Click on the file if you don’t see what’s so funny. I laughed so hard my lunch came out.
TMI? Well, click on the file and see what I say to that…
Who gives a damn? Certainly not me. Best GIF file, ever!
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Sushi for you, Obama-san!
The chef did try very hard to make it non-offensive. A friendly gesture really. Look at the USA flag and the similes!
I am actually using this to test POSTEROUS
My first reaction was:
No! Not another Web 2.0 blogging/tweeting site…
How do they expect us to keep up? Very soon, only SAHMs, celebrities, VC guys, and hackers will have enough time on their hands to keep up with all these things.
Yeah yeah yeah. Spam me for blasting SAHMs. I was one for 2 years so I know. Despite all your complaining, you DO have downtime to go online… So there. Be quiet and get back to your chatrooms. (Or, I am just jealous, ok? because I have to work!)
Posterous should thank RainnWilson on Twitter. His tweet I am guessing would bring an onslaught of people to check out the site at least. Moi included.
So do I replace my blog with my own page on Posterous.com?
I am not crying as hard since I do not have attachment to Twitpic or Flikr. BUT, do they support mobile apps?
Posted via email from submom’s posterous
In praise of Kome Kome Shu: Sake that is easy to love and drink
If you have never tried Sake, or if you tried but didn’t think that Sake is for you. Give it a try again. But this time, try the Kome Kome Shu. Literally, Rice Rice Wine/Booze.
The alcohol content is much lower than the common varieties out there, at only 7%. And it is SWEET, not dry. So easy to drink, it feels like elixir to go with your sushi. Or a lot of non-Japanese dishes. It reminds me of Riesling — and I love Riesling. I am the one stocking up on Dr. Loosen at Costco when they carried them for $9 a bottle…
Don’t believe me? Here is a glowing review of KomeKome Shu written by one Jeremy Kaplan, a guest sommelier in NYC (as of March 2007 when this review was penned):
“[The diners] are usually shocked, and 99% of the time super pleased. Even Japanese customers are taken aback by this sake. We sometimes leave the bottle on the table so the customer can study it, which in this case is dangerous for our bottom line and usually means the sake will get poured again, by the customer! A definite no-no. Of the many wines we pour by the glass, this is the one most people ask us to write down.
What’s nice about this sake is that it opens people’s minds to sake. It drinks so much like a wine that they better relate to it. And then you hope it opens the way to try other sakes. Which is the best way to learn. Taste, drink, taste, drink… and best with friends who also want to go down this same path.”
“Coffee makes grown-ups look better in the morning”
My 6-year-old proclaimed all of the sudden last night when he watched me taking off my face (make-up). I burst out laughing and asked him to elaborate.
“You look funky in the morning when you don’t have your coffee. Then when you come home from work, you look pretty. And then you look funky again when it is bedtime. You and daddy just look better after you have your coffee in the morning.”
Moments like this make me appreciate being a mother.
This morning when he woke me up though, he said, “You should go and have some coffee now. You look funky.” I dared not ask him what he meant by funk-ee…
Utah Senator Butt-Arse calls Gays immoral. And polygamy is? Where is the Big Love?
No flaming please. I didn’t mean to compare Gays to Polygamists. But if Utah Senator Chris Butt-Ars (A-ha!) has his right to speak what is on his mind, to spout garbage based on stereotypes and gross generalization and nothing else, despite being an elected public official, then I have the right to generalize the State of Utah as still the hotbed of polygamy, and then to generalize polygamy as the Pantheon of immorality.
Hey, it is a free country, right? Butt-Ars’s Republican colleagues in the Senate seem to believe so.
Here is the gist:
In an interview for a documentary film, “Butt-Ars called gays ‘the greatest threat to America’ and likened them to Muslim radicals. He said homosexuals lack any morals and want special rights. ‘It’s the beginning of the end,’ Buttars said. ‘Oh, it’s worse than that. Sure. Sodom and Gomorrah was localized. This is worldwide.'”
Butt-ars has been stripped of his chairmanships by Senate Republicans after a closed-door meeting brought about by the outcry, and his Republican colleagues were outraged and they are standing behind him. (I wish I had loyal friends like these…) Butt-ars likewise refused to apologize, but rather relished the pride of taking a stand for his own beliefs. (Imagine: what if we all had showed respect for the slave owners who took the stand for their own beliefs? Hmmm…)
Below is the lengthy quote from The Salt Lake Tribune because you simply cannot make this stuff up!
“I want the citizens of Utah to know that the Utah Senate stands behind Senator Buttars right to speak, we stand behind him as one of our colleagues and his right to serve this state,” said Senate President Michael Waddoups, R-Taylorsville. “He is a senator who represents the point of view of many of his constituents and many of ours. We agree with many of the things he said. . . . We stand four square behind his right [to say what he wants].”
Buttars, R-West Jordan, said he “totally” disagrees with his removal from the panel. In a statement he plans to post on the Senate’s Web page, he said the action was an attempt to “shy away from controversy.” And, he said, he would not apologize for his comments.
“I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said.
Wow. Are you kidding me? Is this for real? In this day and age? I must be incredibly naive to be astounded by these news lately so easily.
This and the Cartoon from the New York Post yesterday are reminders that we should not be complacent about “How far we have come along” despite the victory of having elected the first African American POTUS. Baby, we’ve still got a long way to go…
“When it comes right down to it,” Buttars said in his statement, “I would rather be censured for doing what I think is right, than be honored by my colleagues for bowing to the pressure of a special-interest group that has been allowed to act with impunity.”
#Piqqem now has 270 followers…
It is amazing to see how a Tweep (or, what’s the name for a company/entity that tweets? And Christi on Southwest… is she a Tweep or is the Tweet Southwest’s?) grows the number of followers. I wonder whether there is a 3rd party Twitter apps. out there that tracks number of followers for selected Twitter accounts at the end of each day. Then we can do some trendline analysis, plug in significant events into the timeline, and do some regression.
The power of word of mouth. The tipping point.
#followfriday and/or #fridayfollow
When does it become so big that it stops being effective?
Once again, I wish I were back in Grad School: so many fascinating topics to choose from for virtual Performance Studies. What would Ervin Goffman have said about all this in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life? Maybe nothing. Can Sociology be applied to virtual societies where you don’t see people, rather, you see the texts representing them?
Note to self: Buy lottery tickets. Win. Go back to school.
p.s. Piqqem acquired 3 more followers in the time of my writing this post. Yes, probably not as fast as how some celebrities acquire followers, but still… I am intrigued.
But, wait, there is more!
Note to self: Google is your friend!! When in doubt, Google. Even my 6-yo would say, “Let’s google!” when I cannot answer one of his rapid-fired questions. But as always, beware of what you read if the source is wikipedia. Anyhow, did some googling, and answered my own question wrt. 3rd-party tracking apps. No need to go outside of the house: the Twitter team has thought of that from the beginning. DUH. Check out #hashtags to see what’s being tweeted about right now. And for sure, soon it will be written up in the WSJ. When that happens, you know you need to find the next hottest thing.
Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag “$” on Twitter
Thanks to Wired, I know now what “$” and “#” mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b…
The enigmatic title “On Twitter, $ Is the New #” serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you…
I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a “#” within them. Duh.
Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.
I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:
“Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it’s a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it’s also made those conversations much more difficult to follow.”
So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add “$” in front of the company’s ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:
They have “urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company’s stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice.” Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.
It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.
In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.
The New York Post chimp cartoon – Not at all funny no matter how you look at it…
New controversy alert! February is not over yet, and as many of us have held our breath fearfully awaited, the FIRST racist cartoon about our FIRST Black Prez is out! My fellow Americans, once again, you do not disappoint…
So the unfortunate New York Post published this cartoon today and also on its website.
Take a deep breath, and be honest with yourself: what is your first reaction?
Perhaps only a kid who is not yet aware of racial stereotypes, historical racial relationships, and cultural symbols embedded in the American Psyche would not see it, but most of us do:
OMG! Are they kidding me? Is it what I think it is? Is the cartoonist referring to President Obama as a chimp shot dead? In this day and age? Is there irony in this? A sarcasm attacking racism or something but I simply cannot decipher it somehow?
Because:
1. Our Prez is Black. There is no any other way of saying it. He is.
2. The stimulus bill is his first legislative effort (and I thank him for it!!) and there are a lot of rumblings and grumblings about it
3. The cops as pictured are White. There is no any other way of saying it. They are.
Please tell me there is more to this cartoon. It has got to be. It is the 21st century, people, and we just elected our first Black President. Many are even thinking of abolishing the African American History Month because it does not seem like we need it any more.
Ha ha. Not funny. I want to cry.
The trusted Rev. Al Sharpton came out immediately and protested loudly:
“The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.”
“Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”
One can argue that you are being a racist yourself if any time a monkey is depicted, you immediately think of the signal = signified : monkey = African Americans
Isn’t that a racist way of perceiving the world? Aren’t you walking around with some colored glasses?
Well, let’s be honest with ourselves. We all are aware of each other’s external appearances. There is no escaping it. And we are all aware of the deep-seated stereotypes about each other permeated throughout our collective cultural references. There is no escaping that either. (I was not born in this country, and I have been taught to be aware of these in the years I have been in the U.S. mostly just by watching TV shows and movies, and trying to understand what the significance is in a lot of the cultural and social references…)
Because of this, the statement by New York Post’s Editor-in-Chief defending the cartoon seems rather weak:
“The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”
Is Col Allan from Mars? Born two centuries ago? There is simply no excuse.
Yes, I get his argument: the cartoon allegedly refers to the “breaking story” about the Chimp shot dead in Stamford, CT, which happens to be the headline story in NY Post.
(Is there any wonder nobody really reads it? Asking a question such as “Why did the chimp go berzerk?” is just plain stupid. Why? I’ll tell you why: he was a chimp. If you are going to keep a chimp as a pet in the city and take him on walks in busy streets, yeah, you bet your ass he’s going to go berzerk. If not today, some day!)
But this requires the readers to:
1. Know about the chimp story (which I had no inkling of since it has not been twittered about…)
2. Immediately infers the caption “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” as a comment on the stimulus being so dumb that “even a monkey can write it.”
IF I have to jump two steps ahead in order to laugh at a cartoon, then the cartoon is NOT funny to begin with. Rule of thumb for telling a joke: If you have to explain it, it is NOT good. So DON’T TELL IT!
I cannot help but have this gnawing feeling that perhaps this is exactly what they wanted: getting us pissed. Perhaps, New York Post has won since I am sure their website is getting the record high number of hits, ever.
Gawker.com collected 10 cartoons by Sean Delonas. Make your own judgement.
Americans pay $650 billion more for health care than comparable countries…
It is technically $643 billion, the additional amount Americans paid for health care in 2006 compared to the other countries with comparable wealth and health, according to the research article “Why Americans Pay More for Health Care?” in the December 2008 issue of the venerable McKinsey Quarterly. (Ok, probably not as venerable as The Harvard Business Review, but still a good thing to be inserted into your conversation with your interviewers…)
Please don’t freak out: this article is actually quite easy to follow and it is written in plain English, so there is no “Huh? WTF are they talking about?” or “Do they know what they themselves are saying?” moment. I promise. In addition, there are a lot of charts. We love charts! And these charts actually say something and make sense. Bonus.
Some quick takeaways:
Countries spend more on health care as they become wealthier.
The main source of this gap of $650 billion? Outpatient care. “Outpatient care is by far the largest and fastest-growing part of it, accounting for $436 billion, or two-thirds of the $650 billion figure. The cost of drugs and the cost of health care administration and insurance (all nonmedical costs incurred by health care payers) account for an additional $98 billion and $91 billion, respectively, in extra spending.”
“Today, the US system delivers 65 percent of all care in outpatient contexts, up from 43 percent in 1980.”
Although in theory this shift should have cut the cost down, in reality the overall cost went up because of the high utilization rate of outpatient care. However, it is not because we go to see the doctors a lot more often, rather, the average costs per visit has gone up and the number of expensive tests, such as MRIs and CT scans, are performed more frequently.
The root cause of this? Insurance and low out-of-pocket expense.
There is no check in place to guard the price increase. On the contrary, seeing a doctor may be like buying a high-end purse — if it is expensive, it must be good. And vice versa.
The article concludes thus, “In the United States, the ‘average’ consumer of health care pays for only 12 percent of its total cost directly out of pocket (down from 47 percent in 1960), as well as for 25 percent of health care insurance premiums, a share that has stayed relatively constant for the last decade. Well-insured patients who bear little, if any, of the cost of their treatment have no incentive to be value-conscious health care consumers.”
This sounds familiar but now we have the numbers to back up our suspicions: in order for any health care reform to work and stick, it is important that we carry out the education and cultivation of a new generation of patients that are “value conscious” and treat the burden of health care, even when they do not have to pay for it DIRECTLY, as ultimately their own INDIRECT cross to bear.
Mankind’s reach for the sky – The Tower of Babel apparently did not teach us anything…
Instead, we seem to pride ourselves on it. Free will. The power to accomplish the unthinkable. The art of one-upmanship.
Many did not realize that the 2300-foot tall Burj Dubai is “only” the world’s Tallest Structure, and not the Tallest Building yet. Until Burj Dubai is completed and occupied, the honor of “The World’s Tallest Building” currently still rests with Taipei 101. The grand opening of Burj Dubai is slated for September 2009. Hurray!
The Empire State Building held the title for over four decades, The Sears Tower, 24 years; yet they seemed to be the exception: Chrysler Building was the tallest for only one year before the Empire State Building took the honor away; The World Trade Center, 2 years; The Petronas Towers, 6 years. It has been almost five years since Taipei 101 was open in 2004, and the world cannot wait for a new Tallest Building. Here is a compiled list of timeline of the world’s tallest skyscrapers.
But wait! There is something in the making to top Burj Dubai even before Burj Dubai is officially crowned:
According to the latest issue (March 2009) of Popular Science, or as they are known on the street, Pop Sci , (sigh… as if they didn’t give themselves a cool name, the young kids would stop reading them…), Burj Mubarak al-Kabir, at the height of 3,284 feet, is being planned by the Kuwait government on the Tigris and Euphrates river delta, as part of its “the City of Silk” city development. In comparison, Burj Dubai is merely 2,684 feet tall (as originally planned; nobody knows how tall it will actually be until this September when it is finished). In order to withstand the high wind at that height, Burj Mubarak al-Kabir is designed as “three interlocking towers, each twisting 45 degrees top to bottom to help stabilize it… [The tower overlap in the center to form a triangular core.] No matter which way the wind blows, two of the three towers will always brace the building.”
Like the Washington Monument with a height that is easy to remember: 555 feet, Burj Mubarak al-Kabir will be 1001 meter tall, “One thousand and one meters for One Thousand and One Nights. It’s the difference between bragging rights and telling a story.”
Take that, Burj Dubai. Ouch!
By the way, the supposedly 2nd tallest building to be built, The Chicago Spire? Not gonna happen, if ever, any time soon. It is currently a big giant ugly hole in the ground both literally and figuratively… construction has been put on indefinite hold because the developer have not been able to secure additional financing, at the same time when the world-renowned Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, filed a lien against the developer. Such a shame.
