I was only halfway through this extremely depressing New York Times article about the smear campaign against the founder and principal of an Arabic language public school in Brooklyn when I stumbled on this page:
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week/
You read that right. Islamo-fascism awareness week. Unfortunately we'll have to wait until October to learn why "[it's a] Big Lie... that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat."
2008-04-28
2008-04-26
english fever!
Excellent profile in the New Yorker of Li Yang, a Chinese English teacher whose lessons sound like a weird hybrid of Maoist rallies and revivalist congregations. His method apparently involves holding English texts aloft and shouting phrases in unison. English teaching was never this exciting in Japan.
2008-04-17
Canada to outlaw Nalgene bottles!
I started seeing them as early as high school. By college everyone I knew had at least one or two of these floating around. I drank my first gin and tonic out of one in the parking lot of a Phish concert. A bright pink one once appeared in the trunk of the car I shared with my brother. I think he still drinks from it at work.
But according to an article in today's New York Times every one of those hard plastic Nalgene bottles contains small amounts of the toxic chemical bisphenol-a. This stuff can mess up fetuses, put your hormones out of wack and can cause some serious endocrinal disruption. In an effort to restore order to endocrine systems the Canadian government is considering making B.P.A and any products containing it illegal... including Nalgene bottles.
Thank god I live in the US, where the right to bear reusable water bottles is righten somewhere in the bill of rights. If they mess with that they'll have to pull it from my cold, dead hands.
But according to an article in today's New York Times every one of those hard plastic Nalgene bottles contains small amounts of the toxic chemical bisphenol-a. This stuff can mess up fetuses, put your hormones out of wack and can cause some serious endocrinal disruption. In an effort to restore order to endocrine systems the Canadian government is considering making B.P.A and any products containing it illegal... including Nalgene bottles.
Thank god I live in the US, where the right to bear reusable water bottles is righten somewhere in the bill of rights. If they mess with that they'll have to pull it from my cold, dead hands.
2008-04-15
it's a blog! obama, pranks, arty stuff!
I have a few to add to this page. But I found out too late that new Canon digital cameras don't work with Macs...
Part of my mission back in the states is to convince people here that Japan is not as strange as they think it is. Japanese comedians, Takashi Murakami and Japanese TV are making it extremely difficult.
The internet also has smart people on it. Without this excellent column by Joan Walsh on the "Obama hates the working class" controversy I would still be stuck in sound-byte and pundit land on the whole thing.
So that's it. Hopefully I'll write more in the future, but for now the 21st century has its blue and underlined teeth in me, so I'll be posting the little bits of fluff that drift my way too.
Like this. Oh Japan.
Part of my mission back in the states is to convince people here that Japan is not as strange as they think it is. Japanese comedians, Takashi Murakami and Japanese TV are making it extremely difficult.
The internet also has smart people on it. Without this excellent column by Joan Walsh on the "Obama hates the working class" controversy I would still be stuck in sound-byte and pundit land on the whole thing.
So that's it. Hopefully I'll write more in the future, but for now the 21st century has its blue and underlined teeth in me, so I'll be posting the little bits of fluff that drift my way too.
Like this. Oh Japan.
blawg
I haven't had this steady of an internet connection in years. There weren't any clouds of wifi that would drift into my Japanese apartment, so I would sneak into the second floor of the local McDonalds. I had once seen a white person tapping at their computer with the blank concentration that only seems to come from dipping into that expanding universe of clicks and colors, the internet.
A combination of cheapness and ideological opposition to constant web access kept me from buying it at home, but I occasionally found myself sprinting down to the McDonald's because of an appointment to talk to someone across the world on Skype or just a desperate need to check my email. (I wrote about my experiences cadging free internet connections in Japan a while back in a previous post.) This gave me more time at home to just read, write or watch movies. You know, all the stuff we did before the web. I kept this blog up as a stream of infrequent and perilously long essays with literary pretensions. I didn't really get "real" blogs, aggregations of links to other places.
Since coming back to the New York I find I can't turn the corner without bumping into another damn wifi connection. Instead of settling down with a novel or essays before bed I'll be rechecking Slate and Salon.com. Now that I've started to addictively add links to the message in my gmail chat space I figure I might as well just put that big writing on China project on hold and post them here too. So this is an "I'm back" post, kinda. K, so... here's the cool stuff:
A combination of cheapness and ideological opposition to constant web access kept me from buying it at home, but I occasionally found myself sprinting down to the McDonald's because of an appointment to talk to someone across the world on Skype or just a desperate need to check my email. (I wrote about my experiences cadging free internet connections in Japan a while back in a previous post.) This gave me more time at home to just read, write or watch movies. You know, all the stuff we did before the web. I kept this blog up as a stream of infrequent and perilously long essays with literary pretensions. I didn't really get "real" blogs, aggregations of links to other places.
Since coming back to the New York I find I can't turn the corner without bumping into another damn wifi connection. Instead of settling down with a novel or essays before bed I'll be rechecking Slate and Salon.com. Now that I've started to addictively add links to the message in my gmail chat space I figure I might as well just put that big writing on China project on hold and post them here too. So this is an "I'm back" post, kinda. K, so... here's the cool stuff:
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