September 2005 Archives

I'm listening to Condoleeza Rice, who is speaking at Princeton, from the comfort of my apartment via webcast. I helped with the student protest of her speech by creating ribbons and handing out fliers. I'm surprised to find that I agree with almost everything she is saying. Dr. Rice is extolling the virtues of combating extremism and spreading democracy--the subtext is obvious. A person just waking from a 4-year coma, however, would think that we attacked (or at least heavily pressured) the blatant extremism of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Iran. She hasn't even spoken the word "Iraq" yet.

Oh, she's finally on Iraq. And she is not directly connecting Hussein's regme to Islamic extremist. Of course, you're not supposed to notice that she can't link those two concepts.

Monday afternoon, I went on a daring school night expidition to the land of New Haven, CT. There I had dinner with Mara and Sam from MIT Hillel, Alissa from Dean, and Rain. (Alas, Josh W of DFA-NH was unable to attend.) We went to Claire's for food, which, as a vegetarian and kosher restaurant, had something for everyone; the quality was, despite its reputation, surprisingly good.

Rain and I then went to a Dar Williams concert, which was the real reason for my trip. The opening act, Girlie Man, was surprisingly brilliant (given my previous negative experiences with openers). For the main event, we slithered our way to the front row; Dar was so close that we could practically touch her. She put on a fantastic show, playing most of the songs from her two recent CDs--Beauty of the Rain and My Better Self, as well as some of her past hits. (When she started to play "The Babysitter's Here" a young woman two rows back wistfully exclaimed "I learned to play guitar with this song!") "The Christians and the Pagans" received the biggest crowd reaction, with people jumping up and down during the chorus (and by people, I mean me and the girl next to me).

Needing to put Rain's 10 pounds of picked raspberries to good use, we made Peach-Raspberry Cobbler (straight out of the joy of cooking). While the cobbler was in the oven we enjoyed an episode of Firefly, in anticipation of the new movie Serenity. (Useless trivia: apparently Kaylee will be much skinnier in the movie.)

Last Saturday was The Game: a mini MIT mystery hunt style scavenger hunt. My team finished in the middle of the pack--we got much better as The Game went on. (It took us a while to get the style of the clues.) Some of the puzzles were fantastic: one included a laser set-up with half-mirrors. My two critiques were (1) the flavortext was misleading and unhelpful most of the time, and (2) the great, Back to the Future theme had no climax at the finish line.

In other news, I've started playing soccer most days with my neighbors' kids: two brothers (Gotham and Sidhar) and thier friends, two sisters (Anania and Samya). We play three against two, with my side being down one player. The kids always want to be on my team--they haven't figured out yet that my team somehow always loses...

QOTD: "I think that if Barbara Lee would read the history of Joe McCarthy she would realize that he was a hero for America." (AP)

Last weekend was action-packed, which is hopefully a good sign for my time here at Princeton. Friday night started with services at Princeton Hillel, which no one here calls Hillel. It's the CJL, or the Center for Jewish Life. The building is big and well-adorned. Services were good, and very similar to MIT's. ( For those who care, we used Sim Shalom for our Siddurim.) Dinner afterwards was free for grad students (and will be free every other week!) and they had plenty of vegetarian options. I mistook the couscous for another dish because it was smushed together so much, but the food quality was reasonable for a Kosher meal.

After dinner, we did lots of singing, and I learned new hand gestures to accompany Kol Ha'Olam Kulo (and new English lyrics for it as well). The young woman leading the singing was especially bouncy--I'll have to see next week whether she is normally like that or just overly excited about the new term (I suspect the former). A few of us then took the Jew party to the dorms where I chatted it up with the underclassfolk.

Saturday, I bought a mountain bike for $100. It's in like-new condition, has front wheel suspension, and is only two-years old. It was a great find, except that the seat is a bit painful. I was scoping out other bikes and I saw some seats with extra padding--I need to get me one of those. The other problem is that it's mostly all uphill to class and I'm out of shape. The trip back is very pleasurable though :)

Saturday evening I went to an east coast swing lesson in the non-air conditioned main gym. The girls outnumbered the guys and the freshman girls probably outnumbered the total guys. So I met a lot of 18-year-olds. The lesson was a nice extension of Portia's brief introduction to the dance last summer.

From there I met up with my fellow politics department first-years (aka. my cohort) to go to a concert benefiting the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Turns out the concert featured Gza from Wu Tang Clan. And while I had definitely heard of the Clan, I don't think I recognized a single song and I was unfamiliar with this Gza fellow. Suffice it to say that my cohort and I were out of our element. We left early, though I must say that I gave Gza a chance: I listened to his music for over and hour. But, in the end, I think I'll stick with Jewel, Alix, and Dar.

Sunday I went into New York City, to take advantage of NJ Transit's free ride that they were offering students last week. I saw Rachel and Aswini from DFA-NH, and met up with Seth to watch the Emmy's. Seth said two of his lady friends were coming but they stood him/us up. So we talked about Seth's burgeoning music career instead.

And now it's back to the grindstone and the 500 pages / week I need to read for school.

Geez people, I leave the Mellman Group for a little more than a month, and look what happens! (Joking!)

Fernando Ferrer [Dem] 182273 39.95%
Anthony Weiner [Dem] 131476 28.82%
C. Virginia Fields [Dem] 72640 15.92%
Gifford Miller [Dem] 46480 10.19%

So Ferrer misses 40% by a nosehair, but Weiner just announced that he won't contest the run-off.

Though in other news, Stringer won (I gave him a fundraising DB), and a candidate who TMG never went public about won her primary. (Her poll was the first poll I ever weighted with no one else's help.)

I know I have some readers who live in New York City/Manhattan, so here's a reminder to VOTE today. I would suggest Giff Miller for Mayor and Scott Stringer for Manhattan Borough President. Miller is a youthful voice for the city, and has shown how he can beat Bloomberg at the city council level (hopefully a preview of the general election). Miller was on the New York Times "short list", and did fantastic in the most recent debate. Oh, and for all your New Yorkers who are warming to Bloomberg, have you forgotten the stadium boondoggle and his blocking of same-sex marriage?! Vote for a Democrat--your friends will thank you later.

As for Stringer, he was endorsed by The Times. I don't have an air-tight case on why you should vote for him...but you probably don't know much about the candidates anyway.

On a more general topic, I need a bike to get around campus. I know very little about bikes, so I'm hoping my readers can clue me in. How versatile are road bikes? For instance, will this bike work on the gravel (short-cut) road near my apartment? Or should I go with this one just to be safe? Anything I should be looking out for (wheel size, frame size)?

This week the CA state assembly passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage. Governor Schwarzenegger has said he will veto the bill and that this issue should be "decided by voters or the courts." Chicklet pointed out the complete nonsensical nature of this argument, given that the people and the courts are on opposite ends of the mobocracy-philosopher king spectrum, with a representative legislature somewhere in between. I knew that given the Governator's low approval rating, he had no choice but to acquiesce to his Republican base and needed any argument to justify his position, logic be damned.

In addition, the New York Times brings up the excellent point that Schwarzenegger rode into office two years ago as a sort of uber-politician, beholden to no one. Now we see the exact opposite from him. The Califonia assembly is giving Schwarzenegger a chance to assure his place in political history (and do the right thing at the same time, no less) as the first governor to sign same sex marriage into law. But instead we see him capitulating to craven political convenience--how pathetic.

Got back to the States yesterday after a 15-hour flight from Hong Kong. Chicklet surprised me at the airport so I didn't have to take the train back. After taking the "scenic route" back to Princeton, I returned the favor by making us dinner. Given that I had just been adventurous for 10 days, I wanted to do something very normal, so I popped in The Princess Bride and watched the movie for about the 35th time. Amazingly, Chicklet had never seen the entire movie before (?!). She seemed to enjoy it, though perhaps she'll publish a more detailed review on her site.

For the first time since Kevin told about this program called Napster at MIT, I'm paying for my music. Not wanting to be encumbered by DRM or locked into a certain subset of music players (my Treo plays mp3s after all), I signed up for eMusic. They give you the mp3s straight up--no catches. I'll get 40 downloads for $10 a month (so as long as I find about 1 new album a month it'll be cheaper than iTunes). Also, when they say you get 50 free downloads they are actually being truthful. I've almost used up all my freebies and they have not charged by credit card. My hesitance about joining before was the lack of an extensive catalog, but I saw they now have the Decembrists. (Chu got several of their songs stuck in my head a couple months ago.)

Their catalog, which you can only view by signing up for the free trial, included several pleasant surprises (Debbie Friedman, Green Day, Carole King), but the best find was Dar Williams. Innumerable people have recommended her to me over the years, but for some reason I had not taken the hint. Well, now I'm hooked. I laughed out loud at "The Christians and The Pagans" and it's my new (temporary) "favorite song." It came out in 1996--okay, so maybe I'm a bit behind the times.

It's my last evening in Hong Kong--this has certainly been a fun vacation. I had enough time to both view all the sites and relax. Sadly, I must return to the harsh wilderness of grad school, filled with afternoon naps and ultimate frisbee :)

Thursday I visited my brother's factory in China, where they manufacture all the robots. There were several assembly lines at the factory--the workers were fabricating all kinds of plastic goods, though mainly toys. The workers, mostly women, are poorly paid, though given that room and board are provided, the conditions seem reasonable. Whether it's a better life than the farm workers (growing bananas and sugar cane) we passed on the car ride to the factory is probably a matter of personal preference rather than absolutes (though what do
I know).

iRobot arranged for a driver to take me on a day tour of southern China. My driver was very friendly, and though she spoke 15 words in English, and my Cantonese consisted of only greetings, our liberal use roman numerals successfully conveyed ideas. The first stop was the Boama Gardens, a national touristy locale, where they had ink pads of 18th century Emporers and bronze statues from BCE on display. Next stop was Guangzhou cultural center and local neighborhood. The center had works on display from local artists and I bought a landscape painting for my 'rents. (I bargained the price down to two-thirds of the original.) The nearby neighborhood was very poor--school had just let out, so I saw a lot of activity. Most people ignored me, but some gave me the weirdest look, as in "what the heck are you doing here?!" Given China's homogeneous society, it is pretty easy to stand out.

The last stop was a huge mall and outdoor market in Guangzhou. The outdoor market had one strip where shop after shop was just selling fabric, beads, and buttons. Two stores augmented these items with designer tags. Yes, they were selling the tags themselves. if you ever wondered how that $5 knock-off got its brand name on it, here's your answer: China. For the only time on this vacation, I had trouble finding dinner at the mall because of my vegetarianism--dinner was Gatorade, an Asian pear, and the most disgusting corn I've ever had. I sat down to eat the corn, and this guy decided to shoot a photo of me every time I bit into the corn. Maybe I was eating it wrong or something...

On Friday I came back to Hong Kong, and went to Orthodox services. I discovered later that there were non-ortho services as well, but being the newbie that I am, I went to the first ones I could find--the Orthodox. Unsurprisingly, the Shabbat prayers, tunes, and customs were the exact same as in the US--it was quite easy to follow along in the very standard ArtScroll prayer book. (I noticed two women relegated to the balcony of the synagogue; as elsewhere, the place was dominated by men.)

After services, I stayed for Shabbat dinner. Unfortunately, I was the only person at the table that was not fluent in conversational Hebrew. The guest of honor was Israeli Knesset member Shaul Yahalom, so much of the dinner conversation occurred in Hebrew. Most of the time I knew the topic of conversation and not much else--I can tell you that disengagement was not discussed.

Yesterday we attended a Hong Kong First Division soccer match. Happy Valley tied Xiangxue Sun Hei 1-1. (Marc and I rooted for Happy Valley of course, since we couldn't pronounce the other team's name.) Saturday night Marc's coworkers and I haggled at the Temple St night market. Today I finally had dim sum at Maxim's Palace, based on Chu's recommendation. And then I crossed the last item off the "to-do" list by buying a Lan Kwai Fong shirt at Ben&Jerry's. And so ends my Hong Kong adventure.