Josh Wolf is running for mayor of San Francisco against Chicken John wearing a justin.tv-style webcam on his forehead? I'm proud to say I come from one of the nuttiest cities on the planet. I used to hang out with a few of the justin.tv folks in the God Quad in Branford College. Never imagined that this is what they'd be up to in a couple of years. Nor did I envision a mayoral campaign for Wolf. Just when you think you know the world...

it's a bird! a plane! a... train!

"London to Frankfurt by train? It's possible, it can be as fast and as easy as flying and it's far better for the environment, a group of European high-speed rail companies claimed Monday." There has definitely been an unmet need for the international rail alliance Railteam, but its goal completion date seems far away, and who knows if the discount airlines will still be flying by then. How long will they be viable before the price of fuel makes them impractical? Anyway, the whole carbon offset business that's been all over the news lately would certainly motivate me to go by train rather than plane if they could make it equally attractive and affordable. I don't like to lose time, but a longer train trip probably won't be such a problem as I get on in years (really!) and became a little more patient. I'm already feeling more leisurely nowadays, reading nonfiction books and listening to Yale lecture podcasts. I'm liking this life.

Tiffany

"Medieval form of THEOPHANIA. This name was traditionally given to girls born on the Epiphany (January 6), the festival commemorating the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus."

So goes the description for the group "I am a Tiffany" on the college social networking site ConnectU, which I'd nearly forgotten about. This is new information to me; certainly not the history of the name given in my parents' old copy of What Shall We Name the Baby?. In that case, I have a new pseudonym. I also can no longer enjoy the great coincidence that one of the only words rhyming with my name is "ephiphany."

It's still funny that the two words that rhyme with Tiffany that I can remember right now, epiphany and antiphony, have religious connotations. This despite the fact that "-phony" is a false rhyme.

Sometimes I turn my head when someone says "timpani." Then I feel stupid.

The average American spends about 47 hours per year stuck in traffic. Yet with all the discussion of how to combat an ever growing number of cars on the road by ever constructing more thoroughfares, public transportation is not considered.

kicking the bottle

San Francisco city departments are officially off bottled water. Three cheers! Over a billion water bottles end up in California's landfills each year. Bottles of stuff that falls from the sky and costs more per gallon than gasoline. Oh, human folly...

I was skeptical I'd see the day global warming would be all over the media. Now the even less likely is happening -- sci-fi-like proposals to counteract its effects.

Anyone for cycling in California wine country? A Cali version of bar-hopping on bikes...

A mother searches Tijuana for her mentally disabled son, who has been deported despite the fact that he is an American citizen. The picture of pathos.

Are we millions and millions of exuberant monkeys?

worldwide spam decrease?

It's hard to imagine that the arrest of one spammer could decrease spam worldwide, but apparently the arrest of 27-year-old Robert Soloway may have just that effect. The man has made a lot of money via "zombie" computers of unwitting users--enough that "even with four bank accounts seized by the government, he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer."

The only difference I've noticed recently is that an increased number of phishing attacks have been making it through Gmail's spam filter to my inbox.

architectural social commentary

Dutch architects Willem Jan Neutelings and Michiel Riedijk manage social critique through their Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision while simultaneously preserving what they criticize in ghostly images. But they also subject those who visit and, more importantly, those who work in the building daily to what sounds like a rather harsh interpretation they've placed on media. The building, compared by this journalist to the Beinecke Library at Yale, looks gorgeous, but how will the inhabitants feel about it in ten years? Have the architects managed to balance usability with a flexible social critique?

People buy modern-day ecological indulgences to compensate for driving SUVs while Cindy Sheehan quits the war movement saying that her son "did indeed die for nothing" in a society that cares more about who the next American Idol is than how many troops will die in Iraq in the next month.

And here I am soon to leave the country again...

Remember when Michael Moore shared with us in Stupid White Men that he feels nervous being flown by commercial pilots who make less than the kid at Taco Bell? I don't feel any safer that so many underpaid and undertrained security guards protect our likeliest terrorist targets. How about quality rather than quantity in paranoia? How much training and pay do our favorite friendly folk at the TSA receive, I wonder?

If only people would band together to raise money for causes more worthy than buying $26,000 worth of peanuts in order to get to veg out in front of another season of Jericho.

It still upsets me greatly to think that many of the Americans dying in Iraq are my age or younger. I suppose this isn't the most reasonable or urgent thing to be perturbed by, but it hits close to home.

The man who started the camera phone revolution was really just an engineering nerd whose wife was going into labor.

Some moving stories about Asian American pioneers. Normally I wouldn't resolve to watch a movie because I never watch even the movies I intend to see, but doctor-turned-survivor-turned-Academy-Award-winning actor Haing S. Ngor's comment before his murder, "If I die from now on, OK! This film [The Killing Fields] will go on for a hundred years," makes it just memorable enough to put this film on my list.

the murse

My brand familiarity clearly ranks me amongst the wealthiest in America with an annual income of over $300,000... because unlike all these luxury-man-purse-buying men, I'm familiar with Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Prada, but I actually had no idea what Coach was until this year. Go figure.

By the way, if anyone ever gets me one of these things, I'll return it. Way to waste your money spending it on the thing you're carrying your money in and that folks will snatch when they realize you have a fortune dangling off you.

I'm still amused at the skinny young Asian woman I saw getting off the bus around Park Avenue one afternoon whose slick pink trenchcoat and giant handbag blared the most expensive brands on the planet. "That girl's rich," the requisite gregarious Commentator at the front of the bus informed the driver after we took off again.

The article asserts that "the luxury handbag is the accessory that defines the wealthy woman." I wonder how that bright green handbag with flowers and grass hanging off it in the Milano subway defined its middle-aged owner, then. I'm sure it was more expensive than any of the handbags I passed by in LV.

</end rant>

Save the Sagrada Familia!

A high-speed tunnel connecting Barcelona and Madrid? Great. Running it 5 feet from the Sagrada Familia despite the protests of everyone from Gaudi's successor on the project to MIT professors? Royally bad idea.

Will Earthly bacteria take over the universe? Or at least some poor unwitting Martian's solar system?

D.C.'s first female police chief dropped out of school and had a baby at 15, yet has come farther than most women in the country. We need more role models like this. Wow.

Also, this is why the death penalty is not only barbaric, but also a waste of precious taxpayer dollars.

We Americans are so bad at trying to look good that it's almost funny. As reported by the BBC:

"We made official apologies on the part of the US government and payments of about $2,000 for each death," [US army spokesman Col John Nicholson] said, after US officials visited some of the families left bereaved by the incident.

US forces were accused of killing the civilians during shooting near the city of Jalalabad.... At least eight Afghan civilians had been killed, with a further 35 injured. Reports said that as they left the scene along a busy highway, the Americans fired indiscriminately on civilians and their vehicles.

Journalists said at the time that US troops confiscated their photos and video footage of the aftermath of the violence.

$2,000? Is this some kind of joke? Oh, wait. They're Afghans. That means their lives couldn't possibly be worth more... than a 15-inch MacBook Pro.

not funny.

really just not funny.