February 2006 Archives

Mary Matalin tells WaPo

"He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do."

Except for shooting the guy, right? (TPM has a nice hunters rules summary.)

A few weeks ago, the Justice Department caught the attention of cable news programs by announcing the indictments of eleven "eco-terrorists" in Oregon. Their terrorist activites? Arsons and property damage, in which no one died. Now, I'm not coming even close to condoning their actions, but I don't think the fear of your local meat processing plant burning down in the night counts as a "vast eco-terrorist conspiracy".

For if these actions did constitute terrorizing the public, certainly those responsible for the ten church burnings in Alabama would also be labeled "terrorists". Indeed, two reasons come to mind why the actions in Alabama are worse than those in Oregon/Washington. First, churches are much closer to people's heart and minds than industrial plants, and thus the church arsons give people more of a reason to fear. Second, ten church burnings have occurred in a matter of weeks, while the radical environmentalists spread their activities out over five years.

But the media has completely ignored this incongruity. Personally, I don't think either of the said groups are terrorists--they aren't trying to kill or scare civilians. Someone who should have been labelled a terrorist, but wasn't, was that Tampa teen who flew a plane into a building and said he had sympathy for Bin Laden. Of course, he was neither Arab nor a lefty, so we should just forget the incident ever happened.

My trip to Boston and Yale was fun if somewhat uneventful. Got to Boston just in time to have dinner with two Beast alums, Emily and Nnennia (while Nina couldn't be bothered to ignore her classwork for an hour). Then, I stopped by my brother's frat to wish him a Happy Birthday. As he's just back from Hong Kong and has a new desk at the Burlington office, I gave him a clock for his desk. No, not that clock, but one just as nerdy: it's an analog and has chips, capacitors, and the like for the numbers. I think he liked it. Yet another Beast alum, Monica, was nice enough to put me up for the evening.

The next day, it was off to New Haven, to see my Yale friends. We ate dinner at the usual place, Claire's: as it's both vegetarian and kosher, everyone's happy. (Oddly, all of my Yale friends except Elf are Jewish--not sure how that happened.) Turnout was good, and I got to meet Mara's new cat and her new beau, both of whom were quite friendly :) We went over to Elf's place and played Cranium, where my board game winning streak continued, though this time the deck was stacked in my favor as my team had three players (one more than the other two teams). Who knew Sam would be such a fiend at Cranium? Guess he does more than port ThinkPad fingerprint scanners to Linux all day ;) After everyone left, Elf and I made some delicious pumpkin cheesecake in her new springform pan.

Back at Princeton, Friday night included my first home-court, Division 1 basketball game, as the Princeton Tigers took on (who else?) the Yale Bulldogs at Jadwin. The game was tied 40-40 (deuce!) when Princeton went on a three point shooting bonanza. The Tigers never looked back and took the game 66-49. Their (our?) subsequent win over Brown puts us in second place in the Ivy League standings, behind Penn. We play Penn at home for the final regular season game; hopefully that game will determine whether we go to the Big Dance.

Saturday, I went back into NYC for Fordham Univ's presentation of the Vagina Monologues. All of the actresses were excellent, but the young woman who did the Vagina Workshop monologue just stole the show. Perhaps it was the fact that she actually got down on a "little blue mat," perhaps it was her British accent and the way she pronounced "clitoris" with a heavy emphasis on the second syllable, or perhaps it was just her emotional connection to the audience. Whatever the mechanism, she had complete command of the stage and the theatre. After the show, I attended a party for Sam (who had invited me, and had the role of "Happy Vagina Fact") thrown by her roommates, which was quite humorous and had an excellent gender ratio (10 women, 1 gay guy, and me).

But, alas, now term has started and I'm quite swamped. Hopefully I'll reemerge occasionally to blog.

Before I head off to Boston and Yale, I should blog about my excellent trip into the city last weekend. The whirlwind tour started off with a Shabbat dinner at Andy's. Three orthodox Jewish couples and me--so I stood out in more ways than one. Also, I didn't share the sentiment that Hamas winning the election was okay because now the Palestinians would just "kill each other." But, thankfully, we steered clear of most political issues. Bracha and I had a nice chat about the existentialism of Garden State. (One addendum: it didn't occur to me until about three days after watching the movie the obvious parallel between the protagonist's surname, Largeman, and the term ubermensch.)

Friday night I stayed over at Seth's place, where I scored a rare Scrabble victory over him. (The win was even more impressive because Seth got the Q, Z, and X.) We watched the old Hitchcock version of Mr and Mrs Smith, which is nothing like the new Pitt/Jolie remake. Back in 1941, I don't think women were allowed to be gun-wielding spies in movies (knife-wielding, maybe), so the plot was just about their marital troubles. The beginning and middle were funny, but the ending definitely dragged.

Saturday, I went dress shopping....with my high-school-aged cousins. They're from rural Maine, and it was a great coincidence that both their family and I were in NYC on the same weekend. The girls are off to a winter/Valentine's Day formal in a few weeks and want to show up with dresses from SoHo. Unfortunately, despite the countless small shops we visited, they left empty-handed. I hope they did better on Sunday. I spent that evening with Kevin: Seth and Samidh also showed up to make it a Beast reunion. Continuing the beat-Seth-at-games weekend theme, Samidh and I beat the other two 2e alums in a hotly contested game of Taboo.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year we tried some durian, which is an exotic Asian fruit. Durian smells....a lot. Just unwrapping the aluminum foil around the fruit (which is still intact) fills the room with its scent. And then once you actually crack it open....oy. It's no wonder that hotels in Asia have big signs that say "NO DURIAN." Samidh and Kevin enjoyed it, though Seth and I found the taste rather repulsive. Just check out the quote halfway through the wikipedia article to get a sense of what I mean.

Sunday, Naomi and I went skating in central park and (on her recommendation) to the show Jewtopia. Some of my friends *cough*Seth*cough* had told me the show was a disappointment, but they couldn't be further from the truth. We barely had time to catch our breath amid the continuous laughter from the opening scene to the end. The acting was impressive, especially the female lead who played about a dozen different characters throughout the show. The climax of the show was an unintended "wardrobe malfunction," by which one of the male leads gave himself a wedgie with his Purim costume. The actors on stage cracked up and the audience loudly applauded to give them time to compose themselves. Just too funny.

Had a quick dinner with Rachel from Dean, and then took Metro-North to visit Chicklet. She gave me an awesome belated Chanukah present featuring the Moose Menorah. To top off a great weekend, we watched "The Stackhouse Filibuster," one of the best West Wing episodes ever. (And the topic was timely given the status of the Alito nomination.) Got back in time Monday to meet with my prof about research. And my illegally-parked car wasn't even towed at Princeton Junction!

Yesterday, after listening to the uneventful SOTU and the "eyebrow-raising" Democratic response, I headed over to the GC for a politics/econ grad student party. Gosh, my cohort loves its alcohol. Anyway, it was a "dress up weird" party, and I had not a clue what that meant, so I arrived normally clad. At which point I was taken by the wrist and shown the "costume" table. Well, the only garments left were oddly-decorated tank tops, so I shed my sweater and threw on one of Ling's tops. I hope I didn't stretch it too badly--though the creator didn't endow me with the biggest chest so at least that part of the top remained unscathed throughout the evening. All in all, a very fun and relaxing five days--I hope the trend continues up north.