Sabres beat the Sens in 5. Up next is Carolina ...
I predict Sabres in 6, but a tight six, and possibly 7. This series will match up the conference's best home team (Canes) against the league's third best road team (at least, i think league-wide the sabres were third best, could be conferential though).
Need Rory Fitzpatrick to step up and also probably Thomas Vanek.
More soon.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Thursday, May 11, 2006
The Internet is for more than porn ...
... it's the best cure for jealousy.
This is THE RILO KILEY SHOW that i wish I could have gone to since moving out here. But alas, this was a secret myspace show that only "friends" of the band learned of. I am not a cool kid, though I work with some, and thus not on myspace and ergo never learned of this show until far too late. So I missed this performance of The Frug!!!
But watching this and I almost feel like I got to go. It's weird the top blog had 100 click throughs to this. I'll probably have one ... my own at some later date.
Sabres are up 3-0!!! Fuck you Ottawa.
This is THE RILO KILEY SHOW that i wish I could have gone to since moving out here. But alas, this was a secret myspace show that only "friends" of the band learned of. I am not a cool kid, though I work with some, and thus not on myspace and ergo never learned of this show until far too late. So I missed this performance of The Frug!!!
But watching this and I almost feel like I got to go. It's weird the top blog had 100 click throughs to this. I'll probably have one ... my own at some later date.
Sabres are up 3-0!!! Fuck you Ottawa.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Why Apple rules
You can create pdfs of anything that you want just by saving as a pdf when you open the "print" dialogue box. take that Bill Gates!
Go Sabres!
Go Sabres!
Monday, May 08, 2006
Go Sabres!
Sabres stole both games in Ottawa! And we lost one of our best players for most of the second game and the Sens goalie looks awful. If the Sabres can get their offense moving consistently and tighten the D, this will be a short series.!!
Go Sabres!!
Go Sabres!!
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Why I love KCRW
Elf Power
Check them out! Nic Harcourt played them on Morning Becomes Eclectic Friday morning, they're great! At least the song he played was ... An Old Familiar Scene. I'm not gonna pimp them as much as I pimp Rilo Kiley, but that song was intoxicating.
Check them out! Nic Harcourt played them on Morning Becomes Eclectic Friday morning, they're great! At least the song he played was ... An Old Familiar Scene. I'm not gonna pimp them as much as I pimp Rilo Kiley, but that song was intoxicating.
Without newspapers look what we would lose ...
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has spent his last year (and change) focusing on homelessness, specifically telling the story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a former cello student at the prestigious Julliard in New York City, who as a result of the ravages of schizophrenia and a social services system that has found it more convenient to ignore him (and thousands like him in the United States) has been homeless in downtown Los Angeles for years. With the help of Lopez and dozens of others throughout Los Angeles (homeless services providers, family and friends and also caring readers), Nathaniel has moved into an apartment (at least part of the time) and is using the resources available to homeless people on Skid Row. Nathaniel's story has it seems prompted the Times and Lopez to turn a glaring spotlight on Skid Row, perhaps one of the great shames of our increasingly divided America. In the shadow of great wealth, the nation's largest concentration of homeless (and unfortunately associated criminal activity, public health problems and ignored tragedies) festers in the middle of our revitalizing downtown.
Today Steve Lopez brought the story of Lee Sevilla to the attention of hopefully millions of people. Sevilla is a 71-year-old woman with a part-time receptionist job who lives in her Dodge Neon, maintains her hygiene at a Chevron station and has a daughter who wants to help her. But Sevilla doesn't want to be a drain or imposition on anyone and like all of us seems to want to maintain the dignity of her independence and self-sufficiency. I cannot recommend strongly enough reading this.
No one else, sadly, is really writing these stories or covering them, which is another national shame in this country--this time on the newspapers and other media. But thanks to people like Steve Lopez, things are improving in Los Angeles for the homeless. Now if the other cities in the county can find the courage to do what's right (helping people) rather that simply what is easy (pandering to neighborhood "leaders" who spread unscientific half-truths about the not-real negative effects of locating a homeless services agency in their communities). And thanks to people like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, one of the rebel groups in Darfur signed an agreement to end the violence. Unfortunately for the world, the New York Times makes his columns available only to paying members of its Web site.
So to remedy that today I present ...
May 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Heroes of Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.
Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.
If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.
Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.
I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.
Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.
President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.
Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.
It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.
So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.
Today Steve Lopez brought the story of Lee Sevilla to the attention of hopefully millions of people. Sevilla is a 71-year-old woman with a part-time receptionist job who lives in her Dodge Neon, maintains her hygiene at a Chevron station and has a daughter who wants to help her. But Sevilla doesn't want to be a drain or imposition on anyone and like all of us seems to want to maintain the dignity of her independence and self-sufficiency. I cannot recommend strongly enough reading this.
No one else, sadly, is really writing these stories or covering them, which is another national shame in this country--this time on the newspapers and other media. But thanks to people like Steve Lopez, things are improving in Los Angeles for the homeless. Now if the other cities in the county can find the courage to do what's right (helping people) rather that simply what is easy (pandering to neighborhood "leaders" who spread unscientific half-truths about the not-real negative effects of locating a homeless services agency in their communities). And thanks to people like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, one of the rebel groups in Darfur signed an agreement to end the violence. Unfortunately for the world, the New York Times makes his columns available only to paying members of its Web site.
So to remedy that today I present ...
May 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Heroes of Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.
Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.
If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.
Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.
I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.
Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.
President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.
Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.
It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.
So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Anything to capture the most elusive of targets ...
Oh, Karma chameleon wherefore art thou?
I'm hoping this offering will summon ...
Sabres in 7!!
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Cameron Crowe is a genius
Forget Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown. Even JJ and Damon know that Say Anything Lloyd Dobler is the man women want us to be, right, maybe, Bueller, Bueller, anyone?
I'm gonna shut up now.
Go Sabres!!
I'm gonna shut up now.
Go Sabres!!
Monday, May 01, 2006
Immigration: regret regression?
As an avowed liberal living in a time when moral conservatives control the federal government, we are fighting a war based on government lies, the Vice-President blatantly disregards the science of Global Warming to help his oil baron friends and also refuses to acknowledge which of these friends helped him craft energy policy that strips away the protections of the past four decades, and the party of "small government" hypocritically tells the poor that it's not the government's job to help them by regulating the pharmaceutical industry or utilities while telling gays and lesbians they cannot marry, women they cannot have abortions and teens that condoms don't exist, I sometimes find myself thinking about the populist revolutionary spirit of the 60s. At least the 60s as portrayed in my Gen X/Y culture that is heavy on idealism and passion, if lacking in the tedium of the logistics of organization and patience. Nevertheless, despite knowing that many of the minute details have been glossed over, seeing images of the National Mall awash in a sea of people committed to justice and peace and idealism, is enough to make me envious and even a little punch drunk with a nostalgia for that which I've never been a part of.
I often get frustrated by the lack of anger among people in general and also who I know personally. They are very smart but for whatever reasons don't follow the news or among those that do, are able somehow not getting pissed off at the world. How can we sit idly by while thousands are dying in Darfur, civil liberties are obliterated in Russia and China and the government wastes tens of millions of dollars in Iraq (a recent article illlustrated how we paid for like 215 health clinics but just like 25 have been built or something ridiculous like that).
There are three issues lately that have most provoked me: intelligent design, AIDS in the Third World and the genocide (as deemed by Colin Powell, too) in Sudan. My interest in the genocide in the Sudan comes from Nicholas Kristof's columns in the NY Times. He has lived up to the highest ideals of Journalism, being a voice for the voiceless, shedding light on the truth at risk to himself, and calling on those in power to discover even a slice of the courage his subjects have displayed. When he wrote about two months ago about the demonstrations planned for this past Sunday in Washington, D.C., my idealism was stirred. I felt like I had my chance to make a footprint on my time, and on the path to doing something right, even though it wasn't easy. However, the realities of funding the trip, getting the time off of work, etc. made attending this rally impossible. As I realized that the spark extinguished itself, having consumed the fuel that fired it, which finally brings us to the point today. [Without an editor, I'm really good at burying the lead, eh?]
Today was the giant "Day without an immigrant" rally in Los Angeles, which was actually part of a network of demonstrations nationwide. A friend of mine, who teaches in a local school district composed of thousands of immigrants and greatly affected by the immigration debate, was among the 500,000 who attended the demonstration in downtown Los Angeles in late March, and has said it was an ineffably empowering experience. Many of my students have expressed extremely passionate viewpoints on this issue, since their family members are living through this, and were there that Saturday and I'm sure participated today. Yet, I did not. I skipped a a chance to witness history and fuck that, to participate in history. This is a history-textbook moment that I bypassed. This was my chance to say I did stand up when one of the issues of my generation called. But I stayed on the sidelines. And oddly, I don't regret not going. I think the thing that I wish were different is that I wish I felt worse about not going, instead of just feeling bad about not feeling bad enough.
I'm not exactly sure why I didn't go, to be honest. For one reason, this is not one of the issues that has stirred me. I'm not saying that I don't care about immigration; many of my students and people I've met in Los Angeles are affected by this and I would never wish anything bad on any of them.
And I myself am an immigrant, though classified differently perhaps as an adopted Korean, who came to this country as a baby. But living in Los Angeles I've grown more aware that I am not the white part of the American tapestry and I'm happy not being so, even though I know that means certain opportunities aren't exactly the same for me as if I were white. Watching television and seeing who's in the cast and who's the hero in the movies and television, shows me that Asians and other minorities are still on the outside looking in.
But immigration is very tricky. I want immigrants to have rights. and I want people who work hard and simply want to do better by their children in my country as citizens and I want them to be protected from human predators. But I do want secure borders that prevent terrorists from getting into the country. And I don't think it's fair if people who came here illegally are somehow rewarded by getting to the front of the line while people who have gone through the formal application process are forced to wait even longer to get here.
While I think it's great that someone like Steve Lopez and other columnists write amazing columns about people who are here illegally in many cases working extremely hard to make a better life for themselves and their families, sometimes the story is glossed over. It's analgous to when reporters write Horatio Alger stories about students from poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods going off to Harvard on scholarships. These are awesome stories and they deserve to be told. But I get worried that the general public will think all kids can do that.
In this case, I might say something Lou Dobbsish (which fucking terrifies me), but not all immigrants (legal or otherwise) are here trying to make their own Horatio Alger story. They may say that they're here to make better lives (which they most likely are) and they may be working hard at it, but they aren't all doing the working three jobs with perfect kids who get straight A's thing. I say that simply from the reality that no one group is all good or saintly. And I think that when people paint with these broadbrushes we're actually moving away from coming up with any logical solution to these problems. Bringing in more people (of any race) be it legally or illegally would lead to a need for more services: medical, fire, police, educational, infrastructural, social. And that costs money.
But despite my quasi-Dobbsian idea there, I'd still much rather have news orgs skew in that direction of illuminating these saints in the shadowns than to include the immigration status of every person charged with a crime in the newspaper. My guess is that the reason I expressed that Dobbsian idea, is that I don't assume people here illegally are up to no good, joining gangs or dealing drugs. So what I think some people need to see to complete the picture is a wart. But with so many other people who are anti-immigrant, it's important to give a voice to the silent saints in the shadows. Hopefully that will help change some minds, because they've been ignoring the best part of the picture.
In the end though, I had a chance to get a better look at that picture and I didn't. Instead, I emailed, read newspapers online, watched some television, cleaned, did laundry, planned my retirement a tiny bit and chilled a tiny bit, too. The daily minutiae just required too much of me, or at least I felt like it did. In respect of the demonstrations Monday, though, I didn't transact anything. No groceries, no nothing, all becuase of Sylvana. Thanks, kid!
So this entry has been really sprawling and perhaps contradictory. And I think mainly it was me thinking on paper.
Good night.
Go Sabres!
I often get frustrated by the lack of anger among people in general and also who I know personally. They are very smart but for whatever reasons don't follow the news or among those that do, are able somehow not getting pissed off at the world. How can we sit idly by while thousands are dying in Darfur, civil liberties are obliterated in Russia and China and the government wastes tens of millions of dollars in Iraq (a recent article illlustrated how we paid for like 215 health clinics but just like 25 have been built or something ridiculous like that).
There are three issues lately that have most provoked me: intelligent design, AIDS in the Third World and the genocide (as deemed by Colin Powell, too) in Sudan. My interest in the genocide in the Sudan comes from Nicholas Kristof's columns in the NY Times. He has lived up to the highest ideals of Journalism, being a voice for the voiceless, shedding light on the truth at risk to himself, and calling on those in power to discover even a slice of the courage his subjects have displayed. When he wrote about two months ago about the demonstrations planned for this past Sunday in Washington, D.C., my idealism was stirred. I felt like I had my chance to make a footprint on my time, and on the path to doing something right, even though it wasn't easy. However, the realities of funding the trip, getting the time off of work, etc. made attending this rally impossible. As I realized that the spark extinguished itself, having consumed the fuel that fired it, which finally brings us to the point today. [Without an editor, I'm really good at burying the lead, eh?]
Today was the giant "Day without an immigrant" rally in Los Angeles, which was actually part of a network of demonstrations nationwide. A friend of mine, who teaches in a local school district composed of thousands of immigrants and greatly affected by the immigration debate, was among the 500,000 who attended the demonstration in downtown Los Angeles in late March, and has said it was an ineffably empowering experience. Many of my students have expressed extremely passionate viewpoints on this issue, since their family members are living through this, and were there that Saturday and I'm sure participated today. Yet, I did not. I skipped a a chance to witness history and fuck that, to participate in history. This is a history-textbook moment that I bypassed. This was my chance to say I did stand up when one of the issues of my generation called. But I stayed on the sidelines. And oddly, I don't regret not going. I think the thing that I wish were different is that I wish I felt worse about not going, instead of just feeling bad about not feeling bad enough.
I'm not exactly sure why I didn't go, to be honest. For one reason, this is not one of the issues that has stirred me. I'm not saying that I don't care about immigration; many of my students and people I've met in Los Angeles are affected by this and I would never wish anything bad on any of them.
And I myself am an immigrant, though classified differently perhaps as an adopted Korean, who came to this country as a baby. But living in Los Angeles I've grown more aware that I am not the white part of the American tapestry and I'm happy not being so, even though I know that means certain opportunities aren't exactly the same for me as if I were white. Watching television and seeing who's in the cast and who's the hero in the movies and television, shows me that Asians and other minorities are still on the outside looking in.
But immigration is very tricky. I want immigrants to have rights. and I want people who work hard and simply want to do better by their children in my country as citizens and I want them to be protected from human predators. But I do want secure borders that prevent terrorists from getting into the country. And I don't think it's fair if people who came here illegally are somehow rewarded by getting to the front of the line while people who have gone through the formal application process are forced to wait even longer to get here.
While I think it's great that someone like Steve Lopez and other columnists write amazing columns about people who are here illegally in many cases working extremely hard to make a better life for themselves and their families, sometimes the story is glossed over. It's analgous to when reporters write Horatio Alger stories about students from poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods going off to Harvard on scholarships. These are awesome stories and they deserve to be told. But I get worried that the general public will think all kids can do that.
In this case, I might say something Lou Dobbsish (which fucking terrifies me), but not all immigrants (legal or otherwise) are here trying to make their own Horatio Alger story. They may say that they're here to make better lives (which they most likely are) and they may be working hard at it, but they aren't all doing the working three jobs with perfect kids who get straight A's thing. I say that simply from the reality that no one group is all good or saintly. And I think that when people paint with these broadbrushes we're actually moving away from coming up with any logical solution to these problems. Bringing in more people (of any race) be it legally or illegally would lead to a need for more services: medical, fire, police, educational, infrastructural, social. And that costs money.
But despite my quasi-Dobbsian idea there, I'd still much rather have news orgs skew in that direction of illuminating these saints in the shadowns than to include the immigration status of every person charged with a crime in the newspaper. My guess is that the reason I expressed that Dobbsian idea, is that I don't assume people here illegally are up to no good, joining gangs or dealing drugs. So what I think some people need to see to complete the picture is a wart. But with so many other people who are anti-immigrant, it's important to give a voice to the silent saints in the shadows. Hopefully that will help change some minds, because they've been ignoring the best part of the picture.
In the end though, I had a chance to get a better look at that picture and I didn't. Instead, I emailed, read newspapers online, watched some television, cleaned, did laundry, planned my retirement a tiny bit and chilled a tiny bit, too. The daily minutiae just required too much of me, or at least I felt like it did. In respect of the demonstrations Monday, though, I didn't transact anything. No groceries, no nothing, all becuase of Sylvana. Thanks, kid!
So this entry has been really sprawling and perhaps contradictory. And I think mainly it was me thinking on paper.
Good night.
Go Sabres!
It's only sports, but ...
Knowing that the Flyers fell 3-0 to the Buffalo Sabres yesterday in the Stanley Cup Playoffs is a great feeling. Yay!
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