Monthly Archives: January 2009

Metablogging

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I came up the term “Metablogging” on my own in my last post: blogging about blogging. I am a genius.

For safe measure, I googled the word and darn, it has been written to death. So now my hope is to meta the meta, a blog about the blogs that blog about the other blogs. But that has been done also. Search came back with titles such as “meta, meta, meta”… Sigh.

I wish I were still in grad school, majoring in Cultural Studies, or even Ethnography, the Blogsphere is a such fertile ground for dissertation subjects. Even for a Psych major. Darn!

Where do people find the time to blog? And the Huffington Post’s guide to blogging…

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I am seriously puzzled.  I have checked out the “competitions” out there: do a google search (or a google blog search, even better), and there are a lot of suburban moms out there, clicking away. Many of them are writers, professional even, were or still are.  Thank god!

They all have kids, well, duh, that’s the definition for “mothers”.  So, where do they find the time to produce such abundant material for their blog?

I have to decide whether I want to go to bed or blabber away in the cyber space.  And even in the cyber space, there are so many “social media” choices for my insomniac mind: Facebook, My Space, Slickdeals, Baby Bargain chat rooms, in addition to all the wonderful professionally written blogs: the Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, Micro Persuasion, and, let me not forget the most fun of them all, randomly searching the interweb for funny stuff to read or watch.  (Oh, YouTube, you are the ultimate time sinker!)  Even Twitter, the haiku model of the social media, proves to be a great aide to procrastinators, despite its claim to brevity: read the “Everybody” section like a great “found object poetry”, and click on all the TinyUrl links that people shared. FUN!

Hack, even reading reviews (and dueling comments) on Amazon.com is entertaining sometimes.

And actually, spending more time on my computer, now that the kids are in bed, requires me to put on the blinder and ignore the 3-day-piled-up laundry, the unwashed dishes, the toys strewn about the floor, oh, and yes, BILLS TO PAY, and Quicken to enter (I am proud to say that I have been diligently keeping records on Quicken since 1993…  that’s an astonishing record for someone who has never managed to keep a journal past page 10…)

Really, I could be watching one of the Netflix DVDs that I haven’t touched and need to return soon to get our money’s worth. Or, I could read the newspaper. Or, heck, I should take a shower!  I could also use some exercise on the machine that is now, as predicted, the clothes hanger.

It amazes me every time I think about this question.

In her latest (and probably the “lightest” and least political) book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, Arianna Huffington proposes that everybody should have a blog, and that one should write something down instantly, no thinking required, no minimum for length for each post. And that’s where the fun is, and probably what the point is about blogging.

I have taken a liking (more an affinity, actually) to Arianna Huffington ever since her appearance on the Jon Steward Show this past December (promoting the book, of course).  Jon true to himself wasn’t persuaded by Arianna’s ensued plea, “hey, you should have a blog!”  What got me was what she said, as a side comment, about why she personally likes blogging,

“This way my accent won’t be an issue: people cannot hear my accent…”

It was mind-blowing to me that with her wealth and power and position, she still minds her own accent.  Perhaps I read too much into this. But I now think of her often and wish her well.

“I wish Mary Poppins is my mom…”

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The other day when my 6-year-old was very frustrated with me for saying NO to most of his requests, he sighed and said with longing, “I wish Mary Poppings is my mom.”
Startled but not offended, laughingly I said, “Yeah, I wish she were your mom too.”
He in turn was shocked by my non-reactive reaction.
Then today, after pointing out to me that I didn’t feed him a “proper” dinner (Note to self: Bagel with cream cheese does not count as a “proper dinner”), he said, in mock-earnestness, “I am going to ask Santa for a better mom.”  “Oh, I am just kidding.”
Ah, a great sense of humor is the sure sign of intelligence, I always say.
Being self-reflective to a compulsive degree, I often picture my kids sitting in a shrink’s office, discussing their childhood with their unstable mother and her effect on their great novels of the decade.  Perhaps all the tribulations in our repressingly liberal suburban household will become cannon fodder for their artistic endeavors one day.  One can only hope.
Coda: Turned out that hot dog on a piece of white bread (since I don’t buy buns because they always go bad before we can finish them) is an acceptable entree for dinner.  Thank goodness.
p.s. I am well aware of this:
self-reflection + lack of action to correct any un-motherly behavior = rampant self-indulgence in the guise of mock self-pity

Questions from your kids: How many people are there in the world?

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Here is your answer, as of January 13, 2009 (US Time)
U.S. 305,610,552
World 6,753,669,055
This is pretty neat, courtesy of U.S. Census Bureau’s Pop Clocks.
At my boys’ insistence, here is the counter part: Statistics on death…
(Yes, my kids are naturally morbid, considering how many comic books and movies inspired by comic books they have had encountered.  Neil Gailman is to be blamed, IMHO…)
Number of deaths: 2,448,017 (2005 U.S. census data)
Pondering when is the right time and age to explain to my 6-year-old the plights of people around the world, and how much to tell him…

New Website I dig (this morning): Just Hear It (great search interface for random songs…)

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Thanks to ReadWriteWeb this morning, I am in the know for a brand new website for searching random songs on the interweb: Just Hear It.  Their tag line is:
Any Song. Legal. Free.
Legal is definitely a plus.  Free is a must!
This will be a great tool for when you need to show junior that great song in your youth.  When I searched for “I’ve Never Been to Me” (don’t ask me why…) though, the results shown included a few YouTube clips.  I don’t really mind since the one clip turned out to be quite funny.  Ah, nostalgia.

What’s the strangest-looking package you have ever received in the mail?

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Goodies: this one from my fav radio station (actually the only station I listen to, other than the station that starts playing Christmas music in October…) and one of my fav magazines:
 
Wired Magazine wanted to find out 9 years ago, so they started the "Return to Sender" Contest…
 
 
"During the nine years of Wired's Return to Sender contest, we received some weird stuff in the mail: broken hard drives, a 5-foot felt "long tail," a wooden DNA helix, and an 8-track player containing an Engelbert Humperdinck tape. The rules called for readers to send us any mailable object; if it came in an envelope or a box, it was disqualified. Winners had a photo of their entry published and received—drumroll, please—a Wired T-shirt. Oh, and immortal glory."
 
Read more to learn how you can send your own POOP (permissible objects of postability)!
 
The same concept of POOP is behind this company called "Send a Ball": quite literally, you send a ball via mail!  I guess someone out there should be able to start a new company with a different sort of POOP…  (Ok, not the REAL kind, IYKWIM…) 

 

 
 
 

“Pay-As-You-Go Airline Charges by the Minute”

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This from one of my fav magazines, Wired.
 
When I saw the headline, I thought to myself, "Great, now they have run out of things to charge us for, since they are asking the passengers to pay for everything including tiny bags of pretzels and water, they are going to charge us for sitting on the runway too?"  Luckily for travelers, the upstart airline, Airtime Airlines based in South Africa, will not be charging their passengers more for time spent by the plane idling and waiting in line to take off.  Whew. Now that's a relief.
 
This reminds me of the "Onion-esque" unveiling of the fictional airliner Derrie-Air threatening to charge by individual passenger's weight: "the more you weigh, the more you'll pay. After all, it takes more fuel—more energy—to get more weight from point A to point B…"  (It's a shame really. That would be one urgent reason for me to finally follow my default annual New Year resolution of getting on a diet…)  Only that Airtime Airlines is not fictional, it is a real airline, or, well, almost a real one, as soon as they get their hands on real aircraft that can fly real passengers… 
 
"Taking a cue from the cellphone industry, an upstart South African airline is selling flights by the minute and allowing customers to buy tickets and book flights via text message…  passengers will buy minutes instead of a traditional point-to-point ticket. They can buy a "starter pack" of prepaid minutes and top off their accounts by purchasing more minutes — by text message — at the going rate of 5 Rand (about 53 cents) a minute. Flight times have been mapped out in advance, so sitting on a runway for three hours won't triple the cost of your ticket.

Topping off accounts is where things get interesting. The cost for Airtime minutes can fluctuate, presumably according to promotions and market factors, so topping off becomes an exercise comparable to fuel hedging. Buy a big block of minutes when you think they're at their cheapest and you look smart, unless the price drops again the next day. Then again, it might go up. The price recently rose from 3 Rand to 5 Rand, meaning the cost of a round-trip flight from Durban to Cape Town climbed from about 750 Rand ($81) to 1,250 Rand (about $134). Still that's cheaper than the $200 it would cost on South African Airlines."

Read the entire article here.

“Is it difficult to take care of kids?”

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My 6-year-old boy asked me this question last night when I was putting him to sleep.  (Actually, I still need to sleep with him every night to get him to fall asleep which has been a subject of heated argument sometimes between me and my DH…  I guess I do tend to take the easier way out.  Sorry, Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” is simply not for the time-crunched…)

My boy asked, “Mommy, can I ask you a question?  Is it really hard to take care of kids?”

Startled by the innocent yet loaded question, I employed the age-old trick, “What do you think?”  He thought about it and then said, “It must be hard.  But why?” So I tried to explain to him that unlike complicated machines that we have, babies do not come with instruction manuals, and each one is so different, and they behave differently on a day to day basis, so it is very difficult to know what the right things to do are.

I am such a lame parent…

Of course, now I wonder whether I have complained verbally out loud and he has heard me complaining about raising kids.  The natural extension of the complaint is, for a straight-forward thinker not privy to the complexities of parenthood, “I wish I didn’t have kids”. I hope he did not draw that conclusion on his own.

But I do have a confession to make: sometimes I do wish that I have kids that are more easy-going… which is, probably every other kid that is not mine that I have seen.

NOT from the Onion, surprisingly: Russian analyst predicts USA to break up into 5 countries!

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When you first read it in the Drudge Report on November 25, 2008, you probably wondered, "Did I click on the wrong URL?  Is this The Onion?"
"RUSSIAN ANALYST PREDICTS DECLINE AND BREAKUP OF USA"
A leading Russian political analyst has said the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed his long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

Professor Igor Panarin said in an interview with the respected daily IZVESTIA published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

The paper said Panarin's dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events….

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts – the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong….

 
Somehow this piece of entertaining hypothesizing is picking up momentum and has graced the pages of "large" mainstream news outlets such as USA Today, MSNBC, and most notably the WSJ. 
 
According to Panarin:
  1. The "California Republic," including the West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington, as well as Nevada, Idaho, Utah and Arizona, that Panarin predicts will be part of China or under Chinese influence;
  2. "North Central America," including Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, that Panarin predicts will be part of Canada or under Canadian influence;
  3. The "Atlantic America," including Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, and all of New England, that Panarin predicts may join the EU;
  4. The "Texas Republic," including New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida, that Panarin predicts will be part of Mexico or under Mexican influence;
  5. The "Offshore U.S.," with Alaska going to Russia and Hawaii going to either Japan or China.
Thanks to the WSJ we also have a visual representation of the breakup. 
 
I can see those who have spent so much money and efforts (and even risked their lives!) to come here and become US citizens become quite upset: what? You mean I could have just stayed where I was?  And now you are telling me that I have to go back and be Canadian (or Chinese or Mexican)? 
 
Note to self: consider moving, before the rush begins. 

It’s January 6, do you know who your Senator is?

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Finally.  Dare I say "Finally"?  Al Franken finally was given enough evidence to declare victory, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, based on a 225-vote lead.  Norm Coleman of course immediately indicated, "I am going to SUE!!!"  (Attaboy, like a good old American, that's what I'd do too!) 
 
Please please, let Franken have the chance to run his mouth on the Senate floor.  I cannot wait to hear what he has to say now that he has such an attention-getting mainstream forum, instead of his radio show (and it is NOT even on FM!)