Mindless Philosopher

I went to the Triangle Club performance this academic year, but something tells me that tickets will be harder to come by next year…
Update: This article is also well-played.

Pics are up! Chicklet and I had a great two-week vacation. There is way too much to blog about (especially in my jet-lagged state), but here are the highlights:

Bangkok
• Water ferry — a fun, and very convenient (from our hotel) form of mass transit.
• Huge reclining Buddha
• Neat Wats (temples)
• Monks Bowl village — handmade metal rice bowls
• Lumphini park — crocodiles, turtles, and huge water monitor lizards!
• night bazaar, including ferris wheel!
  Chiang Mai

• We experienced the third world when the only train tickets (which we bought in advance) left to Chiang Mai were non-A/C 2nd-class sleepers. Yucky, but doable.
• Night bazaar — huge market, only topped by the endless market that Chiang Mai hosted in their old city that weekend. In the latter, you couldn’t see the end of the stream of people; amazing.
• Trekking! We trekked the mountains of northern Thailand with 10 other foreigners (farangs) and two guides (one of which was a hill-tribe member and whose catch phrase was “Oh my Buddha!”). We visited the Hmong and Karen hill tribes, in the midst of walking through lots of forests, valleys, mountains, and rice paddies. On the second (of two) days, we rode elephants — I sat on the elephants neck and learned how to tell her (“Ellie”) how to go forward. Ellie could tell whether you were holding bananas (if any part of the banana was touching her), and got disgruntled if you didn’t feed her. So we hid our banana stash, and fed her when she did well :)
• Visited a neat waterfall
• Rode down a river in an unstable bamboo raft. There were three rafts in our group of 12 farangs, and ours was the only one to not break apart. When a raft disintegrated, the guides would pull it over to the side and string it back together! Everyone made it out alive though.
• Back in civilization after the trek, we attended a cooking course, where we learned how to make Thai curry and roll springrolls.
• The last day in Chiang Mai, we travelled a bit outside the city to the Royal Flower Festival. It was massive; unfortunately we didn’t have time to check all of it out before our flight back to Bangkok/Hua-Hin
  Hua Hin/Central

• I drove on the left side of the road!
• Rolling waterfalls (we hiked 6 of the 15 levels)
• Swarms of butterflies (check out the movie)
• Monkeys who had taken over a Buddhist temple on a mountain! One monkey attacked me from behind, taking the few bananas that I had left (after giving most away to the monkeys). The darn monkey scratched up my hand! (No apparent ill-effects though.)
  Koh Tao

• Snorkeling
• Returning the snorkeling equipment and having one of the hotel staff women comment that she had never seen someone as hairy as I was, and how it was damn sexy. Oh wait, just the first part.
• Sea Kayaking (including capsizing!)
• SCUBA diving!
• Playing one of the hardest mini-golf course I’ve ever encountered, and getting under my first time through!
  Koh Samui

• Laying on the beach after an exhausting two-week vacation :)

and the lowlights:

Pre-Thailand
• Air China sucks. Not one of the four flights we were scheduled to take with them departed on time. And, because of delays, we missed our connection in Beijing, and had to stay overnight. Even though we didn’t have visas, the authorities let us sleep in a Beijing hotel. Thankfully, there were 11 other Americans in the same position as us, so, safety in numbers. We celebrated the 2007 New Year in front of the Air China customer service desk :) Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see any of China since the smog reduced visibility to virtually nothing (see pic).
  Thailand

• Bangkok’s mass transit is like DC’s — it doesn’t take you where you need to go. But, we managed.
• Everyone in Thailand wants to make a buck off of tourists. Legitimately and illegitimately. Thus, in addition to tons of street markets, there are many con artists lurking about who will befriend you, (attempt to) convince you that where you are going is closed (but will open in a few hours), and that they can take you around the city for a great price. Unfortunately, these friendly people are lying to you. Which puts you in the uncomfortable position of walking away while agreeing to what they are saying (I sure don’t want to tell a Thai person to their face that they are a liar). Also, the race for tourist dollars means that *anyone* can become a taxi driver, and they are terrible. The taxi drivers often do not know hotels and landmarks, and cannot find addresses. The key here is to have back-up locations near your your desired location that the taxi driver would have to know (e.g., a famous hotel or landmark).

Chicklet took many more pictures than I did, but has no way to upload them at the moment. Will let you know when I’m hosting them.

We’re on a tight schedule, but I wanted to blog to let everyone know that I hadn’t disappeared in the jungle of northern Thailand. Chicklet and I are having a great time; we rode elephants and learned how to cook authentic Thai food (among many other fun activities). Blog to you in a week!

Well, I’m off to Thailand for a nice 2-week vacation. I truly procrastinated *way* too much before I left, but I guess that just means I’ll have to kick it into overdrive upon my return. Before I left, I wanted to clear out the “blog queue”. Months ago, Chicklet was wonderful enough to buy me an introductory flying lesson for my birthday. The instructor gave me a quick 20-minute on the ground lesson, and then Chicklet and I went up in a tiny propeller plane!
Here I am preparing to take-off:

You turn a plane with foot pedals on the ground — it takes some getting used to. But I managed to take-off with only a little help from the instructor.
Up in the air, looking down at NJ:


Once airborne, the 30mph wind made things a bit bumpy, and since my body was tense from being so focused, my stomach was really in knots when we landed. (To be clear, I had nothing to do with the landing :-) .) But, overall, it was a great experience, and a lot of fun to be flying a plane.
Mission Accomplished!

I’ll be celebrating New Year’s in Bangkok, so everyone: have a wonderful 2007!

Twas the night before Christmas and across the states
Students were working soon after clearing their plates.
Writing up proofs — leaving no function to derive
In hopes that a distraction soon would arrive.
The grad students, lit by the glow of laptops
Hoped to avoid cheek pinches by their grandpops.
Running regressions ’til their faces were blue;
Why couldn’t that t-value stay above two!
When out from the inbox came a loud ding!
What could this email on Christmas Eve bring?
Problem set solutions?! who could have thunk
It’s enough to make anyone want to get drunk.
“Should I look at my score?” Maybe tomorrow;
Why fill this festive night with such a great sorrow?
“I’ll help my brother with math — that I can do,
Especially since he’s still in grade number two!”
But how could I get such a mundane Christmas gift?
Doesn’t my preceptor at all get the drift?
Maybe in return I should buy him a clue:
Though I guess that’s what happens when your TA’s a Jew!

Lots of news today, at least from my perspective. First, JK opened the door to her “do not disturb” room! After a struggle to get inside, the reward is a simple game of hangman that reveals the Title to Book 7….(stop reading if you want to try the door yourself)…Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Washington Post article leads one to believe that JK’s use of “hallow” as a noun refers to some sort of saint, but some snooping on fan web sites leads me to a different conclusion. Hallows in this context most likely refers to Horcuxes, or more specifically, the historically-relevant artifacts that Voldemort chose for his Horcruxes. The real-life connection is The Hallows of Ireland, four mystical objects with special powers. These four artifacts are a subset of the The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, which include objects very similar to those already seen in the series: an invisibility cloak and wizarding chess. In fact, someone just added the following to the Hallows article:

It has also been recently confirmed that these four treasures will be illustrated in book seven of the hit series, Harry Potter. It is unknown what role they will play, however, it is rumoured the main character will have to search for these treasures.

Take that WaPo reporting!
Second item: Governor Corzine signs civil unions into law! Four states down (or five, depending on whether you count CA), 46 to go :)
Third: What the hell was Sandy Berger thinking? Hiding classified documents under trailers, cutting them into pieces, and throwing them out! My gut tells me that these documents were specifically damaging to Berger, and not necessarily the Clinton admin in general. I can’t imagine going that far out on a limb for a former President. But, then again, I wouldn’t have thought Berger was capable of such a ridiculously stupid act in the first place.

Less than a month after I celebrated the exit of process-story-writing Jim VandeHei, in comes someone (potentially) worse.

AP spokesman John Stokes confirms. “John Solomon is departing at year’s end for the Washington Post,” he wrote to us in an email that reproduces verbatim the memo we posted above.

In case, you don’t know/remember John Solomon, he was the AP reporter that wrote the story about Harry Reid’s boxing tickets. You know, the story where Reid followed the law, McCain broke the law (well, tried to), Reid voted against the wishes of his supposed donors, and yet Solomon decides to write a hit peice about Reid? Oh, and Solomon was also the one who tried to parlay Reid’s transfer of his land to a LLC (which he also controlled) as something nefarious.

Number Two of the apparently four-part series was just released, wtihout the weird shoulder touching this time.
In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s gay rights week on Mindless Philosopher.

(No links since I’m Treo blogging)
Sticking with the gay rights theme from the past three posts: What is wrong with my former denomination, the Conservative Jewish movement? Today they announced three sanctioned positions for Rabbi’s to take on the question of gay relations and marriage. (Leave it to us Jews to agree on three *conflicting* stances.)
The so-called “compromise” position, and the only one to propel the Conservative movement forward on this issue, would allow gay rabbis to be ordained and remove the restrictions on gay marriage. The act of sodomy, however, remains an abomination. Why is the Rehnquist court to the *left* of these rabbis?!
I have no doubt that every rabbi who marries two men knows _exactly_ what is going on in the honeymoon suite. So let’s not kid ourselves. The Torah is wrong here. The sooner we accept that the faster we can move on. (We? I mean “they”. I’m firmly ensconced in the reconstructionist movment now.)
And, while I’m on the topic, congrats to Mary Cheney! Janeite informs me the case law on second parent adoptions in VA is unclear to non-existant. Hopefully this happy event for the second family will instigate into some happy VA legislation. (Though I’m not holding my breath.)
And who knows, maybe today’s announcement was the result of egg fusion and they won’t need the case law. Mary? The world wants to know.

On the topic of last night’s post, check out Blue Jersey’s spoof of those Mac ads.
And, since you’re already watching videos, here’s MIT’s new development campaign video. What is up with the lame game in the middle? As Prof.Manning would say, “This is MIT, not ITT!” Plus, I’m not sure that the development office understands that MIT students don’t really care about Harvard (certainly not as much as these Princeton undergrads do). We made fun of Harvard about as much as we made fun of ourselves!