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Four Reasons Why Justin Bieber Is Better Than You

2010-12-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber has a world record for the sheer quantity of internet hate he's received. But I think most of this hate is actually jealousy, because come on, who wouldn't want to have become a multi-platinum recording artist before puberty? Sure, he talks and sings like a 12-year-old girl trying to feign a gangster-lean, but here are four reasons why Mr. Bieber (which, if read aloud, must be pronounced "Meester Beeber") is better than, like, all you haterz, aiite.

4. He's Rich

He's 16 years old, about the same age when you were still begging your parents for an early allowance so that you could go buy yourself a new pack of whatever trading cards you were obsessed with. Mr. Bieber already has a net worth of $25 million. What is that wet feeling in your pants, you ask? Urine, my friend, because you now know that he could buy you and your holographic Pokemon collection a few thousand times over, and still have enough money to spare for a G6.

Far East Movement was talking about the Pontiac G6, right?

3. He Can Echolocate

Have you seen this kid's hairdo? He walks around with a fucking broom in front of his face. The only explanation for how he can go about his life without running into shit all the time (emphasis "all the time") is that he was brought up in an underground cave by bats who taught him the secrets of echolocation. And since bats typically use only very high-frequency clicks to echolocate, this also helps explain why Justin's voice is nigh-ultrasonic.

How the hell else would you explain this?

2. He Has Legions of Passionate Female Fans

Most of you sorry excuses for males would be lucky to get a high-five from the cute girl sitting next to you at the football game. On the other hand, Mr. Bieber has single-handedly filled those stadiums with orgasmically passionate female fans. He has been responsible for injuries to at least a dozen girls, and not via Chris-Brown-inspired rampages either; these injuries were caused by other girls fighting to get closer to Mr. Bieber during at least two separate incidences -- one in New York and one all the way in Australia. He's even rumored to be getting cozy with Selena Gomez, who, since she's now 18 years old, I hope I can call "pretty good looking" without setting myself up for any pedophilia jokes. I hope.

...well, fuck.

1. He Has A Giant Dong

Usher mentors him, Taio Cruz writes songs for him, Ludacris raps for him, Lil' Wayne's songs give shout-outs to him, Shaq dance-offs (?) him, and Rihanna performs with him. In other words, Mr. Bieber is surrounded by black folks. Clearly, he must also be black. And you know what they say about black guys...

Was it something about being good with tape measures?

Looking for a small TV?

2010-12-14T20:21:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted here in a few months not because I fell into a massive La-Z-Boy and got infected with obesity, but simply because I had better and more important things to do. Mostly things involving lots of money, beautiful women, and scandalous photos of me leaking onto the internet. I would post them here for your enjoyment, but I actually can't. Which brings me to my next point.

iPads are utterly useless.

Due to a series of unfortunate technical difficulties involving two of my laptops' power chargers, the only computer-like device that I have access to right now is my parents' iPad. Of course I already knew it was useless even before Steve Jobs somehow managed to Jedi mind-trick me into buying an iPhone a few months ago, but now I can verifiably assert that the iPad isn't so much an iPhone for giants, as it's so often been called, but more accurately a flat-screen TV for midgets.

You see, iPhones are useful because you can put one in your pocket and effectively bring a phone, a camera, and the entire internet with you pretty much wherever you go; iPads are not because you have to put yours on a table next to a Wifi router and then upload pictures to it from another, more capable device. Wait...that sounds a little like something else I know: a computer. But wait again...my $300 dollar netbook (currently missing a power charger) can also do things like run Flash, take pictures with its built-in webcam, save and open whatever file types I want, let me type on something where I can manage more than two words per minute, run programs that don't start with "A" and end in "ngry Birds", and most importantly of all, upload pictures to Blogger.

So instead of the marginally pertinent picture that I would otherwise leave you with, here's some ASCII art of a dwarf watching an iPad:

:)-< |

Comment: A Curious Case of Bravado

2010-07-26T00:49:00.000-07:00

In lieu of a better written, more thoroughly researched opinion, I would just like to announce, with all of my millions of readers as witnesses, that I henceto hereforth am calling North Korea's bluff.

For those of you who haven't heard the hullabaloo (hehe, "hullabaloo") about Operation Invincible Spirit (hehe, "Invincible Spirit"), here's the rundown. The US and South Korea are planning some joint training exercises, dubbed Operation Invincible Spirit, in North Korean waters. Apparently there's going to be an aircraft carrier plus twenty or so American ships involved (in other words, about 1% of the US Naval Fleet). Here is one of many news articles reporting on this epically trivial event. Before you read the next line, make sure you don't have any water in your mouth, because this shit is pretty funny.

In reaction to all of this, North Korea has threatened South Korea and America with, and I quote, a "physical response".

A "physical response" from North Korea? That's like a kick in the balls from Verne Troyer. Or a gunshot wound from Stephen Hawking. It's just really not that scary. Or possible. The last time North Korea tried to launch an ICBM, it ended up crashing into the ocean forty seconds later. I may eat my words, but I'm willing to put my stunningly flawless reputation on the line and say that I really don't think they're going to be getting more physical than a patty-cake competition any time soon.

Why I Don't Give a Shit About Facebook Privacy

2010-05-16T15:38:00.001-07:00

There's recently been a general uproar across the Intertubez about Facebook's various new privacy issues. In an attempt to expand its presence throughout websites beyond its own, Facebook is sharing more and more of its users' information with third parties. Users are threatening to boycott Facebook, commentators are calling Mark Zuckerberg the spawn of Satan, and I'm pretty sure someone somewhere has set himself on fire in protest. Even senators clearly too old to have ever used it are involved (link). But I for one couldn't care less about Facebook privacy, and here are some reasons why:

1. It's your fault.

The more you let Facebook take over your life, the more of your life it will have. It's like giving your organs freely to a very charming stranger on the street, and then becoming indignant when he has the audacity to sell them. If you don't want your employers to see pictures of your half-naked ass from last night, don't post them.

2. I already think about what I post on Facebook.

My text message history for the last two weeks is easily more embarrassing than all of my Facebook information combined, for the simple reason that I've never Facebooked drunk. Facebook is where a thousand semi-strangers are going to judge me for every letter I mistype, so any time I update my status or tag a new picture, I've already thought through 95% of the possible social and legal consequences. Of course this is definitely not true for Google, where half of my search queries includes something either illegal or pornographic. Or both.

3. Facebook needs to make money, and I need to keep mine.

If you think about it, it's actually amazing that Facebook is still in business. It gives a few hundred million people worldwide an immersive multimedia and networking experience for the princely price of nothing. And how does it do it? With your information. Because in the world of online advertising nothing is more valuable than customer information, and if I have to share my birthdate in exchange for the power to track down long lost friends from elementary school, then so be it.

5. The less privacy other people have, the more easily I will be able to stalk them.

And that's the whole point of Facebook in the first place.

The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade: Part II

2010-05-05T09:07:00.000-07:00

2. The Airbus A380

In 1988 (yes, that's 22 years ago), a group of Airbus executives decided to challenge the Boeing 747's 18-year reign as the super-heavyweight-freight-plane champion. They suggested building a plane so big that it would be to the 747 what the 747 was to pretty much every other plane: its uncle.

After quite a few years of additional research, Airbus engineers projected this gigantic plane could be up to 20% cheaper to operate than the rival 747, and the Airbus bigwigs were overjoyed. A 20% improvement in efficiency sounds pretty good, but keep in mind that by then, it had been almost thirty years since the introduction of the 747. Naturally, no one bothered to point out that a 20% improvement in three decades is actually pretty dismal, nor that there was still no good reason why the new plane had to be the size of a supertanker, so the Airbus executives, fueled by the size of their wallets and, presumably, the lack of size of some of their other appendages, green-lighted the A380 "Let's Get Into A Childish Size Fight With Boeing" project.

Airbus's competitive business strategy: physically block Boeings from getting onto the runway.

But Airbus forgot one key rule of international competition - do not get into size fight with America. Because whether we're building cars, planes, or hamburgers, our first instinct is to make it big. We are damn good at making things big, and we will find every reason to make things big. But when we decide that it's time to move on to smaller and better things, then you can be damn sure we've exhausted every possible reason to keep making things bigger.

As Airbus was off frolicking in Brobdingnag, Boeing sat down in 2003 and realized that with skyrocketing fuel prices and plummeting customer demand, smaller and more fuel-efficient planes would be a lot more attractive to the airline industry. It would be much easier to fill up such a plane with passengers, and much cheaper to fill it up with gas. While Airbus found itself running into lengthy delays, mostly due to unforeseen complications of the A380's size (e.g. they ran out of copper wire at one point), Boeing started and completed developing the 787 Dreamliner.

Airbus delivered its first A380 to Singapore Airlines in 2007, and Boeing is wrapping up final flight testing for the 787. There are already 866 standing orders for the 787.

Total orders for the A380? 202.

Pardon me, it seems like I'm suffering from a momentary bout of amnesia. Who's your daddy again?

Okay sure, A380s are more expensive, at about $300 mil a pop versus $150 mil per Dreamliner. Even so, Airbus has made less than half as much on the A380 as Boeing has on the 787, even with a three-year head start. The A380 was an overwhelming undertaking with underwhelming results, and frankly, I'm not looking forward to traveling in that flying sardines can any time soon.

So much for making Boeing your nephew, Airbus.

1. The International Space Station

The International Space Station was born out of a semi-noble idea - to maintain a semi-permanent human presence in space. It was hoped to be an unprecedented collaboration between the most influential nations and continents of the globe - America, Russia, Europe, Japan, and, even though we all know it's really just a part of America, Canada. It would serve as a testbed for microgravity experiments and train astronauts for extended missions in space.

The ISS, still in its last phase of construction, has indeed, for the most part, accomplished what it was intended to do. Dozens of research articles are published every month with data collected on board the ISS, and astronauts have learned tons of new ways to prevent their muscles from dying in space. But at what price?

The total cost of the project, according to the European Space Agency, is around 100 billion euros, or about 140 billion US dollars. More than ten times the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program, which brought twelve men to another celestial body. More than twenty times the cost of the Large Hadron Collider, which explodes light to make black holes. And what exactly does the ISS do again? Well, float.

A portion of the International Space Station. I have no idea what that is, but it probably cost your country an A380.

I love space exploration, but I just don't see how the ISS is doing any exploring by hanging around Earth. It's like if Christopher Columbus decided to explore the world by sailing around England a hundred times. I want manned missions to Mars, rovers to Io, another Voyager craft shooting towards the Oort cloud. All of those combined would probably still be cheaper than the ISS, and we wouldn't have to worry about keeping anything from falling down onto our heads.

The International Space Station tops this list not because it was a failure, but simply because 140 billion dollars is such an overwhelming price tag that anything short of cold fusion or world peace is going to suck. And $140 billion for a metal thing that floats? That deserves to be the Most Underwhelming Invention of the 2000s.

Interim

2010-03-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

Before I finally get around to finishing my Most Underwhelming Inventions List, I would like the share with you a little moment of disbelief I recently experienced on my way out of LAX, in a new segment I would like to call:

"Wtf Rly?!?!" with Jon Zhang
(not at all an SNL rip-off)

This week's "Wtf Rly?!?" moment - A Toyota Prius with, you guessed it, custom rims.

Let me reiterate: this is a Toyota Prius with custom rims.

To start with, custom rims are a bit like...really expensive cummerbunds. Unfunctional, unnecessary, and something no one would ever miss if you didn't put one on.

Second, there is an inverse relationship between how cool you look in a car versus how many enviro-eco-mental-hollywood-hipster points you earn with it, and that is precisely why Priuses are so ugly.

Third, the only time custom rims can ever possibly be useful is to reduce weight on a really fast sports car. And if there's an antonym for "really fast sports car", then that word is probably "Prius".

So by putting custom rims on a Prius you are spending money trying to make something, whose whole point is to be ugly and slow, prettier and faster. It's like wrapping a carbon-fiber-encrusted cummerbund around Jay Leno's chin.

The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade: Part I

2010-01-23T00:39:00.001-08:00

Though the onset of 2010 certainly brought along less drama than that of the previous decade, it also brought with it the usual bevy of "Top _____s of the Last Decade" lists. I especially liked one entitled "Top 10 Things We'll Miss Most About the 2000s", which reminded me of the sad fact that those cool "200_" glasses, with the middle "00" as the eye frames, will never return until the year 3000. Anyways, I decided that I too would pitch in, somewhat belatedly, to the fray of best-of-the-decade-compilations.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, The Top 5 Most Underwhelming Inventions of the Last Decade.

5. The Playstation 3

In May of 2005, Sony finally announced the long-awaited PlayStation 3. It was the sequel to the PlayStation 2, the most successful console ever in the history of video games; it was also the heavyweight retort to Microsoft's Xbox 360 and was supposed to continue Sony's undeniable reign over the game console industry.

On paper, every single hardware spec was better than the Xbox 360. The 360 had three processors, the PS3 had nine. Yes, nine. In fact, even the programmers at Sony didn't know what to do with so many processors, so one of them is dedicated entirely to OS security and another one is completely unused. Still, with seven-ish processors running at 3.2 GHz, the PS3's peak single-precision float capability is estimated at a whopping 204 gigaflops, twice that of the Xbox 360 and probably three or four times that of your computer. The PS3 had built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, native high-definition DVD playback capability, flash memory plug-in support, and bigger hard-drive options than its competitor.

So did the PlayStation devour the Xbox when it went to market? Well, no. It's only sold about 70% what the Xbox 360 has, and it's sold that many only because 1. Blu-Ray, luckily for Sony, won out over HD-DVD and the PS3 is one of the cheapest Blu-Ray players on the market, and 2. hackers like to buy PS3s to use as cheap supercomputers. The Folding@home project at Stanford, for example, uses the PS3's massive processing capability to simulate protein folding.

So how on Earth did the fastest gaming machine in the world get relegated to doing protein origami? Because even though it's got the juice of a supercomputer, the PS3's in-game processing capabilities never matched up to the Xbox 360's. Why? Well that's the saddest story of them all:

The bus speeds were too slow. The processors couldn't communicate with each other quickly enough. They were too fast for their own good.

4. The Atkins Diet

Above, the Atkins Diet (for females) in a single equation. Below, the Atkins Diet in a single word: doubtful. (I am convinced, however, that there exists a way to rearrange the above equation to make it true.)

The Atkins Diet wasn't exactly invented in the 2000s, but for some reason it became the coolest thing since sliced ~~bread~~ steak around 2003, so I'm classifying it as belonging to the 2000s. In short, Dr. Robert Atkins, the man who invented this program, advocated a low-carb, high-protein diet to lose weight and improve cardiovascular health. Which already doesn't make sense.

Low-carb, high-protein means you have to take your standard plate of spaghetti-n-meatballs, take out all the spaghetti, and replace it with even more meatballs. So you take an otherwise wholesome, healthy meal and turn it into artery-clogging juiciness.

And did Dr. Atkins even bother to think for a millisecond about, um, hmm, Asians? Because let's see here: most Asians eat rice, and almost only rice. The rest eat noodles, and almost only noodles. Even well-fed Asians are still some of the skinniest people in the world. So did Atkins ever, um, hmm, wonder why that was the case?

The only reason that I've included this in my list of "underwhelming inventions" rather than just "bad, ill-conceived, and clearly wrong inventions" is because of the frighteningly ardent following that the Diet first attracted, followed by its frighteningly quick abandonment once people realized it didn't work. At one point, around one in ten people in America was on the Atkins Diet. Until, of course, Dr. Atkins himself died in 2003 as an indirect result of a heart-problem he developed. Presumably from eating too many meatballs.

3. The Segway Human Transporter

Admittedly, it's strange that riding on a bicycle, a two-wheeled contraption with a giant knob wedged in between your legs, is still so much cooler than riding on a Segway, a two-wheeled contraption without a giant knob wedged in between your legs.

After months of intense media speculation that ranged from hoverboards to anti-gravity propulsion, inventor Dean Kamen introduced the Segway Personal Transporter in 2001, and it turned out to be underwhelming before it had even had a chance to sell a single unit. Not a hoverboard, nor that floating car Obi-Wan Kenobi had in Episode IV, the Segway was instead revealed to be a platform on two wheels that could keep itself upright with what I would like to call "a bunch of gyroscopes and shit". Oh, and you could stand on it, and make it move.

So it's surprising that, despite how a bicycle could do pretty much the exact same thing, the Segway was still hyped like there was no tomorrow. Steve Jobs thought it would be as significant an invention as the personal computer. John Doerr, a well-known venture capitalist, said it would be more important than the Internet. Dean Kamen himself said that it would "be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy". The company estimated it would sell 100,000 units in the first year alone.

But tomorrow came, and now, more than nine years later, the Segway has sold a grand total of...drumroll please...50,000 units. Half of its first-year predictions. If the car had performed this dismally against the horse and buggy, then we'd probably still be riding in carriages today. And to add insult to injury, the Segway isn't just a massive business failure, but it's also become a popular target to lampoon, whether it's by Andy Richter on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien or by the writers of Arrested Development, who made the Segway the vehicle of choice for the underachieving, melodramatic magician named Gob.

So how can anything be even more underwhelming than something that was supposed to be more important than the Internet? Stay tuned for Number 2 and Number 1.

The Church of JRZ - Genesis

2010-01-05T02:00:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, I thought that "money" was synonymous with "power". I thought that if Bill Gates just kept investing in the stock market, he would one day swallow everyone else's bank accounts and become a world dictator. I hoped that I would earn enough money throughout my career to buy a tropical island from Bill Gates after he took over the world. And I worked hard to make that dream a reality.

But thanks to the strange wonder that is democracy, quite a significant number of ~~retards~~ (sorry, that word is insensitive) criminally underqualified neo-Democratic terrorists (CUNTs) have now been chosen to run our country. And because of their infinitely nonexistent wisdom, combined Federal and State income tax for a top-earning Californian is creeping over 50%, not to mention the myriad of sales, property, capital gains, and estate taxes that've been shoveled into our tax code. But that's not even the bad part, because the CUNTs are now going to be taking that money and giving it to a homeless illegal immigrant to feed his Nyquil addiction. Though this isn't exactly the first example of American socialism, it just proves once again that you really are better off being poor.

So what now? Is there any point in even trying to earn a good wage anymore?

Nah.

A sensible man might try to run for political office instead. But then again, no one sensible is going to win an election in this country.

So you know what I'm going to do? You guessed it: start my own religion.

You see, religion, I believe, is now the only way to have the best of both worlds: to get both money and power; to have my cake, eat it, and then throw it in Nancy Pelosi's face, too. I'm not going to pull a Catholicism and ask for donations, nor am I going to declare myself the fourth Prophet. But if I can convince enough followers to have my religion formally recognized by the IRS, then I think we might be able to come up with something world-changing.

I haven't worked out all the details yet - like for instance, its name. I could name it "Zhangism" after myself, but that sounds too Oriental and I don't want to be inadvertently attracting the neo-Yogi white-mom crowd. Nor have I really concocted an inane creation myth. But for now, I'll just sketch out some basic tenets of the Church of JRZ (to be later amended):

1. Charitable donations are tax-deductible. Every Follower must donate his entire gross, pre-tax income to my Church.

2. Taking out a loan is tax-deductible. My Church will grant every Follower a zero-interest loan equal to his donation.

3. Business expenses are tax-deductible. Every Follower must have his own registered business. He must make as many of his purchases business-related as possible.

4. In any election (federal, state, regional, municipal, etc.), every Follower must support the candidate who promises the lowest taxes.

5. Stealing from another Follower is not permitted. Stealing from any person or organization with socialist tendencies is encouraged (e.g. the CUNTs in Washington, a university with an overzealous financial aid program), to a degree corresponding to the severity of that person's/organization's socialist practices.

6. Followers must abuse government wealth-redistribution programs (Medicare, welfare, social-security) as much as possible.

And that's all for now. You get the point. Now if I can just come up with four more and find some rocks or golden plates to scratch these on...

Question of the Day

2009-12-13T16:31:00.000-08:00

Paradox of Life #2: Bad airport food.

Through all my agonizing layovers at the airport and the subsequent and even more agonizing plane-rides, there is one question that has always bothered me and that I have never been able to understand: Why is airport food so bad?

Other than bad chefs, bad management, and incompetence in general, there are exactly two fundamental constraints on the quality of food at any restaurant: 1. the price the customers are willing to pay, and 2. the freshness and availability of the ingredients. And based on these two factors, airport restaurants should be the best in the world.

Firstly, price is absolutely irrelevant at an airport, where anyone coming off an inter-continental JetBlue flight with no meal service that got delayed on the runway for three hours would be willing to pay half his life savings for a decent meal. And anyways, the standard prices for food are already around $5 for a 2 oz. soda and $50 for a hot dog; and seeing as how all those airport diners are still in business, customers are clearly willing to cough up the dough.

And what about the freshness and availability of ingredients? IT'S AN AIRPORT. Airports are transportation hubs. Not only is an airport easily accessible from all the major highways in the area, an airport also has things like, oh, I don't know, AIRPLANES. So there's really no reason why my seafood udon should ever look more plastic than the plasticine display models when there's several tons of the finest spice and freshest seafood getting unloaded from the plane about two hundred feet away.

Plastic ranks high on my list of things that food should not look like.

And finally, there's the worst thing about it all - every airport restaurant has a cute name that makes it sound gourmet, like Sankaku Grill or Ancora Coffee or Songkran Express. And that's just false advertising. Because instead of always getting me so prematurely excited before I taste my food, they should just prevent my disappointment by calling themselves Grilled Plastic, Brewed Plastic, and Spicy Plastic.

Or maybe this is all just a result of some weird collaboration between the airlines and the airport - after all, the worse the airport food tastes, the better the in-flight meal will seem. Or perhaps the less we eat, the less we weigh, and the less money the airlines will have to spend on fuel. Or maybe it's because...actually let's stop hypothesizing now before my brain blows up and I turn into Spencer Pratt again.

Spencer Pratt was not accidentally dropped on his head as a baby. Instead, he was just accidentally lobotomized.

Why Global Warming is a Pile of Shit

2009-11-24T15:18:00.000-08:00

Global warming does not matter.

We can debate the factual validity of man-made global warming for ages. We can argue the scientific "consensus" (link, link, etc.) for the next century. But you know what? It doesn't matter.

Because the most worrying, annoying, and plain stupid part about current Climate-Change-tology is its supporters think that global warming is the best reason to stop polluting - that because our future great-grandchildren might have to wear shorts more often we should all become vegan, that because polar bears might go extinct we should cap our industries, that because Holland might go underwater we need to all buy Priuses. Have ever you seen your future great-grandchildren? Or a polar bear? Or Holland? No. And most inanely, these environmentalists think that because we're all in this together, we need to all solve this problem together. Newsflash: High School Musical is fictional and Communism doesn't work.

HEY GUYS! Stop global warming or else our future is going to look like this!

Telling people to stop polluting because of global warming is like telling your roommate to stop farting because the air current caused by his fart might create a microscopic pressure imbalance across the room, which, given the right temperature differential, might resonate the windows imperceptibly and release dust particles from the window frames, which, at the right time of day, might slowly rise over the next decade into the stratosphere where, given the right humidity conditions, might seed a growing dust cloud that will drift at a rate of 37-62 miles/year to North Korea, where the dust might condense atmospheric water vapor, which, if it's typhoon season in neighboring Japan, could catastrophically amplify existing weather patterns in Pyongyang, which might make Kim Jong Il's great-grandson really angry and result in worldwide thermonuclear devastation in the year 2125. Finite possibility * infinite risk = still a bunch of crap.

You don't tell your roommate to stop farting because of the remote possibility of remote catastrophe in some remote future, you tell him to stop farting because A) it sounds disgusting, B) it smells bad, C) there's a limited amount of air in the room to dilute the smell with, D) you have a hard time breathing his fumes, and E) if he doesn't stop immediately, you are going to kick him in the nostrils. And similarly, you get smokers to quit smoking by telling them it causes cancer, and you get fat people to stop eating fries because you tell them Kate Moss is hot.

When you want to convince people to do something, you tell them about an immediate and tangible consequence, not some hypothetical abstraction. Do you think developing areas like India and Africa actually care how the coastlines are going to look in a few decades, or do you think they'd rather just get in on some of Uncle Sam's money through the Copenhagen Treaty? Thinking about a hypothetical future is a luxury enjoyed by only a few, and just because we are lucky enough to do so in America doesn't mean the rest of the world feels the same way.

What most environmentalists don't seem to be able to grasp is that "pollution", "sustainability", and "global warming" are entirely separate notions that are only coincidentally related. To explain:

Pollution is bad. Burning fossil fuels creates things like smog. Smog causes acid rain, which quickly and noticeably kills trees and animals. Smog significantly increases cancer rates. Smog looks like a blanket of feces covering the city. As Beijing has shown during the Olympics, when you suddenly stop burning fossil fuels, the smog goes away within a few days and your problems are solved. And when you suddenly start burning fossil fuels again, the smog comes back and you're back to living in feces. Hence, we should burn less fossil fuels. Effective immediately.

"Do you want to live in this?" would be much more effective than threatening us with dead polar bears.

Sustainability is good. We have a limited amount of fossils to burn. At our current rate of burning, oil will soon become very expensive, and soon afterwards we will run out of oil altogether. To find more oil, we are having to drill in places previously untouched by man, unnecessarily killing plants and animals in the process. Hence, we should burn less fossil fuels. Effective immediately.

Global warming is...possibly not great. We may have contributed to a gradual rise in the Earth's average temperature by burning fossil fuels. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, we might or might not increase the average temperature by a few degrees more. If we don't burn any more fossil fuels, the Earth's temperature might or might not stabilize. If animals aren't able to adapt quickly enough to the warmth, a lot of them might go extinct. If they are able to adapt quickly enough, then only a few of them might go extinct. Hence, we might want to burn a bit less fossil fuels. Effective in a hundred or more years.

So why the hell are we incessantly badgered about the one unproven, least immediate, and least tangible reason to conserve? Why are we adopting the most communist, and thus least effective, approach to environmentalism? And this is why global warming is completely irrelevant, because there are countless better reasons for us to curb our fossil-fuel addiction, and none of them have to do with Al Gore.

Notebook Doodle

2009-11-10T23:19:00.000-08:00

I Am Atlas!

2009-10-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

Why have I not been updating? Why am I forsaking my precious blog-readers in their time of need? Well don't blame me (ever.), but blame my roommate, because two weeks ago he finally convinced me to open up this book called Atlas Shrugged.

Usually, a book wouldn't be nearly enough to tear me away from my computer screen. In fact, anything short of Miranda Kerr spontaneously Apparating onto my lap wouldn't be enough to tear me away from my computer screen. But Luddites rejoice, Atlas Shrugged has reminded me that there are still things simpler than the internet that are just as fun.

Part of the reason why the novel is so fun is because it's about the total lameness of small-minded liberal folk. And vegetarians. Of course the message is conveyed slightly more eloquently across a thousand-some pages, but the basic tenet remains the same. And now, if you are a liberal and refuse to read it because of what I just said, then you'd just be proving how small-minded you are, and I'd get to make a reference to another one of my favorite books ever: Catch-22, sucker!

My only problem with Atlas Shrugged, though, is that the author does have a fairly transparent habit for self-flattery. Her penname is Ayn Rand, which is already quite unattractive-sounding for a female, but a quick two-minute jaunt through Wikipedia revealed that her birthname was actually much worse. She was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, which makes me think she probably looked something like this when she was young:

A few years later, after changing her name and transforming from a cardboard cutout into a real person, she looked like this:

She then found an especially flattering picture of herself to print as her author portrait in the book:

And finally, when Rand modeled Dagny Taggart, the main protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, after herself, she made herself look something like this:

And that is why Angelina Jolie has actually been approached to play Dagny Taggart in a possible movie adaptation of the novel.

Meet a (few) Magical Horned Creature(s): Dubai Edition!

2009-10-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

If you ever watch television, read the news, surf the internet, listen to the radio, or, in short, don’t live in a hole, then I’m going to assume that you’ve heard of Dubai. You might not be able to point it out on a map, but neither can I, and it really doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that it’s an absolutely astounding place, with a wondrous list of wondrous achievements: world’s biggest mall, world’s largest fountain, world’s tallest building, world’s only indoor ski slope, and generally the world’s most excessively luxurious city. But before the arrival of three very magical creatures with three indistinguishably similar names, Dubai might as well have been non-existent. Their story starts in 1958, with a man named:

Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
(1912-1990)
Ruler of Dubai from 1958-1990

When he came to power in 1958, most of the people were still riding around on camels and living in huts. There was a small dribble of a creek going through the middle of Dubai, in which some of the small trade ships coming from Asia and Europe could dock. Seeing the opportunity to turn that into a massive trading port, however, Sheikh Rashid solicited about $100,000 of funding from American investors to dredge that creek. American investors, being short-sighted as usual, refused; but Sheikh Rashid, being a baller, raised his money anyways and transformed the city into a major international trade hub.

Dubai’s economic development exploded with, naturally, the discovery of oil in 1966. The trade infrastructure that Sheikh Rashid had built meant Dubai could start exporting that black gold almost immediately. In 1973, Dubai strengthened its economic and political influence when it joined the UAE as a principal state, and established the first of many “Free Zones” in Jebel Ali in 1979, where foreign companies could be entirely exempt from taxes, tariffs, and duties. This attracted millions of dollars of overseas investment, and by the time of Sheikh Rashid’s death in 1990, Dubai was one of the richest regions in the entire Middle East.

Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum
(1943-2006)
Ruler of Dubai from 1990-2006

Unlike its neighbor Abu Dhabi, who has about a tenth of the Middle East’s oil reserves under its lands, Dubai’s oil reserves are expected to run out next year in 2010. Sheikh Maktoum, son of Sheikh Rashid, knew that relying on oil wouldn’t be a sustainable long-term economic strategy. So as an alternative, he decided to expand tourism.

Let me start off by explaining that before this man, there was absolutely no reason any sane person would want to visit the Middle East. Its major exports are oil, oil, and a repressive religion. The natural scenery consists of sand, sand, and very very high temperatures. So to try and transform a sweltering dirtpile into the world’s most popular tourist destination is nothing short of batshit insane.

So what did Sheikh Maktoum do? Well, he took all the billions that Dubai was making from trade and oil, and he invested them into projects that were as equally batshit insane as he was. He was, perhaps more than any other politician or economist alive, a firm believer in the mantra that no one remembers second place. So Sheikh Maktoum made sure that everything Dubai did would be the first, the largest, and the best of its kind in the entire world. This is the man who oversaw the construction of the Burj Al Arab and the Burj Al Dubai, who started building man-made islands in the ocean, and who established Dubai as a luxury and trade capital of the world.

Few people can say that they literally changed the geography of their country.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
(1949-)
Ruler of Dubai from 2006-Present

And what on Earth could a successor to such a brilliantly crazy man as Sheikh Maktoum possibly do to match his predecessor’s accomplishments? Well, one way to get attention is to donate a lot of money. And by a lot, I mean that incumbent Sheikh Mohammed has pledged more than $10 billion dollars of personal money to expanding Middle Eastern education, making him one of the most charitable individuals in modern history (I say “modern” because Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s donations, inflation adjusted, come out to several kagillion dollars).

Also, in a drastic bureaucratic reorganization that puts Obama’s efforts at modernization to complete shame, Sheikh Mohammed digitized every single branch of Dubai’s government within the first eighteen months he was in office. Nothing is handled on paper. Messages, forms, memos, referendums, are all transmitted instantaneously. The residents almost never use snail mail – instead, everything, including bills and taxes, is handled online.

His work on establishing and expanding economic free zones have led rise to “Internet City”, where the biggest players in the worldwide IT industry, including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and HP, have major headquarters; “Media City”, the Middle Eastern home of CNN, Reuters, Bloomberg, and BBC; and most recently, “Health City”, where the Dubai government invites hundreds of doctors, medical experts, and healthcare innovators from across the globe to convene in cutting-edge hospitals. His newest brainchild is the creation of a super-massive theme park that will not only combine Disneyland, Six Flags, and Universal Studios under one roof, but will also showcase 1:1 replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, and the Great Wall of China. So why visit anywhere else, when Dubai has it all?

He's awesome and he knows you know it.

We, as a country, have a lot to learn from these guys. Just consider for a moment the magnitude of what they achieved. They turned a desert pothole, with nearly no resources of its own, into a thriving economy, a remarkable tourist destination, and a true beacon of modernization and capitalism. And for that, I salute them with the most honorable award that I can give: magical horned creature status.

Cumulative Magical Horned Creature Rating: 7 (+1 for being nonfictional)
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)

Help the Typhoon Victims. Keep Your Money.

2009-10-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

While my deepest condolences go out to the unfortunate victims of the recent rain in Southeast Asia, my deepest resentments go out to the watery deluge of emails in my inbox soliciting donations to help them. Am I a selfish capitalist? A misanthropic Scrooge? Well, maybe, but that's not why I refuse to give my broken old shoes to a typhoon victim any time soon. The reason, in fact, is rather simple: Asia is on the other side of the world.

Since I just traveled over to that yonder land two months ago (link), I am fully qualified to tell you that a trans-Pacific airplane flight is, alas, not free. In fact, just to haul myself plus 60-odd pounds of luggage over to China cost me seven-hundred dollars each way. Since I weigh about 180 lb, the "shipping" rate works out to about $700/240lb, or roughly $3/lb.

Which is actually a really good deal, compared to international shipping. FedEx'ing a 100 pound package from here to Manila costs approximately $900 according to their website, or roughly $9/lb. Not only is that option more expensive, but the trip would also take two or three more days than a personal flight.

What about freight shipping, on a good old-fashioned boat? The price for that would be somewhere on the order of $700 per cubic meter of storage. Suppose you were shipping a giant cube of pure water at exactly 4 C, at a density of 1000 kilograms per cubic meter - it would still come out to $0.32/lb. I suppose you might consider that good, but then I suppose I should mention something else: transit time would take a month. And generally speaking, typhoons are emergencies.

Thus, even if we consider the completely unrealistic scenario of including your own body weight in a shipping-cost analysis as I have, the very vast majority of your donation would pay for moving stuff from here to there. And that's just ineffective and wasteful. Wiring them the money itself would be equally useless, for although everyone likes a bit of extra dough, cash is frankly not a very nutritious food. Nor good shelter.

Another icon of wasteful spending.

So don't start feeling good about yourself when you organize another fundraiser for typhoon victims or drop off your ugly Christmas sweaters at the nearest collection bin, because I can assure you that exactly 99.42% of whatever you contribute will never get there. If you really want to help, fly yourself over and build some houses for the locals. If you really have no other use for your ugly clothes, give them to me, and I'll drive them over to the Salvation Army where they might actually go to an inner-city kid. And if they don't, well, I'll still get a nice tax deduction.

Travel Update No. 2: Hong Kong-ing

2009-09-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

I am a diehard Chinese patriot. I bleed the exact color of the Chinese flag. So I would usually be the last person to say something like this:

Thank God for British occupation in Hong Kong.

Sure, the redcoats converted half the native population into poppy-heads during the Opium Wars and were summarily owned by the Japanese during World War II, but they also saved a few million mainlanders from Communist Mao in the late 40s and 50s and served as China's only connection to the outside world until the 1970s. Much more importantly, though, the British taught the Hong Kong-nese how to wait in proper "queues".

Chinese people do not know how to wait in a line. It doesn't matter if they're waiting for a cashier in the mall, or for a stoplight on the street, or for a stall in a public toilet, they will run and shove and bounce and spit and generally maneuver themselves, with whatever means necessary, to get closer to their objective. It won't matter if you're as tall as Sun Mingming or have the countenance of a recently castrated bull, because they aren't trying to pick a fight. They just want, more than anything in life, to cut in front of you.

On the left: how to wait in a proper line. On the right: how Chinese people tend to wait in lines. Based on the size of that crowd, they're probably trying to order some KFC.

But if it's anyone who pretends to have manners, it's the British. And it took them nearly a hundred years but I think they succeeded in teaching Hong Kong people some etiquette.

So unlike a typical Chinese metropolis, drunk off its own economic success and staggering to keep up with its own progress, Hong Kong feels like an established business center, a cosmopolitan community, a mature and civilized big brother to the slightly obnoxious little siblings of Shanghai and Chongqing. You won't have to worry about rude, unshowered folks with head lice cutting you in line. Hong Kong is like New York, if New York didn't have all the hobos; it's like Los Angeles, if Los Angeles had a gorgeous harbor running through the middle of it; it's like London, if London had Chinese translations on all of its street signs.

To illustrate the cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong: If you know Cantonese, there will obviously be no language barrier; if you know Mandarin, there will also be no language barrier; if you know English, there will still be no language barrier.

To illustrate the stiff British-inspired culture: It was the middle of summer when I went. I wore the equivalent of a loose-fitting Speedo when I went outside. But everyone else wore long pants, vests, and shoes.

A typical Hong Kong couple demonstrating typical Hong Kong fashion. Note the dyed hair, the flimsy vest, and all the black. The outside temperature was about 700 degrees, and since I secretly took this picture with my camera at waist level, I've included a scientifically accurate scale of their heights.

The most important thing about the city, though, I have saved for last, and it's a point that I don't think I can ever emphasize enough. The food is so good. Go to any restaurant, eastern or western. Point to any item on the menu. And it will be absolutely delicious.

Travel Update No. 1: Sitting

2009-09-20T20:26:00.000-07:00

The worst part about travelling is flying, and the worst part about flying is sitting. So before I left for my trip, I definitely was not looking forward to the five million hours of bad lumbar support, two millimeter leg room, the greasy guy with head lice in front of you reclining his seat into your mouth, and the sheer, insufferable boredom. I am, however, glad to inform you that significant progress has been made in reducing passenger discomfort.

I flew with Cathay Pacific, an airline that I've never heard of but who apparently won some Airline of the Year award a couple years ago, and it's easy to see why. First off, they have clamshell seats that slide down to recline (instead of reclining to recline) so you don't have to worry about head lice in your mouth. And secondly, not only does each seat have a private viewing screen, but you can also choose what you want to watch, whenever you want. Holy crap! I think I'm going to need a clean-up on Aisle 3 just thinking about that again.

Why there's a coat hanger button I have no idea.

There's movies, TV shows, news programs, music, and for those heavily brain-damaged among us who who want to intentionally bore themselves even further on an already insufferable sixteen-hour flight, there's also a program that tracks the plane's progress on a very, very, very, very slow-moving map of the world. It shows you all the information that a sane person would never want to know, like how the temperature outside the plane at 11,215 meters while travelling at 701 mph is -50 C and that you're still exactly 420,398 miles from your destination ten hours into your flight.

The entertainment selection probably sucks, you say? I assure you, with a library of classic movies like Shawshank and Space Odyssey to new releases like Star Trek and Watchmen, plus episodes of everything from 30 Rock to House to Family Guy, you'll feel like Kirstie Alley in a candy store, or a Catholic priest who just got hired as a substitute teacher for the local kindergarten. So no longer do you have to pass the time trying to sleep in a painfully contorted pretzel, you can now pass the time watching Vin Diesel beat up Mexican drug dealers.

For each movie that I remember watching, or that I didn't fall asleep in the middle of, I shall now attempt a 140-character, Twitter-esque review:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Fun. Exciting. EXPLOSIONS. I want Wolverine's powers. EXPLOSIONS. Hugh Wolverine Jackman is a badass. EXPLOSIONS.

Ocean's 13
More of the same Ocean's formula. Which means more wickedly cool and unbelievably suave good bad guys.

God of Gamblers
Classic HK comedy, Chow Yun Fat + Andy Lau being idiots = hilarity. Monty Python fans will like.

And finally, my groundbreaking attempt to review two movies in one Twat:

Push/Fast and Furious
Horrible acting. Hilarious special FX. Cheesy stories. White guys beat up mex/black/chinese baddies. Hot girl leads who look really alike.

On the left, Jordana Brewster from Fast and Furious; on the right, Camilla Belle from Push. On a small screen ten hours past your usual bedtime they start looking exactly the same.

Holy Crap I Died for Five Weeks

2009-09-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

I was considering posting an apology here for not only not posting recently but also for not posting about not posting beforehand, but I won't. Because I have two very good reasons why my last entry was sometime in the Paleozoic Era: 1) H1N1, and 2) Damn Commies.

I embarked on a circumnavigation of half the globe sometime back in the middle of August, and along the way I got swine flu in Hong Kong, hospitalized in Dubai, reverse altitude sickness coming out of Tibet, and blocked from Blogger (along with 90% of the internet, and 99% of the internet's good parts) in China. Hence, not being either Jesus or Chuck Norris, I realized I'd have no choice but to leave you with a picture of a lovely deep sea angler for the past few weeks.

This route only includes where I stayed for at least one night. Curvy lines were flights, that dotted line was an overnight train ride. For big version, click on the picture or here.

I arrived in LA just yesterday, and though listening to the trilled "rr"s and long "o"s of the native language here did feel oddly comforting after a month of non-Latin, the best part about being home, by far, is coming back into the arms of pop culture. Serena Williams. Kanye West. Obama calling Kanye West a jackass. Thank you Lord for blessing us with such entertaining black people. So as soon as I catch up on the month of Youtube and MTV that I've missed, I'll perhaps update you with all the details of my trip. In the mean time, here's a pictorial lesson, from yours truly, on how to sleep in the airport when your red-eye flight has been delayed five hours, while simultaneously guarding your carry-on items from terrorists and thieves.

Hint: tie some of your bags to your wrist. With a flowery, yellow ribbon.

Attension to Detale

2009-08-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

In a completely unintentional but, at least for the purposes of my blogging, somewhat fortuitous coincidence that makes for a smooth transition from my last post to this one, I've spent my last two days of my life shut up in my garage. Starting the next Google? Youtube? Building self-replicating Hannah Montana dolls to take over the world? No, I was doing something a lot less exciting and a lot more difficult: trying to fix my car.

Without going into the laborious details of my House-like diagnostic genius and my profound mechanical prowess, at the end of the day I found out that the cause of all my headaches, the reason why my ABS/ETS/XKCD system wasn't working, was because the accountants over at Mercedes-Benz thought it imprudent to stick an extra ten cents worth of solder onto an $1800 circuit board. Although it was satisfying to put my planet-sized electrical engineering tuition bill to good use, it was still frustrating and frightening to think that a slight lapse in attention to such a miniscule detail almost became the downfall of an otherwise finely engineered, $50,000 automobile.

The approximate amount, and corresponding cost, of extra solder that would have saved me ten hours and the car from its dismal reliability rating.

And this brings up a critical point that, despite being in a country where big ideas and crazy dreams are cherished, success often depends on much more mundane habits like attention to detail. The only U.S. products that still dominate internationally come from its high-tech industry, an industry built by obsessive-compulsive engineers like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the Google guys. Was a computer operating system like MS-DOS truly that groundbreaking when it was released in the 1980s, a decade after the first Unix build? Similarly, the Ipod was unveiled three years after the first commercial mp3 player, and by the time Google entered the search-engine fray, giants like Yahoo and AOL had been in the market for eons. These companies didn't necessarily make anything new, but they made every facet of existing products better.

The more worrisome aspect of all this, though, is that attention to detail doesn't seem to be a trait that you're born with, or you can learn, but is inexplicably tied to your cultural background. Returning to the subject of cars, I used to think that Japanese automakers sprinkled some magical Shinto dust onto their cars so they would last forever, but now I think that their success has, just like that of America's technology companies, been a result of their scrupulous attention to even the tiniest of components:

A big-thinking GM executive might say, "okay, we've got four wheels and an engine, so let's weld a lot of steel to it to make it safe, then weld some more steel on it to make it bigger, and hey, while we're at it, let's weld some more steel on the front to make it uglier, and we'll call it a Hummer."

The deep sea angler fish was the main inspiration for the design of the Hummer H2. Other artistic influences include a brick and Ayers Rock.

A detail-oriented Mazda executive on the other hand would say, "watashiwa domo arigato naruto tokyo", or translated, "we have the RX series, which has been one of the most successful sports coupes in the world for several decades, but what if we made it better by shaving 88 grams from the rear-view mirror for the new RX-8?" Japanese cars aren't bigger or faster than their American counterparts, nor are they styled with the zeal and passion of the Europeans, but because of their obsession over the nittiest of bits, Hondas and Toyotas have become the most fuel-efficient, most-reliable, and downright most practical cars in the entire world.

Moral of the rather circumlocutious story: Chinese manufacturers need to go to Japan and learn how to not make crappy exports. And always, always over-solder.

Green Means Slow

2009-08-03T16:19:00.001-07:00

Recent Addiction: Watching semi-pirated episodes of hit British car-show Top Gear, which basically consists of Jeremy Clarkson and his two partners in crime travelling around the world, driving really fast cars, really quickly. And every once in a while they'll do something jaw-droppingly ridiculous/awesome, like drive to the North Pole in a modified Toyota pickup just to prove that they can.

This is Jeremy Clarkson. At this point, I see no reason for you to continue reading this post when you could be watching more of him here.

Recent Addiction-Inspired-Addiction: Watching three Brits drive around really fast made me want to put on an accent and drive around really fast, too, but given my lack of a car, job, and guts, I instead picked up Forza 2 (a platinum hit for just $19.95!) for Xbox 360. I've been playing it up to three hours a day, and though it's not quite the same as real life racing, at least I don't have to worry about, out of many things, killing myself.

Recent Conclusions from Recent Addictions: People who drive recklessly on public roads are stupid. (And by reckless, I don't mean going 30mph in a 20mph zone, or only stopping semi-completely at stop signs. I mean criminally idiotic.)

Did you know that the word "reckless" is derived from the Greek word "wreckless" or "wreck-less"? Because when the firefighters drag your wrecked car and dead body from the side of the road, that's one less wreck for rubber-necking passerbys to admire.

No one's impressed by your speeding, because putting your foot down on the accelerator is about as skillful as, um, putting your foot down on the accelerator. It's not much of a testament to your car either, given that a $12,000 Toyota Yaris has a top speed more than twice the 60mph speed limit. And if you think that getting some wheelspin while turning through a 6-lane intersection at 45mph in the middle of the night with your 150-horsepower, automatic transmission, front-wheel-drive sedan is unbelievably baller, well you're wrong. It just means your tires suck.

Someone who speeds on public roads is like...a middle-aged blind man running frantically around a Home Depot. Naked. While setting off firecrackers. Because first of all, no one wants to see that. No one is impressed. Not only does he have a great chance of impaling himself on a power saw, he's also likely to seriously injure some innocent shoppers. And when he does find his genitals wedged between a couple of two-by-fours, or when the cops come and tackle him into the fertilizer aisle, everyone else in the store is going to be LOL-ing.

The naked, blind, firecracker-shooting man in Home Depot after two laps around the store.

So please, all you potential speedsters, slow down. Make all our lives a little easier and safer. And if you're ever feeling that itch for speed, try driving slower and more efficiently, save twenty bucks of gas, and go get yourself a copy of Forza 2.

Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Cthulhu!

2009-07-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

The moment you’ve all been waiting for! I now present the second installment of…

Meet a Magical Horned Creature!
This Week: Cthulhu! (a.k.a. Tulu, Clulu, Cighulu, Kulhu, etc.)

An artist's pitiful attempt at evoking the paralyzing terror of Cthulhu.

Meet the Great Cthulhu and be glad he doesn’t speak any human language, because he would otherwise be quite offended at your inability to pronounce his alien name. If you’re trying to communicate with other hominids, however, the commonly accepted pronunciation nowadays is “ka-THOO-loo”.

Describing Cthulhu is a bit like an atheist trying to describe God, because it’s nearly impossible to figure out where to begin. And in all honesty, their origins are pretty similar. Cthulhu, like God, first appeared in some hallucinogen-inspired writing some years ago and has since inspired a cult-like following. More specifically, he (or maybe she? or it?) debuted in horror and science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, as a mythic cosmic entity who crash-landed on Earth eons ago and subsequently coaxed the development of all sentient life. But unlike God (or so I hope), Cthulhu is really, really ugly.

Being a cosmic entity does have its drawbacks. Once the stars began to drift out of alignment, Cthulhu “died”, though not in the usual sense of the word. He cast a spell to protect himself and his spawn, so instead of dying he went into some sort of magical suspended animation and is now waiting for the stars to realign to make his comeback. Without a physical body, he communicates with people through their dreams, where he chants something along the lines of “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn” (sic). Thankfully, he and the similarly un-pronounceable city he lived in, R’lyeh, both sank to the bottom of the ocean, so at least for now we don’t have to stare at his terrifyingly ugly corpse all the time.

And just how ugly is Cthulhu? He’s described as a slimy, green combination of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, with a “pulpy, tentacled head” and a “grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”. He’s also as big as a mountain. To get an idea of what he might look like, just imagine a gargantuan Davy Jones + a gargantuan pterodactyl + a gargantuan amount of Nickelodeon slime, and then make it ten times uglier and bigger just for good measure.

Possible relations to Cthulhu: Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Davy Jones, Jedi Master Kit Fisto, and a man with an octopus on his head.

If you think the story of Cthulhu is all imaginative folly, a series of ultra-low-frequency, deep oceanic sounds recorded in 1997 nicknamed the “Bloop” indicates otherwise. Scientists are pretty sure that the sounds were biological in origin, but the bloops were also so loud that only an animal several times the size of a blue whale could’ve made them. Clearly, no other explanation exists, other than the fact that Cthulhu is real.

One of the several recorded "bloops", sped up 16x and probably around 1,000,000 times quieter. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 8.5*
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)
*I was considering giving Cthulhu a 9, but he seems a tad too undesirable to be rated that close to a lovely unicorn.

Amazon.com's Paradox of Choice

2009-07-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

I love online shopping. There’s so much choice.

I hate online shopping. There’s too much choice.

Case in point: I’m going to be frolicking around the world for a month starting mid-August, and I’ve been trying to buy a nice camera to record all the gloriousness. With a nice camera must come decent lenses, and in an effort to buy the most versatile, best quality, least expensive, and just-pompous-enough piece of hardware, I come across something like this on Amazon:

Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX VR Zoom Nikkor Lens
$202.70

55-200 mm is apparently pretty versatile, Nikon sounds like a high-quality Japanese brand, $200 dollars isn’t too steep, and it’s got a few pompously unintelligible letters at the end to scare off those unsavory plebeians. My needs and ego satisfied, I’m just about to add this to my cart, until I scroll down further and see the “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” section and see something like this:

22% buy the item featured on this page:
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX VR Zoom Nikkor Lens
$202.70

16% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor Lens
$166.20

At this point, I’m already changing my mind because the second listing is almost forty dollars cheaper. But then it’s missing the “VR” at the end! I have no idea what “VR” stands for, but I want to keep all my letters! Worried, I read on:

10% buy
Sigma 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 DC Telephoto Zoom Lens
$159.99

Holy sweet and sour soup! A Greek letter comes into play!

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor Lens + UV Haze Filter
$164.95

You can even do combinations? Amazon.com moonlights as a Mongolian BBQ!

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX AB CD EF GH ZX THE PWN Zoom Nikkor Lens
$179.95

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 BMW M5 VIPER ZR1 Zoom Nikkor Lens
$190.55

10% buy
Alpha 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$201.00

10% buy
Beta 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$200.99

10% buy
Delta 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$200.98
…

And before I could finish reading the whole list, my brain proceeds to explode in a graphic illustration of the Paradox of Choice:

Spencer Pratt, the universal result of brain malfunctions.

We Need Another Cold War

2009-07-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly depressed that that the first decade of this millennium is almost over and our world isn’t even slightly similar to Stanley Kubrick’s space-faring visions in Space Odyssey: 2001. I couldn’t help but wonder: if we still can’t travel regularly to the moon and beyond, then what on Earth (quite literally) have we been doing for the last four decades? Thus I decided to open up my mental filing cabinets, in addition to a few tabs of Wikipedia, to figure out what we’ve been up to since Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps. Join me on a trip down memory lane, one decade at a time, to relive some of the most significant cultural and technological achievements of the last century.

Why aren't we there yet?!

1999

This is a year perhaps better defined as the one before 2000. Dozens of woefully ignorant psychos are building Y2K-proof homes in remote forests, while new cults herald the return of Jesus, aliens, and sentient dolphins. The Backstreet Boys release Millennium. DVDs are just beginning to gain some traction against the still dominant VHS format, and NASA seems like it just can’t keep track of its Mars rovers – it loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander within a span of two months.

1989

A quick jump of just ten years before 1999 and the world is already unimaginably different. Though the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse and the Berlin Wall is being dismantled, the threat of Communism is still a very tangible presence in the United States. The phrase “George Bush” isn’t yet synonymous with all things evil, but is rather the name of a President who would have an 80% approval by the end of this year. Tape cassettes are still the best way to store music. NASA and the European Space Agency are busy fending off budget overruns as they’re trying to complete their joint venture, the Hubble Space Telescope.

1979

The United States is in the middle of its second oil crisis, which means that small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars are suddenly extremely popular. Chrysler prophetically asks the U.S. government for a $1 billion loan to avoid bankruptcy. Michael Jackson releases his first blockbuster solo album Off the Wall, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing. The Apple II is the platinum standard of “home computing”, but is in all honesty a glorified graphing calculator. Voyager I, which, in thirty years would be well on its way to exiting the solar system, is just now flying by Jupiter to give us our first look at the planet’s rings and moons.

The icon of a revolution.

1969

The Vietnam War. Hippies protesting in college campuses all over the country. The very first Wal-Mart opens, the very first Brady Bunch episode premieres. “Computers” are known as “workstations”, and running on just the very first build of Unix, they can’t do much at all. Slide rules are an engineer’s best friend, but addition and subtraction you still have to do by hand. Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this technological backwardness, America also managed to fly some guys onto the moon.

A whole bunch of guys playing with these is how we got to the moon.

2009

So what have we been doing for forty years? It seems like simultaneously a lot, yet not much at all. Our personal lives have improved drastically with the popularization of computing technology, but at the same time the Apollo 11 moon landing still seems like a pinnacle of human achievement. Black-and-white photographs of the Saturn rockets and the Lunar Module still look surreally like scenes from a sci-fi movie, yet the rockets and spacecraft were designed with slide rules. Why does sending men to the moon now seem as much a pipe dream as it was back then?

Both congressional and presidential belt-tightening has severely impacted NASA’s operations in the past few decades, and the slowing global economy looks like it’ll only make things worse. But with trillions of dollars now invested into “stimulating” our flagging economy, space exploration is still being inexplicably neglected. As with infrastructure expansion, money spent on space exploration would similarly create thousands of new jobs. The long-term benefits of the cutting-edge technologies developed in new space programs would far outweigh those produced in other government projects, and if the Apollo program was any indication, space exploration has the added benefit of training and inspiring engineers in all levels of education.

According to our government, a new moon program would cost too much.

Furthermore, though the Space Race was born in the midst of an epic ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, space exploration has since then become a surprisingly effective vehicle for international cooperation. From the formation of the European Space Agency, to NASA and the ESA’s collaboration on the Hubble Space Telescope, and to the fifteen-nation joint effort on the International Space Station, conquering the final frontier has brought together countries with even the most hostile of histories. Expressed best by Indira Ghandi, who at the time of the Apollo 11 landing was prime minister of India, “I fervently hope that [the lunar landing] will usher in an era of peaceful endeavor for all mankind.”

Perhaps most importantly, though, Space represents something gloriously intangible, a worldwide dream of mankind that has persisted unchanged over thousands of years. In no religion is Heaven anywhere but the sky. It is Ra’s ocean, Zeus’s mountain, the high court of Emperor Huang Di. NASA’s space programs have been named for Gods because these endeavors symbolize not just man struggling to escape from his terrestrial, mortal shackles, but also the possibility that one day he too, through sheer ambition and bravery, can join the ranks of the Pantheon.

Lost In Google Translation

2009-07-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I dropped by the bookstore the other day, and after threading carefully through the hordes of excited middle-school kids clustered around the Twilight and Naruto sections (even though I did consider joining them…) I inevitably wound up in some variant of the Computers / Business / Economics / Reading Material for Intellectual Elitists aisle. The manager must have been addicted to Gmail or something because nearly all the books on the first display shelves were about Google – about how revolutionary it is, about how it’s changing our world, about how Google is demonstrating that the technological singularity is near. Admittedly, I do use Google about twenty-six hours a day, but I still have my doubts about how advanced Google’s machine-learning, artificial intelligence, and (insert computing buzzword here) technologies really are.

So I’ve devised a test to find out if Google’s juggernaut A.I. lives up to its hype. Using its automatic translation software, I will play the Rumor Game with these two paragraphs. If you’ve never played, the Rumor Game is simple: you have, say, ten people in a line, and the first person starts a rumor that he whispers into the next person’s ear. This continues down the line until the rumor is transmitted to the last person, who then says it out loud, and everyone has a good laugh at how distorted the original message has become. Instead of whispering, though, I will translate the text into a different language each time, and then finally translate it back to English where we’ll see how much of the original content is still understandable. Here we go,

To Chinese:
我扔掉的书店有一天，经过仔细线程通过成群的兴奋初中的孩子围绕黄昏和火影忍者节（即使我没有考虑加入他们... ）我不可避免地清盘在一些版本的计算机/商业/经济/阅读材料的知识精英过道。经理必须是Gmail或上瘾的东西，因为几乎所有的书的第一展示货架左右谷歌-如何革命，这是关于它如何改变我们的世界，如何表明，谷歌是技术奇异接近。诚然，我不使用谷歌关于二十六小时一天，但我仍然有我怀疑谷歌如何先进的机器学习，人工智能，以及（在这里插入计算机行话）技术真的。
所以，我已经制定了一项测试，以找出如果谷歌的主宰人工智能辜负其炒作。利用其自动翻译软件，我将发挥的传闻游戏这两个段落。如果您从来没有打过，谣言游戏很简单：你有，比如说， 10人一行，并以第一人称开始传言，他悄悄进入下一个人的耳朵。这种情况持续下去，直到下线的传闻是转交给最后一个人，谁然后大声说，每个人都具有良好的笑如何歪曲原始邮件已成为。相反的窃窃私语，不过，我将翻译文本不同的语言，每次，然后把它终于回到英国，我们会看到有多少的原始内容仍然是可以理解的。在这里，我们走，

To Serbian:
И бацају књиге једног дана, након пажљиво нарезано кроз тхронгс загрејани децу од око јуниор средњој школи вечери и Наруто секција (чак и ако нисам размислите придружио им ...) И неизбежно ликвидација у неким верзију рачунара / пословни / економског / читање материјала пролаз у елитне образовани. Водитељ мора бити Гмаил или зависност, јер су скоро све књиге по полицама први приказ Гоогле - Како до револуције, то је како се мењају наш свет, како то показују да је Гоогле је технологија у близини једнину. Тацно је да не користе Гоогле 26 сата на дан, али ја још увек има моје сумње о томе како се Гоогле Напредна машински учење, вештачке интелигенције, те (овде убаците рачунар жаргон) технологију стварно.
Стога сам развио тест да ли Гоогле вештачка интелигенција је кључ да живе и до његових хыпе. Користите аутоматско превођење својих софтверских ћу играти игру гласина две тачке. Ако још нисте играли, гласине о игри је једноставна: ви сте, на пример, 10 особа, а његова странка на прву особу за покретање гласина, он је тихо у следећој лицу ухо. То се наставља све док се линија је пребачен у последњих гласина, који је тада рекао гласно, свако има добру смијати о томе оригиналну поруку је постала искривљен. Уместо шапутање, а ја ћу превести текст на различитим језицима, сваки пут, а онда напокон вратио у Великој Британији, ми ћемо видети колико је изворни садржај је још схватљиво. Идемо,

To Arabic:
يلقي الكتاب الأول في يوم من الأيام ، وبعد narezano بدقة ساخنة خلال حشود الأطفال في جميع أنحاء المدارس الاعدادية ، وأمسيات Naruto القسم (حتى لو لم أكن النظر في الانضمام لهم...) والتي لا مفر منها تصفية بعض الصيغة الكمبيوتر / العمل / الاقتصادية / مواد للقراءة في مرور النخبة المتعلمة. ويجب أن يكون الزعيم Gmail أو الإدمان ، لأنها كلها تقريبا رفوف الكتاب الأول عن طريق جوجل -- كيفية قيام الثورة هو تغيير في عالمنا ، وكيف تبين أن غوغل للتكنولوجيا في القريب المفرد. وصحيح أن غوغل لا تستخدم 26 ساعة في اليوم ، ولكن لا يزال امامي بلدي شكوك بشأن كيفية جوجل متقدمة آلة التعلم ، الذكاء الاصطناعي ، و (هنا تضاف بلغة الكمبيوتر) التكنولوجيا حقا.
ولذلك ، فإنني وضعت لاختبار الذكاء الاصطناعي جوجل هو المفتاح لترقى إلى مستوى الضجيج. استخدام الترجمة الآلية لبرامجك الشائعات تلعب لعبة نقطتين. إذا لم تكن قد لعبت حتى الآن ، ما تردد عن لعبة بسيطة : كنت ، على سبيل المثال ، 10 شخصا ، والوفد المرافق له لأول شخص لبدء شائعة ، فهو هادئ في مواجهة المقبلة الأذن. ولا تزال حتى هذا الخط الذي ينقل الى الشائعات ، ثم قال بصوت عال ، والجميع يضحكون جيدا الرسالة الأصلية أصبحت مشوهة. بدلا من أن يهمس ، وأنا لن ترجمة النص في لغات مختلفة ، في كل مرة ، ثم عاد إلى المملكة المتحدة ، وسنرى كيف المحتوى الأصلي لا يزال على البال. يذهب ،

To Finnish:
Kirja on ensimmäinen päivä, kun narezano huolellisesti lämmitetty kautta väkijoukkoja lasten kouluissa kaikkialla keskellä, ja iltaisin Naruto osa (vaikka en ole sitä mieltä, yhdistämällä ne ...) ja väistämätön selvitystilaan joidenkin kielen tietokone / business / taloudellinen / käsittelyssä materiaalia läpipääsy on koulutettu eliitti. Johtajan on oltava Gmail-tai riippuvuutta, koska ne ovat lähes ensimmäinen kirja hyllyt Google - kuinka vallankumous on muuttaa maailmassa, ja miten se osoittaa, että Googlen tekniikka on lähellä yksikössä. On totta, että Google ei käytä 26 tuntia vuorokaudessa, mutta minulla on silti omat epäilykseni siitä, miten Googlen kehittynyttä Machine Learning, tekoälyä ja (tässä lisätä kielellä tietokone)-tekniikka todellakin.
Siksi olen kehittänyt testi tekoälyä on avain Googlen aihetta melutaso. Käyttö machine translation ohjelmistoja huhuja, pelata peliä kaksi pistettä. Jos se ei ole ollut tähän mennessä huhuja siitä, että peli on yksinkertainen: te, esimerkiksi 10 ihmistä, ja valtuuskunnan hänen ensimmäinen henkilö aloittaa huhu, se on hiljainen, kun vastassa on seuraava korvalla. Ja jatkaa tätä linjaa siirretään huhuja, hän sanoi ääneen, ja nauraa makeasti kaikki alkuperäisen viestin on tullut vääristynyt. Sen sijaan, että kuiskaamalla, ja aion kääntää tekstin eri kielellä, ja jokainen kerta, palasi Yhdistyneeseen kuningaskuntaan, ja näemme, miten alkuperäinen sisältö jää mieleen. Mennä,

Finally, to English:
"The book is the first day, when narezano thoroughly heated through crowds of children in schools across the middle, and in the evening Naruto part (although I do not think a combination of them ...) and the inevitable liquidation of some of the language of computer / business / economic / reading material for the passage has been trained in the elite . The director must have a Gmail or a dependency, because they are close to first bookshelves Google - how the revolution is to change the world, and how it shows that Google's technology is close to the unit. It is true that Google does not use 26 hours a day, but I still have my doubts about how Google's advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and (here insert the language of computer) technology indeed.

Therefore, I have developed a test for artificial intelligence is the key to Google's rise to the noise level. The use of machine translation software to rumors, to play a game of two points. If it is not so far been rumors that the game is simple: you, for example, 10 people, and his delegation to the first person to start a rumor, it is silent in the face of the next ear. And to continue this line moved to the rumors, he said aloud, and a good laugh at all of the original message has become distorted. Instead of whispering by, and I intend to translate the text in different languages, and each time I returned to the UK, and we see how the original content remains to mind. Go,"

(Insert a good laugh here! This is also unsurprisingly similar to some of the stuff at engrish.com)

Highlights:

Original: “the manager must have been addicted to Gmail or something”
Mistranslated: “the director must have a Gmail or a dependency”
Google is implying that Gmail and dependencies are mutually exclusive. So forget rehab, just get a Gmail account instead!

Original: “Admittedly, I do use Google twenty-six hours a day…”
Mistranslated: “It is true that Google does not use 26 hours a day…”
That is indeed true.

Original: “but I still have my doubts about how advanced Google’s machine-learning…”
Translated Quite Well, Actually: “but I still have my doubts about how Google’s advanced machine learning…”

Case in point: Though Google might be very well capable of taking over the English-speaking countries of the world right now, it doesn’t seem like it’s quite ready to take on the rest. Just imagine if “surrender, now” was mistranslated into “all your base are belong to us” all over again.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has his eyes on the prize. He also likes to wear that pimp-cape to work on casual Fridays.

Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Huey Long!

2009-07-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

Since this blog’s current subtitle (subject to change) implies that I’ll be writing about “pop culture, accountants, and magical horned creatures”, and since the number-crunchers at Google and Microsoft in my last post are more or less accountants, then that means I’ve been unfairly neglecting the magical horned creatures section of this website for the last two weeks. In an effort to ameliorate this journalistic travesty, I now present the first of what might become a multipart series:

Meet A Magical Horned Creature!

Where I’ll try and introduce you to a new magical horned creature, either real or fictional, in each installment. Disclaimer: just because you can’t see the horns doesn’t mean they’re not there.

This Week: Huey Long!

Admittedly, this guy’s horns were pretty discreet. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t magical. He was a crazy ass mofo with a congruously silly name, who you might remember in your U.S. History classes as the governor of Louisiana who nicknamed himself "The Kingfish".

He was self-conscious about his horns, so he Photoshopped them out.

Why, though, of all the magical horned creatures to talk about, did I choose him? Well, first and foremost because his name is pretty funny. And also, because I’ve been poring through The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester, a densely-packed, fifteen-hundred-page narrative history of America from 1932-1972. It’s like the Lord of the Rings of U.S. History, the ultimate combination of length, detail, and utter confusion, though unfortunately without attractive elves or talking trees. Anyways, I ran into Huey (his full name is actually Huey, not Hubert) a few chapters ago, and though this entire section of the book is overshadowed by the awesomeness known as Franklin Roosevelt, Huey still managed to stick out like a hobbit in the NBA, a small but hilarious gem floundering around in a sea of giants. Here’s a brief synopsis of his life:

Huey Long was born in 1893, in Winnfield, Louisiana, and it didn’t take him long afterwards to realize how baller he was. He was an excellent student in high school, so excellent, in fact, that he ended up getting tired of his principal and circulated a petition to get him fired. Huey was promptly expelled, but somehow still managed to win a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University.

The scholarship apparently didn’t cover textbooks that Huey couldn’t afford, so he dropped out of school almost immediately. After living an unglamorous life as a travelling salesman for a few years, however, Huey then felt that his career choices might broaden if he attended law school. So he enrolled at Tulane Law School, but instead of spending the typical three years there, he took classes for eight months, convinced the board to let him take the Louisiana State Bar, and passed. He became a lawyer at the age of twenty-one, an achievement that, apparently, had never and has since never been repeated in the state’s history.

He ran for governor twice, in 1924, where he lost, and 1928, where he won. He was always a champion of the poor, as his campaign slogan was “every man a king, but no man wears a crown”. His Share the Wealth program was American socialism at its finest (or worst), and he subsequently ravaged large corporations as governor. He collected enough taxes from the rich to expand the state’s infrastructure from thirty miles of paved roads to 2,500, zero large bridges to twelve. He opened up night schools to teach 175,000 illiterate adults how to read, and mind you, this was all during the worst part of the Great Depression.

How did Huey do all this? Well don’t forget this man was crazy. Throughout his stint as governor from 1928 to 1932, and later as Senator from 1932 to 1935, he centralized Louisiana’s government to revolve around, well, himself. All police departments reported directly to him. He bribed all the judges in the state, including the Louisiana Supreme Court justices; those who wouldn’t comply with his demands were removed through underhanded tactics like district gerrymandering or brute force. Newspaper critics who angered him were often beaten, kidnapped, and jailed. Right before his Senate election, Huey’s secretary’s husband threatened to sue Huey for “alienation of affections”, a.k.a. fucking his wife. And you know what Huey did in response? He flew the man up on a plane, waited until the election polls closed, and then had him brought back down. I have no idea how Huey managed to get him onto the plane in the first place, but I assume it was something along the lines of a free vacation to the Caribbean.

How I assume Huey convinced his secretary's husband
to get on an unexplained flight.

Huey then planned on moving into the White House with the election of 1936, but thankfully he was shot the year before. I say “thankfully” because otherwise he really might have won and turned the country into a communistic monarchy, or something. Capitalism was saved, FDR could continue his million years as president, and men everywhere could go back to work comfortable in the knowledge that Huey Long was no longer out seducing their wives.

Before I conclude, however, there’s one more anecdote that I think is worthy of mentioning. Huey, being the only Southern governor who treated blacks as equals during the 1930s, was immensely unpopular with the growing Ku Klux Klan. When the KKK’s leader threatened to come into Louisiana and march/protest/campaign against him, he replied with the following, which I think is much more potently demonstrated by a bad illustration:

He gets baller status in my book.

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 5 (+1 for being nonfictional)
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)

Google Chrome OS vs. Microsoft Gazelle: Awesome New Ad Campaigns?

2009-07-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

In a slightly more technological aside today, I'm loving the renewed Google-Microsoft tension after the announcement of the Google Chrome OS (link). It's the long-awaited extension of the Google Chrome browser, which itself was already an indirect attack on Microsoft Office, since Chrome was basically made to handle Gmail's web-based productivity software. The new Chrome OS isn't targeted directly at the PC and is meant for netbooks instead, but with an official label as an "OS" there's no doubt that Google has pulled all the stops and is charging at the Microsoft Windows stronghold with its spears drawn and trebuchets loaded. Yes, trebuchets. Trebuchets are awesome.

Actual schematics of Google's takeover plan. On the left is a trebuchet, which will swing Chrome-bombs (which I shall now dub Chrombs) at Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft has its own netbook-OS answer, though, with Microsoft Gazelle (a long, detailed, research report here). Tons of other places have already written on the technical details of the two proposed systems, but what I'm looking forward to most doesn't have anything to do with the systems themselves. What I really, really want to see are the ad campaigns that Microsoft and Google are going to concoct for this epic battle.

Will there be a new Google Guy created in the spirit of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads? Or better yet, will Google accent its fun-loving, multi-colored image with the similarly-colored Teletubbies?

A new target demographic!

How will Microsoft respond? It's now stuck in the middle of a brutal bashing from both Apple and Google, so will it just say "fuck it" and go back to its ill-fated Seinfeld + Bill Gates lunacy? I can only imagine, but this is going to be one helluva entertaining media battle.

uhhhmm.

From MJ's Memorial

2009-07-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

This was probably the saddest scene from today's memorial service, when Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, after having been shielded from the media for so long, finally spoke. If I remember correctly, this was right after the group performance of "We Are the World" and the eulogies of Michael Jackson's siblings, who recalled experiences like watching the 1980 Grammys together, of Michael crying because had won only one, and then saying to LaToya, "Watch, LaToya...I will become the biggest and greatest entertainer of all time." Well, you sure as hell did, Michael. The very best wishes to your children.

Paris Jackson, Michael's 11-year-old daughter,

"Ever since I was born, my daddy has been

the best father you could ever imagine. And I

just wanted to say I love him so much."

Edit: I'm not sure what to think about Al Sharpton's participation in this whole thing, especially when I see how nearly all the performers on stage were African-American. Does he have anything to do with Michael Jackson, other than the fact that they're both black? I just hope that he wasn't doing anything more sinister than being the self-serving idiot he always is.

Help! Twitter is Running Me Ovesdfghjkfsf;;’

2009-07-03T20:39:00.001-07:00

Due to lack of initiative to go to the library and check out some proper reading material, I’ve recently started to devour the slightly outdated Time magazines lying around my kitchen counter. Usually, my despairingly short attention span limits me to just the Briefing section, which includes my favorite “Pop Chart” page – a quick, chuckle-inducing chart depicting recent popular events on a scale of “Shocking” to “Predictable” to “Shockingly Predictable” – but the Time 100 issue finally motivated me to actually open up the magazine’s main section. I was looking forward to be enlightened on the cultural significance of Michelle Obama, on why Manny Pacquiao matters, on what on earth a man named Van Jones is doing to our environment. Instead, the first piece I ran into was one on Twitter, of all subjects, written by Ashton Kutcher, of all people (link).

For the uninitiated (including myself), Twitter is apparently the new online social-networking phenomenon, the unofficial heir of Facebook’s reign over the internet. “Twitterers” announce “Tweets” of 140 characters or less to the world in this new form of “micro-blogging”. Why? I have no idea. But Ashton described it as “a new and completely original form of communication,” and likened Twitter.com’s creators to the greatest inventors of the modern era: Samuel Morse (inventor of Morse Code), Alexander Bell (the telephone), Guglielmo Marconi (the radio), Philo Farnsworth (the videocamera), Bill Gates (most of your computers), and Steve Jobs (the rest of your computers). Really? Twitter is as significant an “invention” as the telephone? Is this another elaborate Punk’d setup?

Here I was, reading something more than a more paragraph long for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I was bored after the first sentence. I wanted to flip to another page, maybe just skip to the end to Joel Stein’s commentary, but then I realized in a minor but “holy crap!” epiphany that even though I had never used Twitter, I was doing the exact same thing as one of its members. I had finished reading the first 140 characters or so of the piece and wanted to move on. Thus Twitter itself isn’t an invention, but rather a reflection of the pace of our world. As our computers, our phones, and the internet process more and more data at quicker and quicker speeds, so must our brains; and Twitter seems to fit our rapid-fire thought-processes perfectly. Its potential as a platform for massive, grassroots-level communication is enormous, and it’s even been credited with enabling the recent protests in Iran (link). It’s like a blog, but quicker. It’s like a forum, but simpler. But I wonder if it’s really all that great.

Twitter is by nature a chaotic mess – on the macroscopic level, the website serves as a completely open forum for discordant and repetitive tweets and twits and twats; on an individual level, you never have to worry about making any sense when posting. Conan O’Brien’s new Late Night Show features a segment called “Twitter Tracker” in which an overzealous announcer reads the oh-so-(not)-exciting Tweets of celebrities, including gems like:

“Just got some bomb grub at Burger King” by Brody Jenner, and

“At Pete’s coffee in brentwood…love this place” by Cash Warren.

Is this meaninglessness really the “completely original form of communication” that Ashton was referring to? While there are instances, like the Iranian protests, especially suited to Twitter’s populist brevity, the vast majority of the information on Twitter smells awfully like spam. Twitter is engaging not because it’s communicative, but because it actualizes our exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies. Like reality shows, it allows us to peek into the lives of celebrities – like the more popular Facebook and Myspace, it allows us to pry into the lives of our friends.

Traditional prose, however, lets us do things impossible otherwise. It communicates subtleties, expresses emotions, and most importantly tries to make sense. Writing forces us to think critically and to analyze. It lengthens our attention spans and trains our patience. This is why I’m slogging painfully through this new blog, not to captivate readers but to relish in this sense of accomplishment I feel after writing a few hundred semi-meaningful words. Instead of introducing me to Twitter, Ashton Kutcher has inadvertently convinced me to sit down every once in a while and work through something longer than a paragraph and more meaningful than a tweet. Then again, I might just get bored halfway through and turn this thing into a celebrity gossip site instead.

@zhangstar: saw some articles about twitter and wrote a lengthy blog entry on the magic of traditional prose. probably no one will read it

The twitter guys sharing an

awkward, homoerotic moment.
(Image from Time Magazine)

Michael Jackson and the Loss of Peter Pan

2009-06-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson once proclaimed to a reporter, “I am Peter Pan”, in a statement that, more than any lengthy biography or documentary, perfectly encapsulated the brilliant and troubled life of this century’s greatest entertainer. He first started performing at the tender age of five and soon joined his older siblings in what became known as the Jackson 5, and by the time he was eleven, Michael’s group had already gained a significant national following. The group, which Michael now led, was signed by Motown Records in 1968, where his career would start its skyrocketing ascent but where his maturity would forever be frozen.

Michael would then live the rest of his life with the confused mindset of an eleven-year-old living in an adult body. He frequently lamented his lack of a childhood, a childhood that he felt was lost to the rigors of his father’s strict discipline and the toils of performing and touring, and so he made it his lifelong mission to recapture what he thought was the glory of youth. His eccentric plastic surgeries, which earned him the derisive nickname “Wacko Jacko”, were really a series of conflicted attempts to preserve his youth but simultaneously look more masculine. He sang about adult themes of love, sex, and violence, but he sang them with the high, pure voice of a prepubescent child. He named his ranch Neverland, after Peter Pan’s imaginary home where children never grow old, where he installed roller coaster rides, a ferris wheel, and a petting zoo, and where he invited thousands of young children, many with terminal illnesses, to come to play with him.

Michael said that he felt comfortable with children because they were his “peers” and their innocence offered him respite from the complicated turmoil of the real world. Michael laughed and cried with them, sang along to Disney movies together, and joined them in sleepovers, the activity he said he most regretted not having as a child. Of course Michael never realized that “playing” with an adult has different connotations than “playing” with a child. He never felt a need to hide any of his activities with children because he thought they were innocuous, but in the exceedingly adult world of modern media, he was sadly transformed into a monstrous child molester. During his most recent courtroom battle, a psychologist who profiled him concluded that Michael’s mindset had in fact regressed to that of a ten-year-old, and it’s no wonder then, that even after he was cleared of all ten charges against him in 2005, this ten-year-old walked away very visibly shaken, frail, and hurt.

During this time, he developed addictions to painkillers such as morphine, the substance that is suspected to have caused his cardiac arrest several days ago. This time around, the media, in perhaps one of its most hypocritical displays ever, lauded him as an eccentric but absolutely wonderful individual whose faults they almost entirely ignored. His death is sad not just because we’ve lost, with no exaggeration, the greatest musician the world has ever known – it is sad because it was us who tortured this exceedingly kind and generous man to his premature grave. During his 2005 trial, Michael’s lawyer described him as being “idealistic and naïve”, but is that so bad? With his money, he donated tens of millions of dollars to charities for children and animals; with his music, especially in his later songs like “We Are the World”, “Black or White”, and “Earth Song”, he preached the powers of love, imagination, and unity. If only we had listened, he might still be here with us today, but instead the world has become that much darker without his brilliance.

The first of his songs that comes to my mind now is not a Thriller classic nor a Jackson 5 single, but “Will You Be There”, the theme from the movie Free Willy. It’s about a young boy Jesse, about ten years old, who frees a captive orca Willy from his selfish, manipulating managers. I can see Michael Jackson in that role, as an artless but determined child who challenged the conventions of the adult world, who tried, in his own small but significant way, to make the world slightly less hateful, slightly more caring. But whereas Jesse’s idealistic naiveté allowed him to succeed, Michael’s might have led to his downfall. So I’d like to imagine Michael Jackson as Willy instead – a force of nature imprisoned by a cruel society during his stay with us, relegated to be an amusement park attraction – now swimming freely in the great ocean beyond.