…person who is not very bright sometimes.
Note to self: Never put contact in eye after handling open can of rotel without a good washing. It will burn.
…person who is not very bright sometimes.
Note to self: Never put contact in eye after handling open can of rotel without a good washing. It will burn.
I had made a list of my favorite things earlier and now it is time
for my purge list. You know, the list of things that you wish you could
purge from the earth? (non-political things)
Well, that is all I can think about for now. Check back later – I am sure I’ll have some more.
The Anal Philosopher talks about “is”s, “oughts”s, and Iraq.
Anal Philosopher :: Intellectual Dishonesty
Meredith and I just got back to Columbia a few hours ago from a week
long visit to Versailles, MO. We saw my family, her family, it was nice
to see them, but not as nice getting sick.
From Slashgear via Digg.
After the news that China has decided to force
manufacturers to standardise phone charging ports to the mini-USB
format, it turns out that there’s an even easier way to get the
industry-wide feature you want implemented: just be the FBI. What
cellphone manufacturers are reluctant to include in-among all the blurb
about Bluetooth and high-speed data connectivity is that apparently
every recent phone sold in the US has a built-in tracking device that,
once activated remotely, can be set to keep the microphone powered on
even when the phone itself is switched off.The FBI used the technology in collecting evidence for the recent
Genovese crime family trial, and it should be made clear that they can
only do so with the relevant court order. Saying that, just how
difficult is it to get a court order in our age of super-terror? The
only way to circumnavigate the tracker is removing the battery, which
then makes the phone rather useless. In fact, you’d be better off
carrying a small child’s shoe, which could at least be used for storing
your keys.
Oh, and as always, the pun was intended.
Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Man: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two
thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket
that they cannot separately plunder a third.
Vote: The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Best Sci-Fi to Tech analogy:
Blogger Buzz: The New Version of Blogger
Battlestar Galactica with Lorne Greene : Battlestar Galactica with Edward James Olmos :: Old Blogger : New Blogger
ESPN.com – NBA – Take your pick: Kobe or Wade?
Good question. The ESPN crew segments this into four questions – I’ll give my answers below.
1) Who do you start your team with?
They are both incredible competitors, but I have to go with Wade. He
is younger and a better teammate. I have only seen him get a bit too
selfish once and that was against the Pistons last year in a regular
season game – Rip got in his head and forced him into several bad shots
in a row. But Wade recovered and I don’t think has been that way since.
You have add other players to cover his weakness on D.
2) Who would win a game of one-on-one?
Good question. Both are just about unstoppable on offense and
slippery as Steve. However, Kobe is bigger and can play excellent
defense
3) Favorite and least favorite attribute of Kobe? Of D-Wade?
Kobe: Lock-down defense / tendency to give up on lost causes (see game 7 against Phoenix last year)
Wade: Jordan on offense / lack of a lock-down defense
4) Who’s got the best chance to win his next title first?
Until Shaq retires, I have to go with Wade. He is in the East where
anyone with a playoff spot can get the finals. Kobe has a good, young
team around him, so he has the better medium-term chances.
What about you?
Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Piled Higher and Deeper : The Christmas Party

While we did not have a Christmas Party, the department threw a
going away party for one of the faculty and it was about like that.
This paper is an evaluation and critique Edward Said’s work, Orientalism[1] and will answer its principal concern of how Western Scholars should approach other cultures. Orientalism was first used to denote a section of scholarship that dealt with the examination of the geographic regions including the Middle East and India. Since its inception it was refined to the Middle East, or Arab studies, as more and more subfields were developed and broke off of from the field, dividing what was called the Orient[2] into smaller and smaller geo-cultural regions of study[3]. In 1973, the twenty-ninth International Congress of Orientalists decided to drop the name altogether[4]. Edward Said used the term to describe a relationship between the scholarship of the Orientalists and the colonial domination by the imperial powers. Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident, but employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists[5].
I will examine the following claims of Orientalism. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, the knowledge it generated was used to justify the power behind the political domination of the East by the West[6]. Secondly, the Orientalists employed a essentialist way of viewing the Near East, this essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. Lastly, since the Orientalist scholars were the product of the system they came from they could not cannot help but to misrepresent the “Other.” Therefore, what was needed was for the subaltern to speak for itself. I will argue that while a significant portion of this theory is valuable and an useful way of viewing part of the Imperialist/Orientalist framework, it too was essentialist in nature and was more indicative of the nature of the Imperialists than the nature of the Orientalist scholars.