Reading log: February

February has not been a productive reading month. It's the shortest month of the year, and on top of that, I've grown increasingly distracted (in a good way) with planning for our Spain trip.

The Place You Love is Gone by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Grade: B- Pierson's elegy to her lost hometowns is poignant in parts, and obnoxiously preachy in others ("we have sold our birthright to the devil in exchange for a wide selection of bath mats"... barf). Sadly, one of her main points--that everyone develops their own specific language of signs and symbols that define their personal brand of nostalgia--definitely applies here. I was so not moved.


The Fated Sky: Astrology in History by Benson Bobrick
Grade: A- I don't usually love history books, but hot damn, this was a good one. I have to ding it half a grade because I don't think any collection of "wow, neat-o!" moments throughout history, no matter how well-written it is, can shake me up and change the way I think forever. As far as the validity of astrology itself, I'm still a skeptic, though it sounds like some of the really old-school pure mathematics-based stuff just might hold some water: Bobrick does a blind reading of Hitler's birth chart using principles from Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and comes up with some specific conclusions that seem a bit too dead-on to be mere coincidences.

Next up: a book on social engineering and human experiments (yikes)... probably the only book I'll be reading in all of March because I'll be too busy stuffing my face with gateau Basque. ;-)

The Oscars: an experiment in liveblogging

1) Glad that An Inconvenient Truth won
2) Jennifer Hudson's right boob is out of control
3) Is it just me, or did the clip for Little Miss Sunshine basically show the arc of the entire movie in under 60 seconds?

Euromix 2007!!

Sheena and I are making a mix in preparation for our trip to Spain, France, and (briefly) London next month: Euromix 2007. Not sure if anything can beat the amazing vocals from "Space Rider", by far the best song on the 2000 Ministry of Sound compilation "UK Garage":

Space Rider,
Where you think you're goin'?
Is it somewhere I can follow?
Some way crazier place
where I can be free?

Other songs that represent the zeitgeist of Europe to me and other misled Americans: Ozone's Dragoste din tei and Gunther's Tutti Frutti Summer Love. I might not have Gunther's mullet, but I think I've seen those glasses at H&M, and I must buy them. Also, I plan on obtaining the shirt seen above by urinating selectively on one of my white undershirts. Or maybe this is just what white undershirts look like when you don't wear deodorant.

Keyvan, got any more gems like "By my side"?

Happy (Lunar) New Year!

Today's the first day of the lunar new year (or Chinese New Year for folks who think all y'all look alike)... an estimated 14 billion "Happy New Year" text messages are expected to go out over the next seven days in China.

As for Eli and me, we've been eating a lot. My mom cooked up a crazy feast for the new year's eve dinner, always a splurge by tradition: shark fin soup, abalone and sea cucumber over gai lan, a ridiculously good braised pork dish, steamed whole fish, orange pork chops, boiled chicken, and a little Hennessy. My parents stayed up until 1:30 watching the 5-hour New Year's extravaganza on CCTV, but I can only take so much Beijing opera.

Can't buy me love - retraction

Okay, you can buy my love if you bring me this puppy:



Eeeee!

Can't buy me love

From indexed.blogspot.com:

Wisdom of crowds indeed

I'm doing a project for work that has involved playing around with Yahoo!Answers. If you haven't tried it out, it's a pretty nifty concept. Questions are posted and answered by visitors to the site. People are incented to give good answers by a number of mechanisms that introduce a civilizing dose of karma: each user keeps a balance of points. Points are taken away whenever you ask a question, but you are awarded points whenever you provide an answer. There's quality control, too--when your answer is chosen as the best answer by the "asker," you get a nice handful of bonus points.

So I decided to do my part and answer questions where I have some expertise. I got a Biology degree at Fair Harvard so I thought, hey, I'll start by browsing the Biology section. I'll weigh in on a few questions, see what's going on, get a sense of the user experience... that is, until "johnny" decides to rain on my parade by reminding me not only of the humiliating state of this country's educational system, but also of its self-assured swagger and emphasis on truthiness:



I thought, this must be some kind of joke... there must be some people out there with more sense than "johnny," or at least more sense than Jessica Simpson, right?

Right?