD
” I don’t see any method at all, sir.”
Good party kids, thanks for coming
– May 15, 2004, 6:56 pm UTCPosted in: Personal
Thanks to those of you who came all the way up to Glen Ellen for helping celebrate graduation. It’s just now dawned on me that I really don’t have anything hanging over my head. Well, except for that annoying stop-sign ticket that I have to do traffic school for, but other than that, it’s all over. I’m ready to fall asleep.
The chili was great (thanks Nate!) and the pies were great (thanks Rachel!) and everything else was great (thanks everyone else!).
Good luck to everyone on the rest of finals, and if anyone wants a reprise of chili, there’s a lot left. Same goes for cornbread (thanks Boyk!).
Nap time.
May 14
– May 14, 2004, 10:49 am UTCPosted in: School
It’s funny. I can look back on a life of achievement, on challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. I’ve accomplished more than most men, and without the use of my legs. — The Big Lebowski
Well I actually do have legs, but today is something of a milestone. Graduation and all that jazz. My last day at Macworld. (I got told by one of the editors that if they had the money that they would hire me — they all really really like me. That’s pretty cool.) Last final exam begins at 3 pm — no more Econ!
This weekend will be a non-stop celebration, starting with tonight, tomorrow and even Sunday brunch.
Thank you guys for everything. Really. My time at Berkeley wouldn’t have been the same without you.
On another note, check this MeFi entry out about the P-P-P-Powerbook reverse scam on eBay recently.
