August 31st, 2008 by Max
This term was not included in the constitution.
I’m watching CSPAN hearings on Executive Power & The Bush Administration. Republican Mike Pence. He seems to be a smart guy. He’s saying that “maladministration” isn’t a cause for impeachment.
I agree.
Deliberate deception. Deliberate withholding of dissenting opinions, on the fact of weapons of mass destruction. That’s impeachable. Telling Congress one thing, without telling them the other. That’s bad faith. That’s lying to start a war. That is THE highest crime!
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August 30th, 2008 by Max
Gustave. Category 4 right now. Having left Cuba, it’s regaining strength. Tropical storm Hannah nears Florida.
Now I’m not rooting for this to destroy New Orleans, even if it would reinforce just how bad the Republicans have been at taking care of the American people. There are many many off shore drilling rigs. This will cause gasoline prices to go back up.
All because of speculators. I’ll bitch about them again later.
Right now what I want to know is how the Religious people will interpret, what is simply an act of nature – albeit revved up by the hand of man. [Yes, that means global warming. The warmer the water, the stronger the hurricane. But man has no control of the direction of the storm nor where it will make landfall.]
Will they see the hand of God in Gustav?
Will they look at this as a second chance, from God, to apply lessons learned.
Punishment? The Republican Convention starts right about the time this Hurricane Gustav will make landfall.
No. They’ll see it as a chance to praise God.
My friend The Fabulous Penguin always asks whether something is irony or poetic justice. I think this is poetic justice. As they prepare to tell the the country, why Republicanism is right for America… Nature reminds us of their greatest failure.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
August 29th, 2008 by Max
Well it was brilliant strategy. Don’t let anyone kid you. This was genius. A real political tactician thought this one up. Pick Sarah Palin of Alaska as your vice presidential running mate. And do it the day after what Pat Buchannan called the greatest political speech in history. (Hyperbole? We think the gentleman doth promote too much!)
Still, it sucked all the wind out from the political talkers the day after the Democratic Convention, truncating their success. [Now the Republicans have a week before their convention and nothing to block the afterglow. The Dems were foreshortened by the Olympics and stepped on by Ms Palin. There is a genius at work here. I suspect it is not the man who finished 894th of 899 midshipmen at the Naval Academy!
Plus, you get the women who are mad at Obama for not picking Hillary.
Plus she's anti abortion rights.
Plus she took on the Republican establisment in Alaska.
Plus she's a mom.
Plus she's a kick ass Christian!
Plus she's young [relatively, as politicians go]
Yet after all that, I still can’t help but thinking about Take A Chance from Monopoly -> “You’ve just won second prize in a beauty contest!”
No offense intended!
Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »
August 29th, 2008 by Max
Here is a link to the REAL entry for Sarah Palin. Yesterday, before today’s announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s VP, someone who had never enterred any wiki entries before, has polished up her profile. According to NPR they’ve reduced the mentions of her entry in a beauty contest and a reference to her working to get her ex brother in law fired.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:wPu4ia1Ld8EJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin+Gov.+Sarah+Palin&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us&client=safari
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August 29th, 2008 by Max
I liked it!
Especially the part about being off middle eastern oil, in ten yers!
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »
August 27th, 2008 by Max
“… Out of the park, across the street and over the building … “ That’s how Keith Olberman described Hilary’s speech last night at the Democratic Convention.
I like Keith Olberman. I really like him. More than that, I really respect him. In some ways he was the first member of the press to come out and say “the king has no clothes”. When the GWB was trampling on America’s image and saying we looked better in the world. Or when the Dub was taking away basic human rights from foreign nationals and usurping Congressional authority and trying to take away basic hard fought for, long standing American rights such as Habeas Corpus. Habeas Corpus for Chrissakes!
So. Yay Keith.
Now to that speech.
Not so much! It was Hilary. Talking about women’s rights. Yay. And talking about her mom. Yay. And talking about her daughter. Yay again. And talking about equal pay and health care and a better economy. Yay yay yay. And saying we should all vote Democrat.
She didn’t say “He’s great.” She just said vote Democrat. Some endorsement!
Posted in My New York, Photos, Science | 1 Comment »
August 26th, 2008 by Max
She’s pretty, nice. She’s pretty, smart. She’s a pretty good speaker. America will be pretty proud!
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August 26th, 2008 by Max
And this is just the first batch!
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I don’t know what these flowers are, besides perrennials.
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More just about color.
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There’s a flower there too.
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I hate pink. I like this one.
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I love this one.
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Another ‘color’ bird.
Today’s theme is color.
Posted in Arts, My New York, Photos | No Comments »
August 25th, 2008 by Max
Transcript of a recent interview I overheard on my Starganza 3000 podcast player and wavelength runner:
Penguin: Welcome to Countless Screaming Argonauts. (The podcast of record!)
P: Tonight we have a special guest with us. A guest who is out of this world. A guest like we’ve never had before. A man ahead of his time. Yes, A man from the future … Mr. Shvanz Jones.
Maqz: Welcome Mr. Jones. Welcome to Countless Screaming Argonauts
P: So Mr. Jones. We’ve never had a guest quite like yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Maqz: Are you really here from the future.
Shvanz Jones: Yes. Yes I am.
Maqz: Wow. I have so many questions I don’t know where to begin.
P: Well Mr. Jones, why don’t you start with how you got here.
Shvanz: Well it’s like this. In the future, as you call it, we don’t call it the “future” any more because we realize that time is an outdated concept but I’ll use that term for now. In the future …there are a few people. It’s very rare you see. Who can pull these things called “fabricans” out of the ethereal void that is space/time. Most people can’t see them. But … if you get enough of them. And you “take” them. You can do what you colloquially call going back in time.
M: Go on
Schv: Well so on my job I have a lot of time, and since I’m a Learyite I can see these things and I collect them in a babyfood jar.
M: They still have babyfood jars in the future?
Schv: Oh yeah. They’re incredibly valuable now. There’s not much silicone left so they don’t make much out of glass anymore.
P: Where’d the silicone go?
S: Breasts
P: What do they make bottles out of now?
S: Oh, they’re all made from carbon distillates.
M: What’s a carbon distillate
S: Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Plastics. Oil!
P: Is there still oil in the future?
S: Oh heavens yes. I keep forgetting how much you people don’t know. In the year 2113 Thomas Edison Grabarkowicz realized that if you take CO2 from the air and Hydrogen from water you can repackage the molecules into petroleum. From there it was no problem to make all the gasoline and oil that the world needed.
P: You mean there’s plenty of oil in the future?
S: Oh yeah. A gallon of gas costs 12 cents
S: Um. And … well … the Shell Oil’s and Exxon Mobile’s of your time went out of business. Now everybody keeps their petroleum distiller under the sink. We make our petroleum products out of air and water. You just take your CO2 collector from your car trunk at night and connect it to your Grabarkowicz under the sink and it fills your own personal gasoline storage tank under the basement.
M: Your Grabarkowicz?
S: Yes. The Grabarkowicz Collection Device or GDC, traps carbon dioxide from the automobile’s exhaust and stores it. Then you take it home and mix it under the sink with your W2EC or Waste Water Effluence Collector and you run it through your Petroleum Synthesizing Unit or PSU and you get gasoline which is usually stored in a tank in the basement of your house.
The thing is we don’t usually use TLA’s
M: TLA’s?
S: Three Letter Acronyms. We don’t use them any more because by now there have been so many TLA’s created that they’ve overlapped and nobody knows what you’re talking about anymore. So mostly now we say things like Grabarkowicz device because it’s easier. For instance you used to talk about IBM and KFC but now people wouldn’t know whether you were talking about the Internal Basement Management device or Interior Ballroom Markings (ballroom dancing is very big in the future) or your International Business Machines unit.
P: They still have IBM in the future?
S: Oh yeah.
M: Do they still make computers?
S: Well yeah. They make C3’s. Command and Control and Communications units. You know. The home computers that run your houses? Oh yeah. You won’t have C3’s for another 50 years or so.
P: Tell us more about the future. What time are you from?
S: Well its like 11:30.
P: No tell us about the times of …
M: What year are you from?
S: 3210
P: Wow. You’re from 1200 years in the future?
S: Yep.
P: So tell us what’s the future like?
S: Well it’s pretty boring. You got your haves and your have nots. Everything’s pretty much perfect unless you’re poor. But its peaceful which is nice. After the clone wars and all
M: Clone wars?
S: Mmm hmmm. Of 2525.
P: Wow Max there’s so much I want to ask here. We could make a fortune.
S: Oh now be careful. If you’re going to ask me about the future you better think twice. There’s a LOT of trouble that way.
M: How so?
S: Well most people want to get rich of course. By knowing which stocks to buy.
M: Yeah. Which stocks should I buy?
S: Well I could tell you, but you know that thing called the Grandfather Paradox?
P: Yeah we’ve talked about it here on our podcast.
S: Well it’s true. And if too many people know too much – and it doesn’t take much to mess things up at all. Then the future changes and its not just the same future anymore. So, I really can’t tell you anything.
M: Not even one stock?
S: Think about it. I’ve already given you a lot!
M: Yeah. Grabarkowicz device….. hmmm.
P: So dude. What brings you back here?
S: Fabricans
M: Fabricans.
S: Yep. In the year 2249 Jonas Grabarkowicz learned the secret of space/time.
P: He did?
M: Grabarkowicz?
P: What is the secret of Space/Time.
S: Well it turned out Stephen Hawking was right. Space/Time is made up of strings. Except now we call them fabricans. Fabricans are the ultimate “thing” of the universe. They make up the molecules that make up the atom. The way they vibrate makes the difference between every “thing”.
M: How did he discover Fabricans?
S: He saw them.
P: He could see the ultimate “Stuff” of the universe?
S: Yep. He just “saw” them.
M: How?
S: It seems that certain people. People like me. Could see the universe itself vibrating in space. They think it has something to do with genetic mutations first generated by LSD users. It changed their genetic makeup to make them more sympathetic to the universe itself.
M: Wow.
S: But after the LSD cleansing nobody talks about it now. We Learyites are an oppressed minority.
P: Learyites?
S: Yes. People whose genetic material was changed by Lysergic Acid.
M: LSD
S: Yes. But we don’t like to use Three Letter Acronyms.
M: Oh yes. Sorry.
P: You said something about an LSD cleansing.
S: Well yes. After the clone wars people were very leery (no pun intended) of science and anything that was different. In 2525 there was a DNA purge.
M: DNA is at TLA
S: DNA is DNA. It’s like a word.
P: Go back to the story.
S: Well, under the rule of President George Herbert Walker Texas Ranger Bush the IV, all people with Learyite DNA were rounded up and sent to the Martian Colonies.
M: Wow.
P: Go on.
S: Well the Bushites weren’t smart enough to realize that if people were able to control the stuff of time and space it really didn’t matter if you sent them a few million miles away.
P: So you just came back?
S: Yes. That’s when National Security One was put into place.
M: What is National Security One.
S: NSO is an executive order that anyone showing Learyite tendencies should be lasered on site.
M: Lasered?
S: Yeah. Fried out of existence with a laser gun.
M: They really DO exist?
S: Yeah. Turns out there really just isn’t a more efficient weapon. Highly dangerous.
M: So they’re illegal?
S: No. They’re mandatory.
P: Mandatory?
S: Yeah. Under George Herbert Walker Bush the fourteenth everyone was required to have one.
P: Wow. Does that make the world safer?
S: No. Not really. People are being burned out of existence all the time.
M: Wow. The future isn’t so different after all.
S: Why do you think I came back here?!
Published under Creative Commons attribution, non – commercial, no derivitives license. You can copy it and share it, but don’t change it in the future.
Posted in Other People's Theories, Social Commentaries | No Comments »
August 22nd, 2008 by Max
Into a everyone’s life a few pearls of wisdom come. When you see them, you should hang on to them. Like this one:
That’s not art on the wall, that’s food, and you should clean that up! – Jette
Genius!
Posted in Other People's Theories, Social Commentaries | No Comments »
August 22nd, 2008 by Max
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/
Here’s a link to that essay, spoken, which references Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus. I heard it, reread on Qn www.QuirkyNomads.com and just felt like putting it in here.
Its about 17 minutes long and worth a listen.
Or, Here it is in text:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus —”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article—fighting offstage all the while—from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every line of code, in every language Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 98 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 98 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 98 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of the cognitive surplus that’s finally being dragged into what Tim O’Reilly calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first—hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.
The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.
Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.
So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message—I can do that, too—is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.
And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, “Isn’t this all just a fad?” You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, “This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before,” and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into. But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse.
We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.
Posted in Science, Social Commentaries | No Comments »
August 18th, 2008 by Max
I won’t root for Usain Bolt. “Lighting” Bolt showed disrespect for his competitors, disrespect for the Olympics and disrespect for the atheletic ideal by slowing down, looking around, and pounding his chest as he blew away the field and the world record in the Men’s 100 meter dash. He ran 100 meters in 9.69 seconds.
Yes. It was amazing how badly he beat the rest of the best in the world. Obviously he could have bettered that new world record merely by continuing to try.
He could have run faster. He could have set a mark that might never be exceeded. I hope someone soon beats his record. He embarrassed himself and the games.
I won’t root for him.
Posted in Social Commentaries, Sports | 2 Comments »
August 18th, 2008 by Max
Alicia Sacramone finished 4th, in the vault finals. Two of the women who finished above her in the scoring had worse vaults. Alicia’s two vaults each had a small step. A 1/10th deduction. They were less difficult, but otherwise perfect. Fine. Less difficult. The woman from “The Peoples Republic of Korea” stepped out of bounds!!! And she made a big step. That should be at least 1.1 deductions. The other woman, from China, fell on her landing! [As in fell on her landing. On her knees!] She finished ahead of Alicia! We talk amongst ourselves about how gymnastics is not a sport, because there is no objective way to tell who won. Fooie on gymnastic scoring. The woman from German by way of Uzbekistan at 33 years old, did two fine vaule wts. Give her the gold. Give Alicia the silver. Anything else is injustice at best … and plain politics at the worst. Fooie!
Women’s vault (final) 1. Un Jong Hong (PRK) 15.650 pts 2. Oksana Chusovitina (GER) 15.575 3. Fei Cheng (CHN) 15.562 4. Alicia Sacramone (USA) 15.537
Posted in Politics, Sports | No Comments »
August 15th, 2008 by Max
Really. Which is the way to judge the leader? If you are saying you won more medals but you don’t have as many firsts … well it just isn’t American!
How do you think we should judge which country is in the lead?
Posted in Politics, Social Commentaries, Sports | 2 Comments »
August 14th, 2008 by Max
Yay for the American women’s gymnastics team. There’s so much to talk about with these games. We’ll get to Michael Phelps later. Right now I wanted to talk about Alicia Sacramone.
Ok, now the Chinese girls [women?] look like they’re about 12. The Americans more mature looking. Still I was feeling a little guilty thinking that Alicia was kinda cute … till I saw that she’s a college student.
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Hang on Alicia! Imagine jumping up, summersaulting and landing on a 4″ beam.
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Beams are 125 cm (about 4’5″) high, 5 meters long, and 10 cm (4″) wide.
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Being brave. The coach blamed the officials, then she blamed the athelete.
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Beautiful young woman
Whew! And she really maintained her poise during some “how not to interview” questioning. Yay for Alicia. Yay for America. Yay for the American women’s gymnastics team. They WON the silver.
Posted in Sports | 2 Comments »
August 12th, 2008 by Max
Posted in My New York, Photos, Science | 2 Comments »
August 10th, 2008 by Max
Ok. We all root for the people from our home country. Yay by jingo!
We – I – at least – root for Canada. I know Canadians. I like Canadians. Often, more than I like Americans. So if Canada is playing against Sweden in soccer. Yes. I watch women’s soccer. I’m rooting for Canada.
But what about after that?
Confession time. If the competition is the Swazamookie woman against the Kaszooki woman … I’m rooting for the cute one! [I think being beautiful is a huge unfair advantage in life ... but that's another blog entry.]
But what about the Latvian boxer against the Uzbekistan boxer? I don’t have a predjudice for every event. Sometimes I just want to watch the competition. I love the competition. Its so basically human. Each Olympics is basic humanity. People competing. People from other nations joining together for the … blah blah blah wonderful.
I always pick somebody to root for! Do you?
Posted in Social Commentaries | 2 Comments »
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