theyrule0001. interesting site. I’m throwing it at you because I am too lazy to get together any decents posts. So I throw a link at you. [via zeldman]
Archive for July, 2001
If you are my friend and live in Marlboro, chances are, sometime next week, you’re going to do this with me. More plans to follow.
Last week, students from Liberty Middle School and Patrick Henry High School in Ashland, Va., presented their proposal last week to put an abbreviated version of the Constitution on the back side of all U.S. paper currency.
The students won a rousing round of applause from a packed hearing room as the House Banking Committee’s Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee took testimony from the students on their plan, introduced by GOP Rep. Eric Cantor as HR 1021. [via congressional quarterly].
Alive and kicking. woohoo.
yah
I’ve noticed that Google allows its users the option of changing the language displayed. This is cool not because you can have your search results in English, French, and Italian, but you can have it in “Pig Latin“, “Hacker“, and “Bork, bork, bork!“
analogy
Access Hollywood : motion pictures :: MTV : music.
Buncha boot-licking morons thinly disguising marketing campaigns as television entertainment. And in the whole process, missing out on all that is important and beautiful of its subjects.
obsequious
What the fuck does obsequious mean? Here, I wake up at this goddamn time, and what’s constantly repeating itself in my head? The fucking word obsequious. Someone lobotomize me. Please.
Be excited! Be-be excited!
Requiem for a Dream.com This website (yes, for the movie) recently won a Webby Award for best film site. Let’s just say the site is as fucked up as the movie is.
ambition can go eat shit
After some light thinking and brief chat with steph-neighbor, I am confidently unconcerned about my lack of ambition. I am lead to believe that it is a wholy American ideal to be ambitious and bold. American culture sucks. Boo to ambition. Yay to doing something (maybe nothing) whenever and not worrying about whether what I’m doing now will further my career in some way. Relief.
produce
In case anyone missed the time-stamp of my previous post, I was up at 5:49 AM this morning. No, not because I have returned to my red-eye college ways; but for the opposite reason. I woke up early this morning because, starting Monday, my Pathmark career has moved up (or down, as you may see it) to the Produce Dept. Yes, today, I stacked grapes, onions, nectarines, and peaches. Oh, those crafty peaches. Always so tricky.
While these new tasks seem more laborious than waving groceries in front of a laser, I do not have to interact with customers! No more old, fat, and/or ugly people asking me to put paper bags into plastic ones. No more telling people how to swipe their fucking credit cards thru the goddamn EPS machine. Well, no more … for half the week. I now work Produce from mon. to wed. .. and Cashiering for the rest of the week. (I don’t want to have to wake up at 6am on a Saturday.)
It recently dawned on me that I, at the ripe age of 19, work at a fucking supermarket. It should have dawned on me sooner, given other people’s typical response of “You? You work at pathmark? YOu, with all your skills, are a cashier at pathmark? Well, fuck me.” (approximate quote). Why am I working at this place? What the hell am I doing? I think it’s because I have no ambition. Simple diagnosis. No ambition. No drive. I just do not care about most things. And I think anyone who has ever known me will very violently nod their head at this assertion. Well, sure, I can get fussy about the way certain things are (”Buckle your seatbelt!”, “No talking during the movie!”, “You’re dealing those cards the wrong way!”); but the main part, I am apathetic about my life situation. I should be uncomfortable with my current comfort (the definition of Drive), but I am not. Sadness.
Good Babies
I think the idea of a “good baby” is all wrong. At work, I’ve seen other people complement a parent on their quiet, behaved little child sitting in the shopping cart. I do not think babies should be quiet or behaved. Babies have all the right to be pissy, angry, annoyed, and disoriented. They are suddenly evicted from the womb and shot out into this weird sensory world. The correct way to respond would be to not take this forced flight lightly, but rather at full volume. Babies should be outraged! They should not sit in their shopping carts with variuos digits in their mouths. All babies should be screaming out, “HEY!! What the fuck is going on here? A little while ago, I was enveloped in a warm, liquidy place, getting nutrients through a fleshy tube in my belly…. and now things are all fucked up. WAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.”
My Fucking People
On Saturday, noontime, my brown friends and I took a train up to NYC to check out Central Park Summerstage, with Manu Chao performing. On the Amtrak train, we found some seats at the end of a car, right next to the door. At the South Amboy stop, some more passengers came on the train; a middle-aged white man with scruffy clothes and a cane took the seat across the aisle from me. My friend would later point out he was wearing a hat that said “Vietnam Vet”. The train resumed. My friends and I continued to talk and joke around to pass time. Occasionally, I would notice on my peripheral that the guy was eyeing me. I didn’t make much out of it; it hardly registered. When the train got to Perth Amboy, the guy got up and headed for the exit. Right before he left, he turned, faced me, and yelled, “Your fucking people killed us, and now you fucking dare come to this country?”.
He left the train. After half an hour, the train pulled into Penn Station, NYC. We went to the concert, walked around the city, and had dinner with Deb at Sammy’s Asian Gourmet. We got back to Matawan at about 10:30 pm.
So how did I react? How did I feel? The most I could manage at the time was a restrained grin. The sort of broad grin that I put on to humor someone when they start talking about things I do not have opinions about or have yet to form opinions about. Or maybe it was the kind of grin you flash to show people that you are not being affected. Either way, I grinned.
Was I too American for him, with my clothes and annoyingly long hair? Were my jokes and manner of speech too Red, too White and too Blue? Why’d he lash out at me? Our train car certainly had its share of Asian people. An old couple reading Chinese newspapers: two seats down. A FOBish man with pants too high up: three seats down, one to the right. Another American Born Chinese: one seat down, two to the right. Maybe I was just the closest to the door. That coward.
After the guy left, for the next half hour, I would sit there, replaying the situation in my head. What would be the proper retort?
- “You know what? I’m not Vietnamese; I’m Chinese, you idiot. I am damn sorry it is hard for you to tell the difference, but I’m damn glad it’s easy to tell the diffrence between a human being and a fucking ignorant piece of shit.”
- “First off, I’m not Vietnamese OR Korean. Don’t you dare say, ‘What’s the difference?‘. There is a fucking difference. I don’t go walking around, blaming you for selling opium to Chinese people just cuz you LOOK British.
OR
- ziipp fuck you.ziipp.
Hey I was doing some research for my previous post; and I noticed that
Britannica.com seemed to have a lot less available content than I remember. They used to have articles up the wazoo all over the place. I can hardly find any now. What gives?
go us/u.s. ?
[Editorial prologue. The below is what happens when computer science majors write about history]
It’s July 4th. Indepedence Day. On this day, people typically whip out their Go American Freedom rhetoric and stick a flag in front of their house. I abhor Go American Freedom rhetoric. Looking back, I am horrified at the stuff my elementary school teachers told me. The colonial situation during the 1700s are usually greatly exaggerated. I just wanted to point out some obvious oversights.
Typical simplified history lessons boil down our declaration of independence to a Tyranny issue. King George is made out to be the enemy. “Look! A tight-fisted monarch! No! We want democracy!” Americans today like to make themselves out to be the starters of the democratic movement. However, the truth is that the democratic thought was already well-settled in Europe. The Parliament in England had already stripped half of King George’s power away and had a significant say in the empire’s decisions. The colonists simply wanted to be represented in the Parliament, so that they have a say on decisions that affect them (like taxes.) However, lack of technology made such representation impractical. It look months to cross the Atlantic; how could a colonial rep stay in contact with his constituents? Rebelling colonists weren’t escaping the King’s tyranny; they were escaping Parliament’s tyranny. Thus “No taxation without representation“?
Anyway, when the Framers started writing the Constitution, most of their politcal theory had come from leading European thinkers at the time. The idea of checks and balances wasn’t new. Neither was having a big building full of popularly-elected officials. What WAS novel, was that the Framers did not have to deal with precedent. America was brand new. They did not have to compromise with historical precedent. They had a clean slate. No traditions, no customs, no existing governing system to compromise with. English peasants had to riot and storm castles before they got the King to sign the Magna Carta, asserting freedoms to citizens. The Framers didn’t have to do stuff like that. They were able to take advantage of hundreds of years of politcal mistakes and blunders.
My basic point is that we’re not that special. Colonists were not exactly treated horrible by the English (certainly not like the Haitians were). So our independence does not seem like that big of a deal. It was not some valiant march for greater freedom for the world. We just broke off from the English. Happy Indepedence Day.
bovine existentialism
If you were a cow, would you rather be a dairy cow or a meat cow? That is, would you rather spend your drawn-out life hooked up to a machine, having your lactic life force pumped out… OR would you rather live your short life jacked up with steriods and harmones, fattened up, and then sent to the slaughterhouse?
an exercise in chronological perspective
I wonder how Elian Gonzalez is doing.
geetar
I got one of these guitars recently. A Seagull S6+ with solid cedar top. It’s awesome. I’m currently taking lessons at Freehold Music Center. guitars sound pretty. I like the idea of me lounging around, strumming out random tunes into the late night. Most importantly, I like the idea of me lounging around.