May 2012
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5/5/12 01:44 am
...which is pretty much the ideal headspace for writing blog posts. Went to a party tonight to hang out with my best friend from elementary school and the first couple years of junior high, which explains the first part of this equation. The second part followed logically from seeing an old friend and contemplating all the musicians I like that have died recently. The Beastie Boys have a special place in my heart, because they were the first band I was exposed to be someone my own age, instead of by some adult. It was '86 or '87, and I was in the third grade, because I am old as fuck. I was going to a school in West LA called Carthay. About half of my classmates were other middle-class white kids, and the other half were kids of varying ethnicities that bussed in from poorer parts of the city. I wasn't exactly popular with that latter crowd- I had narced on some of them once when they were in the bathroom snorting pink powdered hand soap pretending it was cocaine. Being the socially adept lad that I was, I also managed to alienate myself from the other white boys over some bullshit about refusing to pretend to be Transformers with them so I could play tag with a girl I liked. The dispute ended with me getting into a fight with this kid named Josh that gave both of us black eyes and condemned me to the outer reaches of the playground. Temporarily friendless, I spent lunch and recess the next day in the area of the playground reserved for the older kids. I didn't know any of the fourth graders, so I just climbed up on the jungle gym (which we just called "The Apparatus" which in retrospect sounds pretty goddamn ominous). It seemed pretty safe, since there was only one other kid hanging out there. I don't remember his name, or what he looked like, though I'm pretty sure he was one of the students bussed in from one of the rougher neighborhoods. Regardless, he had been listening to his older brother's copy of License to Ill obsessively, and he had memorized the lyrics to "Paul Revere." Since neither of us had anyone to play with, he spent the rest of lunch regaling me with tales of how awesome the Beasties were, and teaching me the lyrics to that song. Pretty much immediately after that my dispute with my classmates was forgotten, and I never ventured into fourth grader territory again. I did not, however, forget the lyrics to "Paul Revere," and I went nuts whenever I saw the Beastie Boys on television. Previously my exposure to pop music had come entirely through my mom, and the Beastie Boys felt special to me because I had discovered them without parental guidance. And since I didn't have ready access to music as a child, they remained this mysterious awesome thing, to be marveled at from a distance. At least until high school, when I finally had a cassette player and enough money to buy the recently released Ill Communication. I also went back and grabbed Paul's Boutique, but I never bought License to Ill. I'm not sure why- it probably just seemed like too special a thing to own, like having it on tape would be the equivalent of sawing off a unicorn's horn and sticking it in your garage with the station wagon. Hence, I am bummed about Adam Yauch's death. Now, I was also planning on writing something about Levon Helm, but I don't have anything to share that's anywhere near as personal about him, so fuck it. Instead, here's my favorite of the many songs he sang:
10/20/11 07:52 am
While I was trying in vain to fall asleep on the bus to work this morning, I began wondering- would the Arab Spring have still occurred if the United States had not invaded Iraq, and if so, what would it have looked like? I don't think I've seen that question asked anywhere, and I think it's a counterfactual worth considering. And as I am an American with no advanced degree in international relations who has never been to the Middle East, I am absolutely the most qualified person to consider it. Ahem. First, I definitely think the Arab Spring would still have occurred. Mohamed Bouazizi would still have set himself on fire, and the consequences of that action would likely have been the same. Would Egypt and Syria and Bahrain have still followed in Tunisia's footsteps? Again, I think yes. In each of those cases, it seems to me that the uprisings were motivated more by displeasure with the current regime than with any great love of representative democracy inspired by the rather lackluster performance of the Iraqi government. The more interesting question, I think, is what would have happened in Iraq if Saddam had still been in power when the uprisings began? I'm sure there would have been uprisings in Iraq, as well. I'm sure Saddam would have gone to great lengths to suppress them, and I'm sure he would have framed the uprisings as a confessional conflict between Sunnis and Shia. He'd have to in order to prevent his base of support from collapsing. Would that have worked? I don't know. If the Iraqi economy were still crippled by sanctions, I think it entirely possible that at very least the urban Sunnis would have participated in the uprising, as well. The bigger issue is how Saddam's neighbors would react to the uprisings. Iran would probably support them, I think. While I'm they would have concerns about a successful uprising in Iraq emboldening the Green Movement in Iran, ultimately the prospect of having a Shia-dominated client state on their border would prove too tempting for them. And of course, if Iran supports the uprisings, it is likely that the Saudis would feel the need to oppose them, though it is a bit bizarre imagining them propping up Saddam's regime. If the first-best outcome of uprisings in Iraq for Iran is an Iraqi state dominated by its Shia majority, than I think the first-best outcome for the Saudis is a situation similar to what may be happening in Egypt currently, where the revolution is co-opted by the military establishment. That eliminates Saddam, who the Saudis definitely don't like, but it preserves Sunni rule, perhaps with a thin veneer of democracy. The next question, I think, is what happens in Syria and Bahrain if the Saudis and Iranians are focused on Iraq? I don't think there's a way to answer that yet. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that we don't really understand how critical Iran's support has been to Assad's government in Syria, and we definitely don't know what they've been up to in Bahrain. Meanwhile, it's possible that the Saudis may still have been able to send troops to Bahrain, since presumably their proxies in Iraq would have access to the Iraqi army, but it is possible that they wouldn't have the bandwidth to orchestrate major responses to two sets of uprisings. Finally, what would we do in that situation? Obviously we'd want to support the uprisings in Iraq. The question is, how much weight would we pull in Iraq in that scenario? I imagine we'd still have a fair amount of credibility since, you know, we wouldn't have engaged in a hare-brained invasion of their country at that point. On the flip side, if the Green Movement had occurred in Iran, and the government had cracked down on them as hard as they did in the real world, then Iran's credibility in Iraq may have been pretty seriously tarnished. If that's the case, we may well have been able to keep Iranian involvement to a minimum, which in turn would have limited the Saudi involvement. Actually, that brings me to another interesting question- would the United States have had a freer hand in supporting the Green Movement in Iran if we hadn't invaded Iraq? I definitely think so. Of course, were that the case, I think Khamenei would have simply dropped Ahmadinejad and embraced the movement. Alright, fun as this was, it's time to get back to work. There are Exchange servers that need to be built.
7/7/09 04:05 am
Look, I'm attempting to blog again! But I'm blogging about Twitter, the very thing that has kept me away from LiveJournal all these many months. It's a conundrum. Anyhow, this spammer dude's attempt to get me to visit some frickin' website amused me. Here then, is the conversation:
el_pinko_grande: The second Red Bull was apparently the key to waking my ass up.
el_pinko_grande: Either that or the 16 grams of meth mixed with adrenochrome, not sure.
melchoir: @el_pinko_grande always go with the meth & adrenochrome. R u in bat country yet?
el_pinko_grande: @melchoir No, but everyone in my office turned into dinosaurs, & some madman has been feeding them liquor! Also, I am the king of man-bees.
some_annoying_spammer: I hear you I was there once... this is how I quit my job <REDACTED URL>
Wow, really dude? I'm totally going to click on your link now that you've established this personal connection with me. So good to know I'm not the only who occasionally hallucinates scenes from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas while at work.
Also, learn to fucking punctuate.
Current Music: That Damned Fly - Future of the Left
1/8/09 02:30 pm
Blast! My stupid Livejournal Mobile app cut off my last post! Here, then, is the new, fixed version. In the past decade, French fries have undergone something of a renaissance- it almost seems compulsory for yuppie eateries to have some interesting twist on the French fry on their menu, whether it be sweet potato fries or double-fried fries or what have you. And yet onion rings have not undergone a similar process, at least so far as I can tell. They’re basically the same as they’ve always been, which is strange to me. Surely the nostalgia which led young hipster chefs to reinvent the cupcake and the grilled cheese sandwich and, of course, the French fry would lead them to devote a similar amount of effort to improving the onion ring. But nothing. And onion rings could certainly use the love- they’ve gotten a bit stale when compared to their hamburger-accompanying rivals. Therefore, I call upon the numberless legions of internet foodies to stop devoting all your energy to figuring out how to add bacon to every dish imaginable, and start thinking of shit to do with onion rings. Though actually, if you want to add bacon to onion rings, I think I’d be receptive to that idea. Certainly more so than the maple syrup & bacon lollipops that have been cropping up lately. Alright, lunch is over. Back to work.
1/7/09 12:38 pm
I wonder if this means we get to keep all the liquor.
Also, dunno if it's evident from the photo, but there's a tangle of RJ45 cables on top of all the beer, which for some reason I find hilarious.
11/22/08 12:27 pm
It's 10pm in Turkey right now. Tomorrow at 3:15 AM, myself and my fellow travelers will be boarding a shuttle for the airport, where we will catch a flight to Amsterdam. There, we will have a few hours to explore the city before we board a plane bound for Los Angeles. We will then be home.
Normally I'm not melancholy at the end of vacations, but this time I am. It's been fun and transformative and incredibly frustrating. Thankfully, I've learned enough that I think future trips will be great without the added headaches this one has possesed. I'm definitely going to be returning to Istanbul. Budapest as well. And despite the opinions of the friends I have with me, I think I'd like to spend more time in Bucharest.
The problem, of course, is that I want to go everywhere now. I can justify returning to Istanbul (I only spent like an hour in Hagia Sophia and didn't get to walk along the Byzantine-era city walls like I wanted to), but can I justify returning to Bucharest if I have to miss, say, Warsaw?
I should go now. I only have a few hours in which I may sleep, and anyhow, my clothes are soaking wet from the sudden rainstorm that caught us. A hot shower and a warm bed are what I need now. I'll be blogging at length about the trip later, of course.
Current Music: Some soccer match blaring on the TV
11/2/08 02:54 pm
I turn 30 tomorrow, so today is the last day of my 20's. I had been planning on throwing a huge party today rather than on my birthday, but the studied indifference I maintain towards my birthdays bit me in the ass, and I forgot what today was until about 6 o' clock last night. And ultimately, I think that's actually perfect- it means that I've been spending the day lazing around at home playing video games and not sleeping enough, which is essentially what I spent the whole of my twenties doing.
I've spent the past six months or so contemplating the fact that I'm not really young anymore, and it hasn't been fun. I absolutely hate the idea of being an adult- I feel like I should be out accomplishing something, and I'm pretty sure that's going to involve lots of hard work. And I hate hard work. But I also don't think I'd be happy if I spent the next ten years of my life as I spent the previous ten. I've got an idea what I want to do with mysel, at least, so I think I'm ahead of the curve theref. Making it happen is going to be the tricky part, though. Sloth has always been my sin, and it's just so much more gratifying in the short term to shirk responsibility and sit around reading and browsing the web and starting yet another Medeival 2: Total War campaign.
So that's where my head is at today. Now that I've got that off my chest, I'm off to play some more Fable II.
Current Music: Good Things - Sleater-Kinney
10/25/08 05:20 pm
So I just saw Let the Right One In, which was lots of fun. While it was as grim and bloody as one might expect from a vampire flick made by Swedes, it was also suprisingly funny and warm, probably more so than any film I've seen from Scandinavia.
Let me just preface this by saying that I've come to find vampires quite tiresome. There's a whole generation of nerds that was raised on Anne Rice novels and White Wolf's World of Darkness, and it seems like every corner of the intarwebz is stuffed with their awful, awful vampire fan fiction and art and (ugh) poetry. And on the surface, Let the Right One In seems like it would be dreadful- it's about a shy 12-year old boy with a bad home life and a bully problem who falls in love with a vampire girl that moves in to the flat next door to him. Sounds a bit like every third piece of bad vampire fiction floating around the internet, but it manages to seem fairly fresh despite walking this well-worn path. Ultimately I think it succeeds because it remains a fairly simple character drama. The film doesn't concern itself with commenting on or reinventing the vampire mythos, it simply uses that mythos to move the story.
The acting is exceptionally good considering the age of the actors involved. The girl who plays the vampire in particular struck me as excellent- I totally bought her as a creature that was hundreds of years old. And it was a pretty film, as well- the DP made good use of the icy Swedish landscape. And most importantly, the director has the good sense to stage some of the more gruesome scenes in a farcical fashion, which made the film far, far more watchable than it might otherwise have been. My biggest complaint is that there weren't really any scary moments. I would've liked it if the audience had been made to feel a bit of terror that the protag must certainly have been experiencing.
Still, all in all, it was an excellent film. I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind seeing a little blood on screen.
Current Music: Hootie Blues - Gatemouth Brown
10/21/08 10:54 am
So as I've stated before, Twitter has been scratching my blogging itch lately. But the 140 character limit on tweets is becoming incresingly onerous, so I have resolved to get back into LiveJournal, at least a little bit.
Random note: I was reading the nytimes.com and encountered a Flash ad that basically was just a close up of a pretty young blonde woman, with her lips parting, breathing heavily while wind tossed her hair about. The shot of the girl faded out, as text faded in stating, more or less, that Air France's business class seats fold into 2 meter beds. Aside from the fact that this was probably the most stereotypically French ad imaginable for an airline, I remain incredibly amused by the fact that they seem to be implying that you can have sex in Air France's business class seats. I think someone should go test them on this matter, see how their flight crews feel about the ad campaign afterward.
Oh yeah, I have a new job and my house almost burned down.
Anyhow, other than that, not much going on with me.
Current Music: Dancing Choose - TV on the Radio
9/19/08 05:39 pm
So I opened my iGoogle, which displays the current headlines at the BBC website. Just as I did, someone came up to ask me a question. As I turned to deal with them, I very quickly saw the headlines for this article, and this article. Which, because I only saw them for a split second, got jumbled in my head into "Hadron Collider Kills Iraqi Civilian." So as I was having a boring conversation about Exchange server accounts, I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how the hell the LHC killed a dude in Iraq.
And that's the most interesting thing that happened today.
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