Aside

Ok kids, I need your advice on this one. My big problem with the iPhone has been that it’s just been too friggin’ expensive for my budget. However, all of that has changed now with the price drop of the remainder of the 4GB iPhones that Apple is selling directly from their site. My brother works at Apple and can get a bit of a discount too. When it’s all said and done, I can get a 4GB iPhone, after…

Salon: But that was then. This is now. Which is the other reason I’m eating Taco Bell tonight: I want to sink my teeth into the culture clash between past and present — the whiter, more monocultural society we were, versus the hyphenated nation we’ve become. Taco Bell harks back to the Wonder Bread America of 1962, when the chain was founded on the assumption that real Mexican food was too slow, too spicy, too unpronounceably foreign, even in the…

Someone in the Bhutan government was searching on Yahoo for “tiny young japanese sex.com” and somehow came across my blog. The best part? I can’t figure out how they got here, as if you run that search, I don’t come up. But, thanks to this entry, I probably will now though. (Other fun with server logs.)

There’s a lot of famous scenes where soldiers go through boot camp, and get yelled at and drilled until it’s instilled. But how real is that, and what does it take to go from civvie to a Semper-Fi-spewin’ Marine? The LA Times follows three kids, including one Iranian-American, to find out: While still in high school, the friends had enlisted under the Marines’ buddy program, which guaranteed they would train in the same platoon throughout boot camp. In July, a…

Dear Friends, The powers that be have told me that my piece on the rise of foreign YouTube clones will air today on The World (and of course on the Internet on any of these stations’ streams.) New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 3 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg Boston – 4 pm…

While I’m not much of a coffee drinker myself, I was introduced to Peet’s Coffee at a very young age. My grandparents’ home, perched alongside Claremont Canyon, is about a 20 minutes’ walk from the fourth location of Peet’s Coffee, on Domingo at Ashby Ave in Berkeley. When our family would gather around holiday times, we’d make the trek down the hill to Peet’s. The adults would get their lattes, while the kids would get their hot chocolate. Peet’s was…

This LA Times article provides some suggestion as to what I’d wondered about for some time: Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution. According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village. As it…

“Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.” — William Gibson Directors Guild of America’s Digital Day Los Angeles, May 17, 2003

Big ups to Tom Randall for scoring this fascinating piece. Well done, sir! Bloomberg: Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) — The United Nations has sent about 10,000 text messages on mobile phones to help inform Iraqi refugees in Syria that an international food distribution program for them begins tomorrow. The UN Refugee Agency and the World Food Program will initially distribute enough rations to feed 33,000 Iraqis in Syria and about 50,000 by the end of the year, the UN said today…

If there’s one thing that I love to imagine, it’s how much more liveable Los Angeles would be if there was a decent transportation system. Turns out, the future of LA’s public transportation might be in Shanghai: Los Angeles Times: In 1990, four years after Los Angeles broke ground on its Red Line subway, Shanghai began to build a subway system too. Los Angeles was one of the richest cities in the world, with an extensive freeway network, top-notch engineers…