Mindless Philosopher

Mary Matalin tells WaPo

“He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.”

Except for shooting the guy, right? (TPM has a nice hunters rules summary.)

A few weeks ago, the Justice Department caught the attention of cable news programs by announcing the indictments of eleven “eco-terrorists” in Oregon. Their terrorist activites? Arsons and property damage, in which no one died. Now, I’m not coming even close to condoning their actions, but I don’t think the fear of your local meat processing plant burning down in the night counts as a “vast eco-terrorist conspiracy”.
For if these actions did constitute terrorizing the public, certainly those responsible for the ten church burnings in Alabama would also be labeled “terrorists”. Indeed, two reasons come to mind why the actions in Alabama are worse than those in Oregon/Washington. First, churches are much closer to people’s heart and minds than industrial plants, and thus the church arsons give people more of a reason to fear. Second, ten church burnings have occurred in a matter of weeks, while the radical environmentalists spread their activities out over five years.
But the media has completely ignored this incongruity. Personally, I don’t think either of the said groups are terrorists–they aren’t trying to kill or scare civilians. Someone who should have been labelled a terrorist, but wasn’t, was that Tampa teen who flew a plane into a building and said he had sympathy for Bin Laden. Of course, he was neither Arab nor a lefty, so we should just forget the incident ever happened.

My trip to Boston and Yale was fun if somewhat uneventful. Got to Boston just in time to have dinner with two Beast alums, Emily and Nnennia (while Nina couldn’t be bothered to ignore her classwork for an hour). Then, I stopped by my brother’s frat to wish him a Happy Birthday. As he’s just back from Hong Kong and has a new desk at the Burlington office, I gave him a clock for his desk. No, not that clock, but one just as nerdy: it’s an analog and has chips, capacitors, and the like for the numbers. I think he liked it. Yet another Beast alum, Monica, was nice enough to put me up for the evening.
The next day, it was off to New Haven, to see my Yale friends. We ate dinner at the usual place, Claire’s: as it’s both vegetarian and kosher, everyone’s happy. (Oddly, all of my Yale friends except Elf are Jewish–not sure how that happened.) Turnout was good, and I got to meet Mara’s new cat and her new beau, both of whom were quite friendly :) We went over to Elf’s place and played Cranium, where my board game winning streak continued, though this time the deck was stacked in my favor as my team had three players (one more than the other two teams). Who knew Sam would be such a fiend at Cranium? Guess he does more than port ThinkPad fingerprint scanners to Linux all day ;) After everyone left, Elf and I made some delicious pumpkin cheesecake in her new springform pan.
Back at Princeton, Friday night included my first home-court, Division 1 basketball game, as the Princeton Tigers took on (who else?) the Yale Bulldogs at Jadwin. The game was tied 40-40 (deuce!) when Princeton went on a three point shooting bonanza. The Tigers never looked back and took the game 66-49. Their (our?) subsequent win over Brown puts us in second place in the Ivy League standings, behind Penn. We play Penn at home for the final regular season game; hopefully that game will determine whether we go to the Big Dance.
Saturday, I went back into NYC for Fordham Univ’s presentation of the Vagina Monologues. All of the actresses were excellent, but the young woman who did the Vagina Workshop monologue just stole the show. Perhaps it was the fact that she actually got down on a “little blue mat,” perhaps it was her British accent and the way she pronounced “clitoris” with a heavy emphasis on the second syllable, or perhaps it was just her emotional connection to the audience. Whatever the mechanism, she had complete command of the stage and the theatre. After the show, I attended a party for Sam (who had invited me, and had the role of “Happy Vagina Fact”) thrown by her roommates, which was quite humorous and had an excellent gender ratio (10 women, 1 gay guy, and me).
But, alas, now term has started and I’m quite swamped. Hopefully I’ll reemerge occasionally to blog.

Before I head off to Boston and Yale, I should blog about my excellent trip into the city last weekend. The whirlwind tour started off with a Shabbat dinner at Andy’s. Three orthodox Jewish couples and me–so I stood out in more ways than one. Also, I didn’t share the sentiment that Hamas winning the election was okay because now the Palestinians would just “kill each other.” But, thankfully, we steered clear of most political issues. Bracha and I had a nice chat about the existentialism of Garden State. (One addendum: it didn’t occur to me until about three days after watching the movie the obvious parallel between the protagonist’s surname, Largeman, and the term ubermensch.)
Friday night I stayed over at Seth’s place, where I scored a rare Scrabble victory over him. (The win was even more impressive because Seth got the Q, Z, and X.) We watched the old Hitchcock version of Mr and Mrs Smith, which is nothing like the new Pitt/Jolie remake. Back in 1941, I don’t think women were allowed to be gun-wielding spies in movies (knife-wielding, maybe), so the plot was just about their marital troubles. The beginning and middle were funny, but the ending definitely dragged.
Saturday, I went dress shopping….with my high-school-aged cousins. They’re from rural Maine, and it was a great coincidence that both their family and I were in NYC on the same weekend. The girls are off to a winter/Valentine’s Day formal in a few weeks and want to show up with dresses from SoHo. Unfortunately, despite the countless small shops we visited, they left empty-handed. I hope they did better on Sunday. I spent that evening with Kevin: Seth and Samidh also showed up to make it a Beast reunion. Continuing the beat-Seth-at-games weekend theme, Samidh and I beat the other two 2e alums in a hotly contested game of Taboo.
To celebrate the Chinese New Year we tried some durian, which is an exotic Asian fruit. Durian smells….a lot. Just unwrapping the aluminum foil around the fruit (which is still intact) fills the room with its scent. And then once you actually crack it open….oy. It’s no wonder that hotels in Asia have big signs that say “NO DURIAN.” Samidh and Kevin enjoyed it, though Seth and I found the taste rather repulsive. Just check out the quote halfway through the wikipedia article to get a sense of what I mean.
Sunday, Naomi and I went skating in central park and (on her recommendation) to the show Jewtopia. Some of my friends *cough*Seth*cough* had told me the show was a disappointment, but they couldn’t be further from the truth. We barely had time to catch our breath amid the continuous laughter from the opening scene to the end. The acting was impressive, especially the female lead who played about a dozen different characters throughout the show. The climax of the show was an unintended “wardrobe malfunction,” by which one of the male leads gave himself a wedgie with his Purim costume. The actors on stage cracked up and the audience loudly applauded to give them time to compose themselves. Just too funny.
Had a quick dinner with Rachel from Dean, and then took Metro-North to visit Chicklet. She gave me an awesome belated Chanukah present featuring the Moose Menorah. To top off a great weekend, we watched “The Stackhouse Filibuster,” one of the best West Wing episodes ever. (And the topic was timely given the status of the Alito nomination.) Got back in time Monday to meet with my prof about research. And my illegally-parked car wasn’t even towed at Princeton Junction!
Yesterday, after listening to the uneventful SOTU and the “eyebrow-raising” Democratic response, I headed over to the GC for a politics/econ grad student party. Gosh, my cohort loves its alcohol. Anyway, it was a “dress up weird” party, and I had not a clue what that meant, so I arrived normally clad. At which point I was taken by the wrist and shown the “costume” table. Well, the only garments left were oddly-decorated tank tops, so I shed my sweater and threw on one of Ling’s tops. I hope I didn’t stretch it too badly–though the creator didn’t endow me with the biggest chest so at least that part of the top remained unscathed throughout the evening. All in all, a very fun and relaxing five days–I hope the trend continues up north.

As The Note hypothesized, polls really are “crack for the weak.” Scientists asked political stalwarts on either side to watch videos of Kerry and Bush while they monitored the participants’ brains:

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”
…
But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

Two important points: (1) this study did not have a control group (though sometimes subjects were asked to listen to Tom Hanks), and (2) both Democrats’ and Republicans’ brains reacted with disgust when shown pictures of John Kerry. (Okay, that second one is pure conjecture on my part.)

Finished off “Fall” term yesterday. Roomie had a grand plan to go skiing, and I certainly wasn’t going to get in the way, so I finished off my papers Sunday night/Monday morning and handed them in well before the 5pm deadline. We checked the weather report and the rain at the mountain was supposed to stop around noon (and certainly before 1pm), so we adjusted our schedule to get there around midday. As we neared Pennsylvania, the rain turned into a drizzle, and while we had lunch at a quaint Italian restaurant the rain stopped and things were looking good. But then, as luck would have it, as we pulled into the ski area parking lot around 1pm, it started to rain again, hard. Darn weather forecasters….grumble.
Not to waste the hour-plus drive to our neighboring state, roomie and I headed to the outlet malls nearby, where I experienced the awesome wonder of “power shopping.” We must have been hitting stores at a rate of about a dozen an hour. Good stuff. Roomie bought more items than I did, but I’m pretty picky person when it comes to clothes. If I’m paying 20-some-odd bucks for some fabric, there better be lots of fabric to keep me warm.
Next, we headed over to the “Delaware Water Gap,” a national recreational area. We couldn’t find the information center (it turned out that the center had been flooded and was closed), so we forged our own trail up the side of rocky hill/mountain. Good scrambling times. The snow made the conditions a bit slippery, but nothing too dangerous (perhaps just dangeresque).
Later that night it was off to game night with the Woody Woo folk. I avenged my previous scrabble loss, but my Taboo team faltered in the end and lost 76-72. I cost us two points late in the game for not knowing the definition of bigamist. Not my fault…that word definitely wasn’t on my GRE study list.
Continued to celebrate the end of term by staying up late and watching the much-celebrated flick Garden State. To be honest, I’m not sure what all the hullabaloo was about. First, the movie had a very slow start; there was way too much front-matter that lacked Braff-Portman interaction. (Their dialogue was the highlight for me.) Second, the existentialist overtones were at some points overdone (the infinite abyss!), but most of the time, the characters didn’t speak to (of?) the philosophy. What I’m attempting to say (and probably failing), is that Garden State didn’t do anything for me that Fight Club didn’t do better. After watching the deleted scenes, I think that the editors could have produced a much better film by including some of those cuts (especially the extended bath tub scene and the one with Andrew and his father). The movie is currently well under 2 hours and has room to grow. (Also, as a side note, 4-day romances do not convince me that “this is it.” They convince me that Hollywood tries to distract people from “it.”)
Lastly, the tentative intersession schedule is: New York, this Friday to Tuesday. Then Boston on next Wednesday, and probably New Haven next Thursday.

A Christian’s take on a funny gender-role-reversal ad presentation. (Warning: the presentation itself has some mature, but mostly tasteful, pics.)
Procrastinating is fun….

Random Stuff
First funny H*R email to Strong Bad in a while.
Was just drunk dialed by a DC Deaniac reuninon…I miss DC.
December pics: pinyon haben and West Wing crew dinner.
Most obvious article of the month award goes to: GOP Contest Prompts Yawns Outside Beltway. Oh, and look at the byline: written by my second least favorite WaPo writer. (Unless Rosin doesn’t count now that she’s on book leave.)
Decided to procrastinate and cured the TiVo.
And it’s not yet midnight, so: Happy Birthday, Meredith!

First Condi, today Hillary. Tickets were gone in a flash, so roomie and I watched the former First Lady on the Princeton cable network. The topic was the Middle East (which was Ms Rice’s topic as well), and the two speeches couldn’t have been much more different. Rice staunchly defended a specific, though internally-inconsistent, philosophy, while Clinton spoke in generalities and only rarely went negative on Bush. (To paraphrase, she accused Bush of “outsourcing” US diplomacy on Iran and North Korea. I don’t know about you, but to me “outsourcing” is very 2004.)
I must give Clinton credit: she looked very Presidential. And it does seem that she has almost perfected the art of giving a policy speech without pissing anyone off (all “plantation” comments notwithstanding). She also stood by her vote for the Iraq war, and struck an optomistic chord on the future of our former colony–a tenor you don’t hear from many Democrats nowadays.
On the topic of political speeches, I went to a Christine Todd Whitman address last week. She seemed certain that Rice would be the VP nominee for the Republicans in ’08, a proposition which I’m willing to publically bet against right now.
And in other news: my TiVo is sick. The fan is spinning constantly (though it isn’t disk-seeking continuously) and I’m getting “prebuffering pause” errors. As a result, MythTV is unable to change the channel (though I can change the channel through manual software) and playback is choppy. I don’t think it’s the video card since I can cat the output of /dev/video0 and that plays back just fine. Perhaps after finals I’ll open it up and do a little surgery.

My favorite DC United player, Josh Gros, just re-signed with the team in a deal that triples his salary. After making a paltry $28,000 last year, DC is finally paying him a reasonable wage for the caliber of play he provides. Perhaps United’s generosity was also a result of guilty consciouses for not playing him in their devastating 4-0 loss to the Fire in last year’s playoffs. (In my opinion, Nowak’s questionable lineup changes — starting Jamil Walker?! — had a large effect on the final scoreline.)