Music, politics and comics

So Tai called the other day and told me to get on myspace and look up a band called "Chromeo". I did, and they're fraking fantastic! Imagine if Ratatat got the two guys from Flight of the Conchords to do vocals, except one of the guys has a talkbox. I immediately downloaded the torrent err, I mean bought the instant downloads online and put both sets of mp3s on my ipod. Oh fantastic!

So have you heard Hillary's story about her trip to Bosnia under sniper fire when she was First Lady? She's trying to add to her Presidential cred it seems. Oh wait, she was lying... (with youtube video of the truth! HA!) I really dislike her because I think she's totally slimy. This is just another incident of her slimy-ness showing through.

And I really do love xkcd.com. Today's comic is no exception:



Ok, the comic's funny, thats obvious. But notice that they're not just having sex, the boy stick-figure is going down on the girl stick-figure! Haha. All the more reason to love that site.

Well, I should get back to reading the two books I have to finish this week. Untill next time!

My slacker friends will be proud

Because Wednesday night I stayed up till 4:30am putting the finishing touches on a paper for my History of China since 1949 class, something I've never had to do before. Stay up all night finishing a paper, that is. Though, they might be fooled, a bit. I actually wrote 80% of the body of the paper the weekend before, and spent most of Wednesday revising and adding text. Wednesday I didn't wake up till almost noon, and had a meeting with my advisor at 1:30. Then I had a couple of hours in the library before class, and then I had to go to work till midnight.

I actually spent about 90 minutes Wednesday night on the phone with a dispatch tech out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. He was waiting for the local guy to come let him in so we could test their data line. The local guy took almost half an hour to arrive, and I spent the time working on my paper and bullshitting with the tech. It got to the point where I was bouncing titles off the guy! Some random redneck! Ha, it was great. I eventually decided on: "'Inevitable and Necessary to a Great Revolution:' Violence, Contradiction, and Idealism in China’s Cultural Revolution." The first half is a quote from the author in the book, the second half are the points I make in the paper. I love the quote though, it fit right in and saved me from having to come up with something to use.

When I first started the paper I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to get it to the page, but eventually I think it turned into a pretty good peice of work:

Early in Spider Eaters, Rae Yang introduces four women: a young girl in Switzerland, a courageous Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, a peasant working on a pig farm, and a literature professor who teaches at an American university. The story of these four women and Rae Yang’s attempts to reconcile them into the one woman that she has become is a fascinating one, but even more so are the contradictions of the Cultural Revolution as told through the words of a young Chinese girl. She must set aside her morality in the name of Revolution to justify the destruction of property and later, the taking of a human life. Then she must work through the horror of a member of her family being labeled a “rightist”, only to almost suffer the same fate herself. She must also learn to reconcile the ideals of the Party with the actually of the Communist Party at all levels, and yet she also shows how Chairman Mao was able to separate himself from the bad policy and squabbling within the party while rallying the Red Guard to his cause. Within these contradictions, this suffering, this confusion, and this idealism lies the story of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist period of China’s socialist revolution, as told by those who lived it.


Oh shit. I just re-read that paragraph and caught a gramattical mistake. HA! So much for attempting perfection. I'm sure the prof will catch it, but the intention is still fairly clear. The original wording was: "through the horror of as a member of her family is labeled". I guess the real lesson here is though staying up till 4:30am might get something finished, you *still* need to proof read one last time before turning it in. I'm not going to read the rest of the paper now though, no use worring about it all weekend.

Its 2:17am, do you know why that phone is ringing?

I worked 12 hours yesterday, 12 hours today and I have to work 12 hours tomorrow. Yet, for some infernal reason I can't get to sleep. So here I sit, watching a re-run of Meet the Press thinking "wow, James Carville looks like an evil man but sounds like a cute little southern puppy dog!

They're comparing Hillary's "3am" ad to Mondale's "red phone" ad. And now they have George H W Bush talking about a phone ringing at 3am. And it goes back even further to that Johnson "Daisy" ad from so many years ago.

I really need to get to sleep, and this beer isn't helping at all. Maybe I can just sleep through work?

The Awakening

Last week, I was dismayed to find out that "The Awakening" was sold. Some rich guy bought it for $750,000, and is moving it a half mile down the river, to the new National Harbor development in Maryland. I guess I can't really complain that he's moving it, but he plans on putting it on a very small section of beach, right smack in the middle of the dock area. Why not on solid ground? I have a terrible feeling this is going to end badly, like whenever we have a really strong storm. When I first saw The Awakening, I was a small child, maybe 6 years old. The statue had just been placed a few years earlier, and the area around the statue was still mostly grass. The power of seeing this massive giant digging himself up our of the ground was moving.

In recent years, they stopped re-planting grass between the sections of the status and instead covered the area with mulch. It is obvious why the park service would do this (to save money) when they didn't technically own the statute and it was in place on a permit that expired 25 years ago. But when I went to pay my final respects to the statue while it was still in Hain's Point, it was obvious that the mulch pretty much killed the statue's power. No longer is it a sculpture of a giant man pulling himself out of the earth, it is now a giant man digging himself out of a mound of dirt, or pehaps a grave. The mulch changes the atmosphere of the moment.

I think when the statue is moved to the beach, it will kill the idea behind the art even more. No longer is it a man trying to escape the earth, or even a fresh grave. Now he's a guy at the beach, whose kids buried him in the sand while he was sleeping and taking in the sun. I hope they reconsider and bury him in a park, or something. Even if it means you have to re-seed the darn thing every spring, PLEASE! Don't bury him in the sand.

Opening statement

What do you write for a first post on a blog in class with no time to put together a coherent thought? You post that its completely strange that its snowing tonight, but just 48 hours ago it was 75 degrees. Yup, posting about the weather... It's been a slow night.