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What am I doing right now? Read my Squeaker here.
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Guy Fawkes Day is probably a bad time to declare an insurgency, but that's what Michele Bachmann did. Bachmann is a member of the American House of Representatives and she sent Rush Limbaugh an email entitled "Insurgency in Congress". This insurgency was planned for Thursday, November 5, with the aim of maintaining America's status as the only developed country without national health insurance. In addition to the frightening title of the email, Bachmann wrote:"If real freedom-loving Americans come to Washington and walk up and down the halls of the office buildings and the capitol tracking down congressmen, looking them in the whites of their eyes and getting them on videotape, then I think we can kill this thing. If we can kill health care this week in the House, I think we will kill it for the next ten years. We have Jon Voight and Mark Levin confirmed, also Betsy McCaughey. We'll have a meet-up at the Capitol steps and then the insurgency begins. It's a big task, but it's the best way to really kill the bill, which is our goal."
Bachmann is, of course, no stranger to lunacy. In the past, she has called for an investigation of anti-American activities from left-wing liberals in Congress, refused to fill out the census form because that's how the Japanese were sent to internment camps, and rambled incoherently about the benefits of carbon dioxide.
Once again, I call for Chairman Mao on the US dollar bill by 2030. 毛主席是我们心中的红太阳!
posted by Adeel 2:36 AM
Thursday, November 05, 2009
This year, I had the misfortune of spending some time in close proximity with a former co-worker who was both an idiot and a person of epic proportions. One day she boomed, to anyone who could hear, that she was going to cleanse her body of "poisonous toxins". I asked her if there was such a thing as non-poisonous toxins, but she didn't understand the question. There are lots of people like her who like to "cleanse" their body in variety of ill-advised, medieval-inspired methods. They even have their own online communities, but that shouldn't surprise anyone (here are serious communities dedicated to running, fat acceptance, graves and white supremacism).Slate's Samantha Hennig decided to try a 10-day cleanse in which she abstained from any food and only consumed some unholy liquid concoctions. On its own, it makes for interesting viewing, but it's an interesting insight into the warped thinking of that subset of the population which insists on shunning conventional medicine and will try anything as long as it has no evidence to support it and sounds kind of nice. This entry was spawned by a letter printed in the National Post today, which questioned why people will run from the flu shot and entrust their body to all sorts of quackery, but not, say, their cars.
Nobody goes to a mechanic, who says that you need the sort of new part whose name I would know if I knew anything about cars, and then disregards that opinion by going to an alternative, all-natural mechanic, who does nothing but rub your seats with elephant urine. With machines, we don't think twice about trusting the experts, who often do suggest unnecessary products and services. With healthcare, the sort of person who studied medicine for seven years is not to be trusted, but you should probably trust the person who completed a six-week course in naturopathy.
A working theory I have on the appeal of non-scentific medicine is that much of the appeal comes from cures that just sounds nice. There are many things that though we don't enjoy on a regular basis, we like the idea of being able to enjoy them on a regular basis. That's why we buy books that we have no intention of reading, talk about watching soccer if it was ever on, and always drink strange teas, as long as they're of an exotic East Asian origin. On a vague level, many people like the idea of being able to cleanse their body of bile just as the ancients would have liked. Unlike buying War and Peace and occasionally reading its first few chapters, there can be serious consequences to not eating any food for ten days.
posted by Adeel 1:55 PM
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
I don't have an English name, but many people do. I've seen lots of kids with weird English names that came from currency, TV, movies and so on. I've never seen anyone with names as crazy as the ones in this video. I did meet an Athena in China. All the other names were too hard to pronounce.
Labels: 中国
posted by Adeel 5:30 PM
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
I got to spend the afternoon and evening yesterday with my 75-year-old grandmother, who has lived in Canada for about 20 years but is not too familiar with football. At first she confused the pregame showmanship for professional wrestling, asking if it was real. Then she criticized the game for its barbarism. "They hit each other in the head, intentionally. It's so uncivilized." She also found some of the dives a little gratuitous. "Why do they just fall down on purpose?" She was relieved that they do wear shoulder pads and helmets, but given the present concern about the long-term impact of concussions in football, her analysis is not that funny.The game between the Saints and Falcons was very well-played, with shifts in momentum and lots of offense. The best part was the final 90 seconds of the game, even though the outcome was a certainty. The Falcons had no timeouts and were down by 11 points. On a third-down play, Coy Wire simply took the ball away from running back Pierre Thomas, who carelessly dove into a fracas. The Falcons quickly drove down the field and scored a field goal with about 40 seconds left.
On the ensuing onside kick, the ball went off a Saints player and right to Wire once again. The Falcons got a long completion to bring the ball to midfield before a last-second pass was intercepted. Going from a few kneel-downs to actually having a chance to erase an 11-point lead with less than two minutes left to go is fantastic football. For trying to prevent viewers from being treated to a series of kneel-downs 42 seconds apart, I hope the Falcons are justly and richly rewarded.
posted by Adeel 12:46 AM
Monday, November 02, 2009
So, it took seven tries, but the Broncos finally lost. To the extent that I have a favourite football team, it's the Broncos, though I'll cheer for pretty much any cold weather team and refuse to legitimize the Broncos unless legitimate. A 6-0 start was a good claim for legitimacy, but from the moment they took the field against the Ravens yesterday, I could say that I knew they were frauds. After a 30-7, I didn't feel like a complete moron for once after a Broncos game.This probably was the most interesting thing to happen all day in football, unless you consider BRETT FAVRE RETURNING TO GREEN BAY WEARING A JERSEY OTHER THAN THE JERSEY OF THE GREEN BAY PACKERS, FOR WHOM HE PLAYED AS RECENTLY AS TWO YEARS AGO to be an interesting story. If you do, you might also be interested in touring your former workplace and soaking up abuse from erstwhile customers. Lost in the hype of BRETT FAVRE RETURNING TO GREEN BAY WEARING A JERSEY OTHER THAN THE JERSEY OF THE GREEN BAY PACKERS, FOR WHOM HE PLAYED AS RECENTLY AS TWO YEARS AGO was the fact that the Vikings-Packers game was also an important division game. With a win, the Packers, FOR WHOM BRETT FAVRE ONCE PLAYED, AS RECENTLY AS TWO YEARS AGO, could have improved to 5-2 and the Vikings would have been 6-2.
Hopefully the Saints-Falcons game tonight will be more interesting. I was so starved for an interesting game that I resorted to watching baseball last night, knowing full well what the outcome would be. Baseball, I'm always pleased to realize, is actually a really interesting sport if the Blue Jays are not involved. Elsewhere in sports, if you had bet $100 each on the men's and women's winners at the New York Marathon, you would have about $14,000 today. Clearly, if you're bored by football, you should turn to marathons.
posted by Adeel 1:46 PM
Friday, October 30, 2009
If you're at all interested in running, you should watch the New York Marathon here on Sunday. It was originally a great race, but then the runners started to get worn out before the race even started. Two of the fastest men, Martin Lel and Patrick Makau, balked at the thought of running the race, as did five of the women. That still leaves a very good collection of runners, but it could have been much better.Odds make this much more fun, so let's see what they are, courtesy of Oddschecker.
Jaouad Gharib - 5/2
James Kwambai - 9/2
Patrick Makau - 5/1
Ryan Hall - 5/1
Marilson Gomes dos Santos - 6/1
Robert Cheruiyot - 9/1
The rest of the guys won't win. The temptation is to go for Gharib or Kwambai, since they've run a 2:05 and a 2:04 this year. Gharib is very reliable, but almost never wins, except of course for the consecutive world championships he won. I won't pick Kwambai just because the guy with the fastest PB never wins, it's just too simple.
Patrick Makau debuted with a 2:06 in his first marathon this year, and I'd bet on him if he's running, which he's not according to a Kenyan newspaper.
Robert Cheruiyot at the bottom ran well enough to finish 5th at the World Championships, but I see no compelling reason for him to win.
That leaves Ryan Hall, who is white and has blonde hair, and Marilson Gomes dos Santos, who has only won two of the last three New York Marathons, but nobody thinks he's all that good.
If Makau isn't running, then Kwambai (second at Boston in '07, second at Berlin in '08, second at Rotterdam in '09) will finally win something.
On the women's side, we have the following odds:
Paula Radcliffe - 1/3
Salina Kosgei - 9/2
Yuri Kano - 9/1
Ludmila Petrova - 9/1
Radcliffe, unless she's sick or is running at the Olympics, always wins. Kosgei won Boston this year, so she's the better payoff. Kano will only be a factor if the pace is slow and something weird happens. Petrova is 41 years old, though she was second last year.
Speaking of gambling, here's an interesting article about how this Sunday's football games ruined Las Vegas.
posted by Adeel 2:13 PM
Monday, October 26, 2009
Over the course of about 11 hours yesterday, I saw all or parts of twelve football games, thanks to NFL Sunday Ticket. This was my first time partaking in the awesome power of television, and I was disappointed. Before I'd had time to adjust my eyes to the unholy glow of the screen, pretty much everyone was off to a two or three-touchdown lead. With the exception of the Steelers-Vikings, Bills-Panthers and Cowboys-Falcons, all of the 11 games on in the afternoon were routs at one point or another. There were seven games on at 1 pm yesterday, but they were all blowouts except for the Steelers-Vikings, until the 49ers made a game of it in Houston.I was disappointed with the results, but not so disappointed as to not watch just as compulsively next weekend. This is, after all, my just reward for watching football games last year in the most uncomfortable part of the night (Mondays, 2-5 am), on my laptop, in my choice of either Chinese or Danish.
Watching so many football games at once is an overwhelming responsibility. At one point, I just gave up and started watching the Bills-Panthers, until my brother pointed out that to do this would defeat the purpose of the all-games service. Still, if nothing else, it was a instructive exercise in why they only show one or two (sometimes three) NFL games at a time: the rest are really too bad. Who, aside from Bills fans (and even this is debatable), wants to watch the Bills and Panthers play? Or, how about next week's Epic Fail Bowl, the Lions hosting the Rams? I really want someone to look it up and let me know if two worse teams (these two are 1-5 and 0-6) have ever met. It's not just that they combine for a 1-11 record, it's also that the Lions have lost 22 of their 23 games, and the Rams have lost 24 of their last 26. So, we're going to see two teams on a combined 3-46 run.
Of course, there were lots of good plays too. There was a Lamar Woodley fumble recovery and touchdown where the ball sat on the ground for a seeming eternity, and then Woodley ran downfield for what seemed like an eternity, with none of the Vikings able or willing to bring him down. On the ensuing kickoff, the Vikings returned it for a touchdown, thanks to Steelers kicker Jeff Reed, who forced the returner toward the sideline where there were no tacklers, instead of the middle of the field, where there were many tacklers. There were also Eli Manning's fantastic deep passes, which somehow always seem to find their targets in the most improbable of settings.
There was also this freakish run by Reggie Bush in the most entertaining game of the week. The Saints were down 24-3, but came back to win 46-34 over the Dolphins. Proving that the NFL is run by some of the strangest men around, possibly androids, this game came to an end when the Dolphins drove to the Saints goal line and spiked the ball with a second to go. The ensuing play was irrelevant and would have ended the game. Still, the officials conferred for a few minutes. They finally ruled that on the spike, one of the Dolphins receivers "was not in a set position". This necessitated either a 10-second run-off or the loss of a timeout. Since the Dolphins had neither, the game was over PHP exception
posted by Adeel 2:18 PM
Saturday, October 24, 2009
I hope you find this as funny as I did.posted by Adeel 9:46 PM
Thursday, October 22, 2009
After coming up with schools for blacks only last year, the Toronto District School Board is now considering the idea of schools and classrooms for boys only. The problem is reasonably obvious, even egregious: by most indicators, boys fare far worse than girls at school. The director of the TDSB argues, as others do, that this is the result of a feminization of schools. Boys and girls learn differently from each other, which is probably a reasonable enough argument, and proponents of boys-only schools believe that public schools are heavily tilted in favour of girls.There is scant evidence of this tilt presented in newspaper articles on the topic, and I don't recall much of it. Sure, an inordinate amount of time in my middle school was devoted to expressing a variety of complex ideas through poorly-acted skits, but I attribute this more to the softness of the curriculum, though I'm told that it has only gotten harder since we so unjustly crammed five years of high school into four (for some reason, nobody complains about that anymore).
If the classroom is not an unnaturally feminine domain for boys, then it's worth considering, as you see here and there, that males are simply ill-suited to the sort of docile, sedentary lifestyle required for success in both education and employment these days. To this end, the incipient boys' classrooms would allow for more mobility, perhaps, and periodic bouts of using classroom implements as athletic equipment. Unless you believe that women are simply more intelligent than men, this is probably not the answer either.
But the answer is not far from here, I think. In high school, it was far more acceptable for boys to be complete buffoons than it was for girls. Perhaps this reflects the fact that males tend to take more risks, are more likely than females to be both spectacular successes and spectacular failures, though my impression is that we accept idiocy and failure more from boys than we do from girls. We accept that boys will be rowdy and difficult to control and we tend to excuse their failures. Like any other group of people that has low expectations placed on them, they underachieve.
posted by Adeel 9:48 PM
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Teaching is not something I ever thought I would enjoy. In fact, I didn't really think anything about teaching until I started doing it. The guides to teaching overseas discuss just about everything, up to and including bedsheets and deodorant, but no one really discusses teaching itself. That's partly because people don't go overseas to teach so much as they go overseas to teach. So, on my first day, when someone handed me a math textbook, a sheaf of lesson plans and a sample craft, I was in for somewhat of a rude awakening.I never really thought much about whether I liked teaching or not. The discussions were always about whether I liked Korea or not. It was after about 9 or 10 months teaching that I realized I actually enjoyed it. Teaching, after all, combines those three things I really love: talking, ideas that are only worth knowing in and of themselves, and the attempt to impart those ideas to the others.
Different things motivate different teachers. Many of my Korean coworkers were guided first and foremost by a genuine (and I stress this term) love of their students, to the point that my foreign coworkers often explained that hugging and kissing children that often would get us fired or arrested. I found my students hilarious sometimes and adorable other times, but always very interesting for their attempts to get a jump start in class: writing the date in their notebooks before I wrote it on the board, memorizing the words to Jingle Bells, writing short essays on a variety of innocent topics, and so on.
What motivates me as a teacher is what alienated so many of my friends in university. I have a burning passion to make sure that 6-year-olds understand that a bicycle is self-powered, a sailboat is wind-powered and a car is powered by fuel. I have a burning passion to ensure that 8-year-olds understand the various terms having to do with honeybees. I also have a burning passion to ensure that you know what a syllogism is, why Homer's Iliad is important and why Plato thought that the entire world is made up of triangles. It's a strange attribute, I concede, and I don't know how well it would be received teaching in Canada, but in Korea it's as popular as a relentless high school football coach in Texas.
posted by Adeel 4:02 PM