05.28.08
Reevers and zealots
I hate to say it again, but I hate to say it again, but I hate to say it again.
05.24.08
Ichiro says,
“Playing on this team and seeing what is happening around me, I feel that something is beginning to fall apart. But, if I was not in this situation, and I was objectively watching what just happened this week, I would probably be drinking a lot of beers and booing.”
05.22.08
Life before the internet
Having no internet at the apartment has given me some time to think about things. For example, I thought about how life has changed since the internet became something convenient to use.
Back in fourth grade, we had to write a report on an animal of our choosing. The rubric stipulated that we were to use something like 4 sources of reference such as books, encyclopedia (print or electronic), and the internet. I remember looking at the rubric and thinking dang, I’m gonna need to find 2 books. Because, you see, 56k was as good as it got back then, and besides that, I doubt anyone in my class knew how to use the thing back then. These days, I bet 4th graders are using the internet to raise all sorts of hell. Man, how times have changed.
And remember how if you wanted to use the internet, you’d have to lose the use of your phone line? And how the rich kids and their rich parents could afford to have TWO phone lines so that they could use the internet all the time? Those crazy rich folk!
I guess that if it weren’t for the internet, I’d have fallen in love for real. I’d have used the phone more and spent less time in front of a monitor. But hey, at least I went through 14 years of my life without it, right?
The old man laughs.
05.15.08
Tungsten is the king of metals
If I could forge a chain of any metal, it would be a bond forged of naught but the purest tungsten.
Such a chain would bind to me forever my love of tungsten.
And, should the heat of passion never exceed 6192 degrees Fahrenheit, my love will never abandon me, for said chain would hold strong in hotter flames than hell has to bear.
Oh tungsten~
You are the metal with mettle.
You are the filament of my guiding light.
W, 74, I am yours.
05.10.08
What exactly is a post-intelligencer?
After having watched sports news talk shows for 3 or 4 years now, I’ve developed a subconscious knowledge of the big newspapers in many cities around the US. Can you name a newspaper for the following major cities? There are more than one option in some of these cases, but if you know at least one newspaper for each of these cities, that’s pretty impressive.
Denver
Seattle
Miami
Orlando
Washington D.C.
New York
Boston
Los Angeles
Chicago
Houston
Dallas
Atlanta
Kansas City
Detroit
Philadelphia
You can see my quick list after the break.
Read the rest of this entry »
05.06.08
Penultimatum
In a few hours, I’ll be a college graduate.
Whatever.
I’m not feeling the excitement, guys. It’s a lot like when I graduated from high school, except this time there are less friends that I’ll never see again.
So I don’t know what there is to say about it.
Maybe when you graduate, you’ll know what I mean.
04.26.08
Satan is a metaphor for the harm we do to each other
she told me she judges people on how nice she thinks they are to others
and i believe her and think it’s wonderful.
there were so many doxens in washington square park today. so. many, for the doxen parade, it was ridiculous. all in one place, the park was magical.
and there was a black lab to the side, with a face that said “wtf why are there so many midgets?”
and the market happened that always happens on saturday, and with weekly $1 sticky rice, street peddlers, street artists, street kids, street protestors protesting animal cruelty, a lady from h&m who took pictures of me, the dogs! a group of people giving free hugs, the homeless, that one black man wearing a clown suit, gandhi statue with flowers! man, yeah, that is great silk screen work, man, yeah, i follow, the government does suck sometimes. yeah, man, i love you too, thanks for the hug.
people, why has it taken so long for me to learn to love you? and trust you? and just be merry and happy with you?
today i filled my life with strangers, and it was satisfying.
and i think it’s wonderful. and i’m trying to learn better now, how to love and be loved by just. people.
Facts about elevators
- The Door Close button is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. In elevators built since the early ’90s. The button is only enabled in emergency situations with a key held by an authority.
- The only known occurence of an elevator car free falling due to a snapped cable (barring fire or structural collapse), was in 1945. A B25 Bomber crashed into the Empire State Building, severing the cables of two elevators. The elevator car on the 75th floor had a woman on it, but she survived due to the 1000 feet of coiled cable of fallen cable below, which lessened the impact.
- Elevators are twenty times safer than escalators. There are twenty times more elevators than escalators, but only 1/3 more accidents.
- Elevators are also safer than cars. An average of 26 people die in elevators each year in the U.S. There are 26 car deaths every five hours.
- Most people who die in elevators are elevator technicians.
- The Otis Elevator Company carries the equivalent of the world’s population in their elevators every five days.
- The New York Marriott was the first to introduce a smart elevator system that assigned passengers to elevators depending on what floor they were heading to.
- Elevators used to require a two-man dispatcher/operator team to function. The advent of navigational buttons rendered those jobs obsolete.
- The area required for personal space is 2.3 feet. The average amount on elevators is generally 2 feet.
- Elevator hatches are generally bolted shut for safety reasons. In times of elevator crisis, the safest place is inside the elevator.
- The myth about jumping just before impact in a falling elevator is just that — myth. You can’t jump fast enough to counteract the speed of falling. And you wouldn’t know when to jump.
- Due to the laws of physics, elevators can’t be any taller than 1700 feet. Hoist ropes become too heavy after that, snapping at 3200 feet.
Taken from The New Yorker
04.12.08
What I mean when I say that the BBC is full of jerks
On the car today, I was listening to the BBC news show on NPR. According to the report, an artist from Italy named Pippa Bacca was recently found murdered. She was some sort of political performance artist, and her latest act was to promote peace in regions of conflict by hitchhiking from Italy to Turkey wearing a wedding gown. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it there alive.
Now, the reporter doing the story was interviewing someone who was a friend of the late artist, and the end of the conversation went sort of like this:
BBC: “What was she trying to prove by doing this? What was the point?”
Guy: “She was trying to promote peace.”
BBC: “And what does her death show us?”
Guy: “It’s a tragedy, and there are bad people in the world.”
BBC: “Actually, doesn’t it show that she was wrong? That art can’t make a difference?”
This wasn’t the first time that I heard a BBC interview where I thought that the interviewer was pushing his own point of view and taking some thinly veiled shots at the interviewee’s views. The other time was when they were interviewing one of the Zimbabwe ruling party representatives and they basically asked the guy, “Why does your party suck, and why don’t you just stop cheating and play fair?”
Here in America, all the interviews are so embarrassingly soft, so maybe the way that BBC reporters do things merely seems mean in comparison. Even so, I thought it was cheap to say that a woman who died trying to make a difference was wrong, naive, and that art doesn’t make a difference. All of those things may be true, but you don’t gotta rub it in the face of her friend like that!