THE PURGE FORWARD

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This website (iConflict) gave me a good chuckle. From their “About” page:

“iConflict seeks to empower people who have been struggling to find a place and a space to tell their story. No other citizen journalism site enables users to connect, discuss and share news on conflicts and crises. If you care about resolving conflicts, then join our global grass-roots effort.

Your participation in iConflict will help to increase awareness on the important events happening all over the world.

iConflict is the only citizen journalism site to focus on international conflicts and crises. If you want news and information on the truly important news events taking place today, there’s only one place to go – iConflict.com.

At iConflict, your news, is news.”

What a load of poop.

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“He wore black pants and a turtleneck, which naturally enraged a couple of environmental activists who threw two plates loaded with green whipped cream at him before fleeing the auditorium in a hale of flyers explaining why he deserved a pie in the face. The message rang out loud and clear:

Rhode Island is awesome.”

(from Wonkette)

The video seems to be getting scrubbed off the internet very efficiently, but last I checked it could be seen here. I want to emphasize that it would have been very difficult for Friedman to get the pie out of his mustachio should he have taken a more direct hit.

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A few weeks ago, on the short walk home from the subway, I overheard two young professionals discussing the local surroundings. “I feel like I’m in Bizarroland,” said the young man. Having lived here for more than two years, in Woodside, Queens, I couldn’t help sympathizing with his sentiments. After that, I felt a little offended, but mostly I think this can be attributed to my super-ego intruding on the material facts of reality.

In any case, Esparks Coffee has just opened up shop here, replacing the former purveyor of dusty stationery, cheap gifts and plastic toys from the 80’s. What an improvement! Basically, it’s just like Starbucks, except the music is much less annoying, there are far fewer people, the coffee is a lot cheaper and you don’t need to use strange words like “Venti” or “Tall” when all you want is a small coffee. Plus, the real clincher: wireless internet is free.

There’s something about an air-conditioned coffee shop with free wi-fi and a nice view of the street that makes life seem much less bizarre.

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Like many others across the continental United States, I often get the urge to eat some food some time in the evening, usually around six-thirty or seven. This is when I frequently eat the meal called dinner, or supper. Today, I was feeling especially lazy, so I racked my brain to come up with the least complicated way of getting some victuals into my stomach. What I came up with is Domino’s pizza online. All you need to do is go to the website dominos.com, register an account, click some boxes, and then the computer promises that within 30 or 40 minutes you will have a real pizza in your hand, just like the one you designed on the internet. One thing I found appealing about this was that you don’t actually have to talk to anyone at all. You just wait in your apartment, waste time watching the primary results on CNN, and then voila, an underpaid gentleman shows up at your door with a piping hot pizza.

I do believe this pizza will be coming from an actual Domino’s location (with humans working inside and everything) because they provide a phone number. However, the “real” location seems a little bit far from where I live, so ordering online saves troublesome questions such as “Do you deliver all the way to XXXX?” Also, the tip is included in the credit card charge (my preferred payment method), and it came out being about 35 cents more than the tax charged by the state of New York for affording me this wonderful opportunity of anti-social pizza consumption. I foresee one awkward moment happening in 5-10 minutes when Muhammad (according to tracking information, he left the restaurant at 7:49) shows up at the door. Will he be expecting an additional tip?

What should I do?

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I’ve always thought that would be a good epitaph, and when I die, that’s what I want written on my grave. This wish is not based in some kind of belief in the afterlife or a faith in the transmigration of souls. I just think it might startle the average cemetery visitor. And that’s what counts.

Having received thousands of emails over the past couple months begging for for a new post, it is finally time to heed the masses. My last posts dealt with two of the three remaining candidates in the 2008 US Presidential election. Both of those posts have a sort of mocking, negative tone. That’s because I am not a big fan of either Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Actually, I don’t think either of them are entirely awful, it’s just that they are both partly awful. Perhaps Hillary could be considered less awful on a spectrum of awfulness.

This post is about the candidate I support, Barack Obama. Here’s an essay I wrote about why I like him:

(continued below…)

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This just in from C-Span…

When Hillary Clinton walks into a grocery store to buy an apple, she wants to make sure she can know if the apple she is buying is a New York apple or an imported Chinese apple.

Is that like, one of our big imports from China??? Apples? Please enlighten me.

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@GoogleMaps 

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在我的记忆中，平安夜总是最幸福的夜晚。从小至今，每年的平安夜都差不多，只是每个跟我庆祝平安夜的人年纪又大了一岁，包括我。在平安夜，这个很特殊的夜晚，我们都可以放下心来，跟家人和朋友享受快乐和安宁。

典型的平安夜是这样的：

天气冷得很。傍晚之前帮妈妈准备平安夜的饰物。我和爸爸去海滩装沙子，然后把这些沙子陪妈妈放进小纸袋。每个纸袋不要太多沙子，就是要放蜡烛在里面，所以沙子要足够让蜡烛自然站立。蜡烛和纸袋准备好了，把纸袋放在外面，沿着我们住宅的小街旁边。（邻居的朋友搞路的另一边。）天黑了，到外面点燃蜡烛。

平安夜的晚饭也很特别。因为妈妈的前辈都是从意大利来美国的，所以她很重视一些意大利的传统。最有趣的是平安夜的“七种鱼”晚餐。我小时候不太喜欢吃鱼—受不了，但现在我的味觉有所改变，所以可以接受。妈妈花那么多功夫，清早一起床就开始做傍晚的“七种鱼”。

吃完晚餐，我们稍晚一点去教堂做平安夜的礼拜。教堂里，人山人海，平安夜是最热闹的礼拜，又是最安静的。人们一起唱歌，一起祷告。教堂里弥漫着高香的气味和烟雾。礼拜结束，在教堂门口牧师送给每个参加者一个巨大的橙子。

上汽车，一边吃橙子，一边前行。下一站是我们家的朋友的圣诞节晚会。这是一个当地的传统，他们每年都开这个晚会，每年都可以看到从前的朋友，玩一样的游戏。要不然，我不会乐意跟着父母参加晚会。一般情况下，父母早一点儿离开，我呆一会儿跟小朋友打乒乓球、台球之类的游戏，跟久别的朋友谈一谈。

回家时，父母一定还没睡。可能我小时候，大家此刻已经上床，圣诞树下没有礼物。现在为我长大了，礼物已经在那儿。说一句“晚安”，明天早上就可以打开。

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Professor Robert Harrist teaches Art History at Columbia. In the video below, he discusses an interesting relationship involving new scientific discoveries associated with the brain and some recent trends in contemporary Chinese art. It’s nice to see that the humanities and the sciences can have some common food for thought!

Also, being “a graduate student at a large research university in New York City,” I just learned that I may have a chance to take a class with this guy next semester. It would be a class dealing entirely with the work of Xu Bing, a well-known contemporary Chinese artist and would even involve visits to Xu Bing’s studio in Brooklyn! Here’s to hoping my application for the seminar goes through.

UPDATE: If the dimensions of this video are too small, you can go directly to the site where it was found, Brightcove.TV. They make it really difficult for users like me to embed their videos on a blog but at their own site the viewing experience is quite nice.

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