alex chiang: web 6.0

No real content today, and I didn’t even find this link on my own — I stole it from Andrew Sullivan. Still, it’s a good one, and food for thought:

Whether This War Was Worth It by Robert Kagan, an editorial in the WaPo.

So I saw Batman Begins on Monday after reading my brother’s positive review, and agree that it was an awesome movie. My first thought was that it was a shame they didn’t make this movie before George Lucas started making the Star Wars prequels, because then they could have sat him down and made him watch this movie, saying, “Ok George, pay attention! This is how you make a prequel!”.

The other thought my buddy and I had was that, “wow, this was almost as good as the original Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson”, so we resolved to watch it last night.

Damn, were we wrong. The original Batman *sucks* in comparison to Batman Begins. I had vestigial memories of it being a really dark and creepy awesome movie, but watching it last night, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the campy original tv series with Adam West, not to mention that it was stupid goofy like Dick Tracy (although a quick IMDB search shows that Dick Tracy came out after Batman). I suppose one of the disadvantages that the original Batman faced is that it was made in the 80’s (yup, you heard me — released in 1989 — feeling old now?), and as we all know, our sense of what was cool back then was being distorted by alien mind rays coming from Uranus.

Still, we should just go and erase all of the current Batman movies, and just start over with Batman Begins, or as I like to call it, “the good one”.

The Fark headline reads: School looks to solve cafeteria overcrowding by serving lunch at 9:36 AM, and is tagged with “stupid”.

These kids in Poughkeepsie don’t have it so bad. Their school doesn’t start til 8, whereas at good old Randolph High School, homeroom started at 7:20. First period started at 7:30, and we had 40 minute periods, with 4 minutes passing time between classes. Lunch was periods 4 — 7, and if we do a little math, we see that 4th period went from 9:42 — 10:22.

This was the lunch period I had for two of my four years, and I ate a hockey puck cheeseburger, greasy fries, and a 1/2 pint of chocolate milk every day (which cost about $2, which should tell you more than you need to know about the quality of the food), except during wrestling season, in which case I would survive on the leftover sweetness in my mouth from brushing my teeth that morning.

Typically, it takes students 20 minutes to make it through the lunch line, leaving them 20 minutes to eat, Shuchat said.

Yup, me too. So looking back at my formative years, this is probably why I skip breakfast, eat lunch at 11:30 (or thereabouts), and can usually wolf down an entire meal in about 20 minutes. Thanks for giving me such healthy habits, Randolph High School.

For those of you who have never heard of Maddox, you are missing out. He has the “best page in the universe” and regularly writes scathing screeds full of vulgarity, misogyny, and hilarity. After reading an older article of his about sponsoring a vegetarian, I’ve come up with a refinement to his theory. Here is the text of the email I sent him; we’ll see if he respond:

Maddox,

Congratulations, you do indeed have the best page in the universe. Better you than me, because I don’t think I could handle having such an awesome life.

I was recently perusing your brilliantly evil plan to eliminate the stupidity known as “vegetarianism” by sponsoring said vegetarians, and was similarly disturbed that it creates a minor inconsistency in your world view by violating your being lazy rule (to avoid turning into a fat fuck).

I think I’ve come up with a better solution, and humbly submit it to your genius mind for comment, namely:

you still purchase 3 portions of meat, but instead of eating it all, you simply throw out whatever you can’t finish

This adds to the spite factor, in that not only are more animals dying because the vegetarian refuses to eat meat, but their deaths are extra pointless, because no one is even eating them. Additionally, the sponsor does not get fat AND doesn’t have to work out either.

Extra spite, less work. What do you think?

regards,

/ac

I just read the most pointless article from Ziff-Davis in my entire life, about how Open Solaris code doesn’t have swear words in it. This is worthy of a news article!?!?

A cursory search through the code revealed almost a complete lack of commonly-used profanity. This is in contrast with other examples such as the leaked Windows 2000 code and the Linux kernel project — which are famous in coding circles for the number of rude words programmers have included in an adult-rated effort to describe how a particular portion of the code works.

I don’t know much about the programming practices over at Microsoft, and I’ve never looked at the Win2k source code, but I’m somewhat surprised to hear that there is a lot of profanity in it. Maybe the culture there is different, but I have a hard time understanding why you would feel the urge to type “fuck” or “shit” into code that you are checking in, and how other people reviewing your code don’t seem to care.

Linux, on the other hand, I can understand the need for the hackers to feel cool and awesome that they’re not working for the Man and get to do sweet things like say “fuck this piece of hardware” in a comment or something. Man, I bet they get all the chicks… or something.

Just for fun:

Wow, look at those Linux guys. Aren’t they cooooool? Man, they’re cool!

fuck! shit! fuck! fuck! fuck! shit! I want to program Linux! fuck! shit!

Oh wait, my ratio of fucks to shit is wrong.

shit! shit! s… err, fuck! shit! shit! s… fuck! Yeah…. I’m coo, I’m coo.

Having just read Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, knowledge about the Mormons and their beliefs and history is somewhat fresh in my mind. The Guardian has an article about one of the sects mentioned in the book, led by Warren Jeffs, who is banishing teenage boys from the colony so that more teenage girls are available for marriage.

There is an interesting section at the end of the article:

What does the FLDS believe?

Polygamy allows a higher birth rate, increasing the “righteous” population. No man can go to heaven if he has less than three wives. The sect believes black people are inferior, the offspring of Cain. It teaches that America was first colonised by a lost tribe of Israelites and was visited by Jesus after his resurrection.

(by the way, it’s important to note that mainstream Mormonism only recently changed their teaching about those things, mostly so that their religion is more marketable.)

I find this fascinating for some of the same reasons that Krakauer does, namely that this religion was invented in modern times, its entire history is documented, and we get to watch it evolve (har har, the concept of religion evolving must be quite distressing to fundamentalists everywhere). I happen to think that Mormon beliefs are pretty ludicrous, but the most interesting part of it all is the large number of mainstream Christians who think the same thing.

They seem to be forgetting that their religion was pretty ludicrous as well (some bearded guy running around calling himself God (but was still killable) whereas at least the Roman pantheon of gods had the good sense to stay up in the heavens and not get crucified), but then it became popular and now anyone who has alternate beliefs is a nutjob heathen bound for hell. They point at the book of Mormon (and the D&C, etc) and correctly note that it was just written by some guy who claimed that God (via the angel Moroni) spoke to him and allowed him to transcribe the Truth. Nuts! Crazy! That guy was a lunatic, they claim.

Someone please explain to me how this is different from the Bible. Or the Torah. Or the Koran. Are those books really any more legitmate than the Book of Mormon just because they’re older and it’s harder to prove that they’re the works of wackos too?

All religions are nuts. Some more than others. And for one religion to look down on another religion for its beliefs is completely and utterly absurd.

An article in the CS Monitor today talks about the demise of the oldies radio format. The main example they use is WCBS-FM in New York.

I didn’t exactly have a normal musical upbringing. From as early as I can remember until I was perhaps a sophmore in high school, I listened to what my dad listened to, that being the oldies on WCBS-FM. So yes, I missed out on basically the entire 80’s phenomenon, but I can sing basically every Simon and Garfunkel song, ever, along with Chuck Berry, Jay and the Americans, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, the Big Bopper, and of course, the King. I grew up listening to Harry Harrison and Cousin Brucie and Bill Brown (and his brown bag special), and now they’ve been cast to the wayside.

I’ll miss you, Oldies 101.1.

IMG_1622

Originally uploaded by chizang.

A setting sun at Beach 69 (named so because it’s close to mile marker 69 on the highway). Why did I only come for four days? I are dum dum.

Here are all the pics from Hawaii (on Flickr): http://www.flickr.com/photos/chizang/tags/hawaii/

In a whirlwind 48 hours, it seems like I’ve managed to see almost all of the big island of Hawaii. Friday consisted of visiting the southernmost point in the United States (about 400 miles south of the southern tip of Florida), hanging out with green sea turtles on a black sand beach, and cavorting amongst smoking calderas and catching fleeting glimpses of lava spewing into the Pacific from afar in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Exhausted, we spent the night in Hilo (after driving around for umpteen hours trying to find a hotel listed in the Lonely Planet before giving up and asking some locals for help which ended up with us at the Naniloa Hotel) at some posh digs with arctic cold air conditioning.

Saturday was a bit more leisurely, with a drive across Saddle Road and going from sea level in Hilo to 13,800 feet to check out the surreal telescopes at the top of Mauna Kea with newfound friends Ben and Chrissy, and then back to -3 feet above sea level, frolicking in the ocean at idyllic Beach 69. Saturday concluded with a delicious dinner of homemade sushi (lots of room for improvement there), and then simultaneous passing out again.

Today’s activities include lazing about on the beach some more and avoiding the traffic snarls of the Honu Half Ironman Triathlon taking place a few miles north of here.

Hawaii rules, and going back to Colorado is going to be depressing indeed.

So I landed in Kona last night greeted by Jenny who threw a genuine lei made from orchids around my neck. The big island of Hawaii is humid (and how!), but it’s beautiful here. The sleeping arrangements look great on paper — sleeping on an enclosed patio with a million dollar ocean view — but in reality, the roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing starting at 4 AM make sleeping a bit of a challenge.

Not sure what’s on the agenda today, but I’m sure it will include liberal amounts of awesome.