Happy: my old school. And check out those new icons! Pahingi!

Joffin: no, she’s not pregnant yet.

The Accordion Guy: the post that started it all.

Eileen: potty training and puwetry — I mean, poetry.

MacDiva: a statue of MLK, and plastic surgery — “[Plastic surgeons'] case loads are disproportionately Asian and Asian-American, and, as the black middle-class grows, African-American.”

O-Dub: you’ve probably already seen it, but Oliver has an entry on Mingering Mike.

Tram Spark: “The ghosts I think will never come”

Barbara: “hues of blood sunset pearls”

Margaret Cho: I’m sure you’ve read this elsewhere; folks, send love her way. (No wonder the right hates “the liberal intelligentsia” — these people are just plain fucking stupid.)

and Bellona Times: see the 1/8 entry. Can Asian American Studies professors like Elvis? Yes they can.

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Got some more debt elimination spam today — this time not just with random words, but actual sentences clearly designed to foil anti-spam software. (It looks like the spam program automatically generates sentences based on a template: a phrase here, a preposition there.) The following two paragraphs were tacked to the bottom of the ad:

Now and then, near test honor upon compendium over. Furthermore, from condemnate, and of playoff fall in love with related to. I from squalid toward, or behind assimilate around. Any sky can of, but it takes a real chevron to nearest henry over. Most people believe that related to learn a lesson from heater, but they need to remember how refract. Go near gets drunk, and about we’ll starts spiderwort about lost glory; however, beyond give lectures on morality to from.

Now and then, of operate a small fruit stand with treachery around. When around uproot returns home, inside sweeps the floor. Together living with is careen.

The prepositions keep tripping me up, because they’re clearly randomly strewn about. But otherwise there are some great sentences and phrases here that one could use for later — “operate a small fruit stand with treachery around,” “starts spiderwort about lost glory” — and that last sentence, rhythmically a kind of summation: “Together living with is careen.”

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I promise never to say anything bad about Canada again. For our Chinese New Year party, my colleague Isabelle brought her partner Antoine, who brought bottles of wine and six bottles of beer from his favorite brewery in Montreal.

Beer: Trois Pistoles.
Brewery: Unibroue.
Appearance: Deep, dark body, substantial foamy head.
Aroma: Pleasant fruity, cherry-like aroma.
Flavor: Mostly caramel at first, then dried fruits and brown sugar as you slosh the beer around in your mouth, then a slight bittersweet aftertaste.
Summary: Stellar beer with complex flavors. When you pour it out wait for the almost purply lees at the bottom. Best drink lots of water afterwards, for this puppy is nine percent alcohol, and comes in a 750 ml bottle. (The label — name in Fraktur, a dark winged horse over a church — looks like something off an Emperor album.) In a word: delicious.
Rating: **** (four stars)

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Found an extensive snippet from my book that some of you might appreciate:

As early as 1898, the inimitable Philippine Commissioner Dean Conant Worcester, then still assistant professor of zoology at the University of Michigan, was already asking: “Can we refuse to accept the responsibility which the logic of events has thrust upon us?… Can we not withdraw and leave the civilized natives to work out their own salvation? There can hardly be two answers to this… for their utter unfitness for self-government at the present time is self-evident.” Three months later, he was summoned by President William McKinley to join the first Philippine Commission, where they wrote, in their first conclusion regarding government:

The United States can not withdraw from the Philippines. We are there and duty binds us to remain. There is no escape from our responsibility to the Filipino and to mankind for the government of the archipelago and the amelioration of the condition of its inhabitants.

The Commission also underscored the eventual granting of “independence after an undefined period of American training,” but the impossibility of self-rule at that time had already been established. Less than a month after arriving in the islands as part of the Second Philippine Commission, then-Commissioner Taft would write a friend: “The great mass of them are superstitious and ignorant…. They are cruel to animals and cruel to their fellows when occasion arises. They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.”

Speaking of people unfit to rule, President Smirk is going around again pretending he’s the “Education President,” promising “an extra $33 million in the approximately $12 billion Pell Grant program to give $1,000 more per year to low-income students who complete a rigorous high school curriculum.”

Considering the fact that he actually froze the maximum award last year — after promising a raise during his past presidential campaign — makes this new “promise” even more brazen.

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Just saw Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and it is indeed every bit as good as the critics say it is.

Madeline and I were in an art store waiting to pick up something.

I said, pretty much out of nowhere: “So what did he whisper in her ear? Or maybe we weren’t supposed to hear?”

Madeline replied, “I don’t think we were supposed to hear.”

The woman at the counter suddenly turns around and asks, “Are you talking about Lost in Translation?” (Later on she added that that scene made the movie for her.)

It is indeed an excellent scene (they share something with each other that’s only theirs, and not even the audience’s), but I equally liked the various shots of Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson driving — or more importantly, being driven around — while the neon lights of Tokyo flash “indecipherably” all around them. They were oddly reminiscent of the long freeway scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (there are about two or three similar scenes in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye and, come to think of it, some film maybe by Jon Jost about a father teaching his son to hunt, the title of which I can’t remember right now) where it simply evokes the boredom of going nowhere. (Granted, Tarkovsky probably wanted the extended driving scene to symbolize some inarticulable spiritual journey, or silence in the face of the infinite, which isn’t exactly the same in Coppola’s movie, as we generally see shots of Murray’s craggy jet-lagged face instead…)

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