I don't remember any stories about her when McCain was running back in in 2000 and don't think I have heard much of anything said about her this election. May not be the most unbiased of articles, but definitely presents a different view than most are used to seeing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1024927/The-wife-John-McCain-callously-left-behind.html
Showing posts with label mikeyp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mikeyp. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Radiolab
When I was an undergrad I used to mock my neighbor who listened to npr all day while sitting at his computer. Now that I have a job, I pretty much spend all day at my computer and about the best thing I can find for free that requires very little channel surfing on my part is NPR. In particular there is a show Radiolab that I have become quite fond of. If you are the impatient kind you can find their webcasts at www.radiolab.org, start listening, and skip the rest of what I have to say.
I was about 5 years late to the NPR party, and figured I wasn't really breaking into any scenes when I started listening to radio lab. Its two guys talking about science in an interesting way. Nothing super fancy about it, maybe some special effects and a lot of introspective background music but overall well produced. Each episode is about a common theme, and in reality each 1 hour episode is really 3 or 4 smaller episodes that get strung together.
What makes the show good, and really what I am saying is what makes this show worth sitting down to every day and listening to for 4 or 5 hours until you have listened to them all is that it doesn't exhaust your attention. The show is not a textbook, nor a one hour lecture it simply is a collection of stories about science about people.
I was about 5 years late to the NPR party, and figured I wasn't really breaking into any scenes when I started listening to radio lab. Its two guys talking about science in an interesting way. Nothing super fancy about it, maybe some special effects and a lot of introspective background music but overall well produced. Each episode is about a common theme, and in reality each 1 hour episode is really 3 or 4 smaller episodes that get strung together.
What makes the show good, and really what I am saying is what makes this show worth sitting down to every day and listening to for 4 or 5 hours until you have listened to them all is that it doesn't exhaust your attention. The show is not a textbook, nor a one hour lecture it simply is a collection of stories about science about people.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Water Water everywhere except in Alamosa Colorado
There has been a story floating around the news this last week about a small town in Colorado whose water supply was shut down by salmonella. The entire town's drinking supply had to be taken off-line because an unknown source salmonella was making a lot of people sick. They had to use a lot of chlorine to disinfect the water pipes and then water couldn't be used for drinking, eating, or bathing until chlorine levels dropped. Basically you could flush your toilet and that was it. What I find interesting in this story is that every news outlet basically reports it as a human interest story. Oh it is interesting that people are drinking thousands of bottles of water in order to survive, or that people haven't been able to shower in days. It is cute to watch people rough it, but it seems there has been very little appreciation for what most other people in the world do on a daily basis, which is survive without clean water. Another aspect of this I find surprising is the fact that no one is really mentioning that the town's water supply was not even chlorinated to begin with. The lack of pretreatment is the entire reason why a bacterial contamination event was even able to occur. I am not advocating everyone needlessly treat their water out of some irrational fear, but it would seem this fact would be far more integral to the story than an off-hand fact buried in a paragraph somewhere or not mentioned at all.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
"Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" : A Review
Last night I had the chance to watch a one-woman show about suicide for asian american females. Before the show started I had been expecting some sort of adaption of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," however I have never read the book or watched the movie so I really didn't know what to expect.
The show begins with a Mr. Rogersque opening. Wong walks around the stage in a green cardigan and puts on a pair of shoes, and then begins to talk to the audience. Wong begins a 1-hour monologue with an occasional interlude for some audience participation / heckling to talk about her personal life, her past, and her own dealings with suicide. Half the time the show is a comedy routine with Wong poking fun at race and dropping one liners for laughs. The other half of the show is about why asian american females are killing themselves, and why its impossible we the audience should expect to find an answer by the end of her one hour show.
One of her most poignant anecdotes comes about 3/4 into the show when she begins to point out how few examples there are of asian american women who have survived suicide. On one end of the spectrum she points to celebrities who never had to deal with suicide, and then she begins to detail asian american women who have dealt with severe trauma in one form or another and survived: they are all porn stars. She briefly details the lives of Asia Carrera and Annabelle Chong. The former a piano prodigy who ran away from home to escape abusive parents and would sleep with strangers just to survive. The latter a gang rape survivor who would later pioneer on screen triple penetration and who was cheated out of money she should have been paid for performing one of the first one-day ultra gang bang marathons where she had sex with over 300 men. Wong's dramatic conclusion is that you have no choice but tol be perfect, turn into a porn star, or not live.
At one point in the show she begins to delve into cases of asian american suicide. A profile will flash up on the screen, giving such details as location and reasons associated with the suicide as she begins to monologue what might have been their last thoughts. The second case is about a girl named liz from cambridge, ma who is suffering depression and anxiety from grades and sets herself on fire. To me this is immediately recognizable as Elizabeth Shin from MIT, a girl who committed suicide the summer before I arrived for my freshmen year. After the first 4 cases the profiles on the screen begin to flash by as she races to even just provide names for them. By the end, the case numbers have reached past the tens of thousands. I am not sure most people realized that those were in fact real cases she was detailing.
The most interesting part of the evening came after the show was over. I was talking with four
asian american females who had seen the show, and not a single one had much to say! In contrast, after I had seen the latest harry potter movie every asian american female was up in arms at the way Harry had treated Cho Chang in the movie.
You can find out more about Kristina Wong here:
http://www.kristinawong.com/
http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/
The show begins with a Mr. Rogersque opening. Wong walks around the stage in a green cardigan and puts on a pair of shoes, and then begins to talk to the audience. Wong begins a 1-hour monologue with an occasional interlude for some audience participation / heckling to talk about her personal life, her past, and her own dealings with suicide. Half the time the show is a comedy routine with Wong poking fun at race and dropping one liners for laughs. The other half of the show is about why asian american females are killing themselves, and why its impossible we the audience should expect to find an answer by the end of her one hour show.
One of her most poignant anecdotes comes about 3/4 into the show when she begins to point out how few examples there are of asian american women who have survived suicide. On one end of the spectrum she points to celebrities who never had to deal with suicide, and then she begins to detail asian american women who have dealt with severe trauma in one form or another and survived: they are all porn stars. She briefly details the lives of Asia Carrera and Annabelle Chong. The former a piano prodigy who ran away from home to escape abusive parents and would sleep with strangers just to survive. The latter a gang rape survivor who would later pioneer on screen triple penetration and who was cheated out of money she should have been paid for performing one of the first one-day ultra gang bang marathons where she had sex with over 300 men. Wong's dramatic conclusion is that you have no choice but tol be perfect, turn into a porn star, or not live.
At one point in the show she begins to delve into cases of asian american suicide. A profile will flash up on the screen, giving such details as location and reasons associated with the suicide as she begins to monologue what might have been their last thoughts. The second case is about a girl named liz from cambridge, ma who is suffering depression and anxiety from grades and sets herself on fire. To me this is immediately recognizable as Elizabeth Shin from MIT, a girl who committed suicide the summer before I arrived for my freshmen year. After the first 4 cases the profiles on the screen begin to flash by as she races to even just provide names for them. By the end, the case numbers have reached past the tens of thousands. I am not sure most people realized that those were in fact real cases she was detailing.
The most interesting part of the evening came after the show was over. I was talking with four
asian american females who had seen the show, and not a single one had much to say! In contrast, after I had seen the latest harry potter movie every asian american female was up in arms at the way Harry had treated Cho Chang in the movie.
You can find out more about Kristina Wong here:
http://www.kristinawong.com/
http://www.bigbadchinesemama.com/
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Judge's Idiocracy
Today I finally saw Idiocracy. The film was originally released over a year ago, and played in about 7 cities. The nearest theater showing the film was 6 hours away in Los Angeles. By the time it had been released on DVD I had all but forgotten it had existed.
The film's plot runs with a futurama-like premise where a completely average and uninspiring individual is accidentally frozen for 500 years. Except in this case he awakes to find that in the future he is the smartest man alive and that the world is in an intellectual Ice Age. In a short montage, and possibly funniest portion of the movie, it is shown how the intellectually elite are eventually outbred and outnumbered as the stupid come to inherit the earth. Most of the satire in the film is blunt and comes from the outrageous evolution of commercialism and sex in the future: Fuddruckers becomes ButtFuckers, a wholesome family establishment, and Starbucks is the goto joint for a handjob. While the film doesn't tackle any of the finer nuances of theses issues, anyone watching it would be hard pressed not to see the parallels and grotesque caricatures of this future society to today's where sex, money, and instant gratification are the only values remaining.
2 oofs up. 1 boof down. Approximate 90 minute runtime.
The film's plot runs with a futurama-like premise where a completely average and uninspiring individual is accidentally frozen for 500 years. Except in this case he awakes to find that in the future he is the smartest man alive and that the world is in an intellectual Ice Age. In a short montage, and possibly funniest portion of the movie, it is shown how the intellectually elite are eventually outbred and outnumbered as the stupid come to inherit the earth. Most of the satire in the film is blunt and comes from the outrageous evolution of commercialism and sex in the future: Fuddruckers becomes ButtFuckers, a wholesome family establishment, and Starbucks is the goto joint for a handjob. While the film doesn't tackle any of the finer nuances of theses issues, anyone watching it would be hard pressed not to see the parallels and grotesque caricatures of this future society to today's where sex, money, and instant gratification are the only values remaining.
2 oofs up. 1 boof down. Approximate 90 minute runtime.
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