I’m reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs at the moment. It’s an exploration of what Levy calls “raunch culture”, the pornographization of American mainstream culture. One of her points that I think is worth examining is the distinction between sexiness and sexuality.
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You’ve probably already seen the clip of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing a map question, which went global earlier this week. In it, the beauty pageant contestant flubs a question about why 20% of Americans can’t find the US on a world map.
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As you might have heard by now, Atlanta Falcons Quarterback and NFL superstar Michael Vick entered a guilty plea in the federal dogfighting/gambling/racketeering case against him. American public opinion, it’s safe to say, is against him. He was involved in activities that involve brutal cruelty to animals, including electrocuting to death dogs that don’t perform well enough, starving dogs to make them more aggressive in the fights, and variuos other forms of abuse.
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I have to admit that I’m quite surprised. I thought he’d stay until Bush left office, that there wasn’t any way he’d leave earlier without being impeached (which wasn’t likely to happen). But that’s it, he resigns apparently on his own terms, his final day 17 September.
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I came across a story the other day about a store refusing to allow a customer to leave when the customer declined to allow them to check his receipt. The reactions to this story have been interesting, with many people making the claim that the customer was at fault by being unreasonable.
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Mixed Martial Arts fighting, in the US especially the United Fighting Championship, has been gaining a lot of popularity recently. Presented here for your edification is an argument against its taking itself too seriously… Viacheslav Datsik
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This is a photo of a swan by Dublin’s Grand Canal that I took last May.
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The Pale Blue Eye is a historical thriller set in 1830s America, at West Point Military Academy. A murder there brings a retired police constable, Augustus Landor, back to work, and in the course of his duties he becomes friendly with one of the cadets—Edgar Allan Poe.
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My favorite local place to eat dinner, Modern Thai, has apparently closed. I say “apparently” because there’s renovation work going on in it, so there’s a small chance it’ll return… but there are no signs on the door to explain anything to patrons, which makes me suspect that it’s gone for good.
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I purchased an iRiver clix 2, the 4 gigabyte model, recently. I wanted a music player with flash-based storage that I could use while running, and also one that could play video (particularly on plane journeys). Naturally, it had to have Ogg Vorbis support, and to be usable as a standard USB storage device.
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Focus can achieve some rather amazing things. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine mentioned a linguist in Berkeley who knows (apparently to a relatively high standard) over ninety languages. Part of the key to this rather amazing feat was the fact that he spent several years in Korea doing nothing but eating, sleeping, exercising, teaching occasional classes, and being what he termed a “language monk”—that is, spending the rest of the time on language learning. Since his teaching was in linguistics, it didn’t distract him from his main focus, and he hence learned at a prodigious rate.

I was also reminded of this by the discovery of this Star Wars fan-produced lightsaber duel. With obsessive focus, people can create rather impressive creations.
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Earlier this week I decided not to play in the major MTG event Grand Prix “San Francisco”. A Grand Prix is a two-day mixed professional/amateur tournament, open to all attendees (unlike the invitation-only Pro Tour events). I put the location in quotation marks because the GP is actually in San Jose—something that is a factor in my skipping it, and it annoys me quite a lot that Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t either put up the money to host the event in San Francisco or honestly admit that it wasn’t in San Francisco.
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You know things are rocky when the Comptroller General, David Walker, starts making comparisons between America’s present situation and the fall of Rome.
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San Francisco Airport recently added a “Cell phone waiting lot”, which provides an alternative to endlessly circling the arrivals area. It’s not that easy to find, and the signs for it aren’t that prominent. To find it, you follow the signs for “Long-Term Parking” until you see a sign that has a cell phone on it.
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This has been highlighted in a few places, but I feel it’s worth writing about here also. Here’s an exceprt from a speech by Rudolph Giuliani, while he was Mayor of New York City:

[F]reedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
—19 March 1994, from The New York Times

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I know it’s The New York Times, but still, an outright lie in the first sentence of an article is a bit much.
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On Monday I referred to the Democrats who voted for the FISA cave-in last Friday as “[s]pineless, stupid, or fully invested in the machinations of the elite class against the rest of the United States”. While not wishing to rule out spinelessness or stupidity, I suspect that the last option is the most realistic. Dianne Feinstein, for example, has been quite successful in Washington, and doesn’t appear to be a pushover that anyone can manipulate. So why would she vote for that change to FISA?
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People who loudly condemn software (or music, or film) “piracy” often confuse the concepts of a) taking something from someone else and b) getting something for nothing. Their reasoning seems to be based on the idea that since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, if you get something for nothing, you must be stealing it.
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I’m still appalled by the fact that the new wiretapping bill passed both Senate and House last Friday. 16 Senators and 41 Congresspersons crossed party lines to vote with Republicans.
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It was strange not to write a post yesterday. After doing it every day for just over a year, I was acutely aware of its absence.
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One of the problems America has that I didn’t mention yesterday is the number of people it imprisons—another thing I haven’t heard much about from the Democratic Presidential candidates.

Over two million Americans were in prison in 2006, more than in any other country. American per capita rates of incarceration are generally between three and eight times as high as other Western developed nations. For a country as rich as the United States, that’s ridiculous, and for a country that claims to be based on ideals of individual freedom, that’s shameful.
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I think next year’s US presidential election is going to be simultaneously important and irrelevant. Important for the obvious reason—electing another Republican would simply be insane, and getting that party out of power is absolutely necessary. Sadly irrelevant in the longer term because I don’t think that any of the Democratic candidates are really willing to tackle the major problems this country has.
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I started posting every day one year ago. I haven’t missed a day in that time, which I’m happy about. I’ve written quite a few posts I’m happy with, and only a few I really dislike.
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