Collect Experiences. Not Things. :')

March 31, 2009

Comfort Zone or Getting Old, or Maybe Both

For the last year, I've only frequented two take away joints: a Chinese place where I get wanton soup and white rice, and an Italian place where I get a sausage sub or large chef salad. My dilemma is that there's a bunch of other mom & pop shops/delis/restaurants nearby.

I've contemplated checking them out, but each time I convince myself not to, because of:

1. What I don't like what I order?
2. What if it's not satisfying?
3. What if I get sick?
4. What if it too fatty?

Ugh, it's clearly the fear of the unknown. It's so much easier to stay in a comfort zone and repeat, or to "tranquilize with the mundane and trivial".

But then what if I'm missing out on something new and it's really good. Is it worth trying? But then if I find something new and I really like it, what if it's fattening, then I'd have to spend more time in the gym. Ugh.

The Beauty of Living in Newark

1. they sell live chickens, ducks, and rabbits across the street. pick the one you want they'll have it ready in 15 minutes.

2. the man next to me at the gym was running on the treadmill wearing "payless" dress shoes.

3. the fish section of the supermarket smells like Bacalhau (salted cod).

4. there are 18 convenient stores/delis/restaurants within two blocks of my house.

5. the lady in the bakery only speaks Portuguese.

6. at noon each day, the smell of grilled sardines fills the air.

March 26, 2009

Sincerely Calculated

NYT: "GO BULLS! President Obama’s team lost; it may not have bothered 5-year-old Nick Aiello."

When a photo similar to the one, of Obama drinking a beer, hit the blog sites, there was all kinds of hoopla - like "why is my president drinking a beer?" (It's probably non-alcoholic, but anyway). But Obama does have that intellectual image, so I sure his handlers welcomed the beer drinking in public. He's trying to be the "everybody's" man.

'Taking Woodstock' Trailer

I can't wait. Ang Lee has to one of the best fllmmakers working today!!

March 20, 2009

Six Years Ago Today - Another Idiot

You realize again from this speech just how utterly different the rationale was for the war at the start than it is now: to "defend the world from grave danger." There was no grave danger. How the US government could have been so incompetent in making such a serious charge remains bewildering to me.

(Via Andrew Sullian)

Lies, Lies, Lies. This is probably the biggest reason we have a financial crisis today. Bush distracted the country's focus to "fighting evil" while Wall Street and the mortgage brokers raped the American taxpayer. And if Bush didn't start the pointless war the U.S. would save over a trillion dollar. What a strange country we live in. And it's kind of ironic Obama sends out a message of peace to Iran today. What a stark difference. Then again, Nixon visited the U.S.'s arch enemy in 1972. And look at our relations with China today.  

I'm looking forward to getting hammered tonight and watching reruns of the "Family Guy.

March 19, 2009

What a Bunch of Idiots

House Votes to Impose 90 Percent Taxes on Bonuses From Firms That Took U.S. Bailouts

1) If they impose the 90 % tax, the employee will quit. Why work for a firm with a 90% tax bracket.

2) And what's worse Congress keeps pushing off the blame of the economic crisis on the financial institutions. Congress need to take a look in the mirror and impose a 90% tax on themselves. To be fair. Congress is as much to blame for their lacked regulation.

March 18, 2009

Can We Say Hypocrite?

Barney Frank seems to have assumed Claude Rains' roll from "Casablanca" "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!".

Why should Barney Frank be appalled at A.I.G. bonuses, when he has been chairman of the House Banking committee since 2006. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco started around 2004. Why didn't he tighten regulation of the mortgage market when he became chairman? That basically goes for all of Congress. Congress seem to be appalled at Wall Street, but it's Congress's responsibility to regulation all financial institutions. They are as culpable for the current economic meltdown as the execs on Wall Street.

March 13, 2009

The GOP Has Hope For America

What's happening? Why all this hope for failure?

And it all seems a bit ironic, when former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system.

Without doubt given Obama's spending bill, and issues on abortion and stem cell research the GOP will back in power in 8 or possibly 12 years. Democracy is a pendulum. But to wish the country failure is a bit harsh.

March 12, 2009

Humans: Soon To Become a Data Observation

Google will begin tracking your every move online and selling the data to the ads guy to target their marketing.
Google knows more about you than any organisation in human history. It can give you a bird’s eye view of your house, allow friends and family to track your every move through their mobile phones, and through its search engine - knows your likes, dislikes and even your vices.

Google’s influence over our lives is set to grow further after it announced today that it will track millions of people as they move through the Internet in order work out what their interests are. Using that information, it will then provide targeted advertising to suit users' individual tastes.
(Via Times Online)
Our existence will be defined by our data points. Think about it. Supermarkets track groceries purchases; gyms track the calories burned and attendance; Ezpass records car movement; google records all online interest; Amazon record book purchases; iTunes music; Netflix movie rentals; Walmart medical records; the list goes on.

An aggregator would then be able to objectively define us by our data and identify others with the same or similar preferences and habits. Subjective marketing becomes objective marketing.

Belligerent chimp proves animals make plans

So humans aren't the only ones that make plans.
According to a report in the journal Current Biology, the 31-year-old alpha male started building his weapons cache in the morning before the zoo opened, collecting rocks and knocking out disks from concrete boulders inside his enclosure. He waited until around midday before he unleashed a "hailstorm" of rocks against visitors, the study said.

"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events."
Why do all the good chimps live overseas? I'd love to see the visitors reaction to the "hailstorm". YouTube, please?

March 08, 2009

Worse than the Dow Crash of 1929?


The S&P 500 bear market, now nearly 17 months old, finished the week slightly above its current low. It continues to dominate our saga of the Four Bad Bears. In nominal terms, the decline in the S&P 500 matches the Dow Crash of 1929 over the equivalent time frame. In real (inflation adjusted) terms, it has surpassed the Dow decline.

The accompanying chart is intended not as a forecast but rather as a way to study the current decline in relation to three familiar bears from history.
(Via dshort.com)

March 06, 2009

How'd They Do That?

It's very cool, but I don't get it....

Check it out here.

Gotta Love India

"Audacity" of Hope

I found paragraph on a website I frequently read.
"I have always been a strong advocate of willing your desires into existence. Many of my successes in life have begun with an element of arrogance — or “audacity,” as some would put it — which I carried with me into tasks I was entirely unqualified to undertake, but that I completed with bravado regardless. Uncountable failures stem directly from underconfidence. By pretending an unappealing situation does not exist, we condition those who constitute it to accept the change we wish to create."
To me this makes a lot of sense, it's basically a philosophy I've followed most of my life. Most of the time I'm entirely unqualified for what I undertake, but I do it anyway.

But what gets me, is that we all have a vision, this "audacity", of how we want to live our lives and make choices accordingly, and we expect our choices to be the "best" and we expect other's to recognize our choices are the "best". Okay, I'm not sure if I'm making sense or not, but the bottom line is we REALLY don't know if "our choices" are the "best". Yes, I've been watching a little too much of "The Wire" and it's seeping into my head. It seems like the best any of us can do it to recognize we don't know, and go from there. I'm off to a film conference this weekend to practice this "audacity".

Late to the Party, I know

I just started watching the entire HBO series of "The Wire".

It's five seasons.
780 minute per season
3900 minutes total
65 hours
A week and a half of "watching"..... dang!

But it's good. It's about justice, and unlike most Western theme shows, there are no heros. All the characters, rich or poor, black or white, educated or uneducated, are all a little good and a little bad. Everybody is doing their "job" to survive. And everybody thinks they're doing the "right thing", but their own "right thing" is making other people miserable. The prosecuting attorney is making the defendant's life miserable. The cop is making the drug dealer's life miserable. The chief of police is making the cop's life miserable. The drug dealer is making the junkie's life miserable. The junkie is making the drug dealer's life miserable by becoming an informant. The cop is making the chief-of-police's life miserable by not doing his job. Its a total cat and mouse chase, and everybody is a little "dirty", except in their own eyes.

1 in 100 Adults are in Prison

Something is wrong. 230 million adult Americans are in jail, with a disproportionately higher number of hispanic and black men.
For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.
And based on the stats below, violent crimes have fallen over the past 20 years, but spending has increased.
In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crime rates fell by 25 percent, to 464 for every 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation.
The prison system industry appears to be extremely profitable. If I didn't know better, I'd think the predominately white-owned prison industry and predominately white-run law system were working together to maximize profits.

March 04, 2009

How Cute?


Getting soft in my old age. ...

Republicans Want Obama To Fail

This stuff is a little weird. Republicans, being lead by Rush Limbaugh, want Obama's policies to fail, because they believe Republican supported policies are better.

What? The Republican policies of deregulation, promoting greed, and under taxing the rich are the ones that failed and got us into the current financial/economic crisis.

Obama has only been in office what 40 days?

March 03, 2009