Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/us/10squatter.html?hp

I very infrequently find the New York Times interesting. It's usually a fine source of information, but anything that verges on opinion, social issues, whatever, I just skim over or ignore. To be fair, this isn't limited to The Times - as I've grown older and more bitter I find that my tolerance for the opinions or thoughts of pundits, experts, or even worse non-experts talking on subjects where there are experts available to talk that they ignore, has waned dramatically.

So anyway, I was pretty surprised when I found the linked article. It's not opinion or anything, but it actually got me to stop and realize that I don't know what I think of the issue.

For synopsis, and because the link will eventually die:

The housing crisis has made there be a lot of vacant houses. There are homeless people. Some homeless people have moved in to vacant houses. Some "advocacy groups" have begun helping homeless people move in to vacant houses. Obviously this is great for the homeless people, and makes the advocates feel great about themselves as well. However, it's also obviously illegal (and the advocates freely admit that). The majority of the houses are bank owned, though some are owned by other investors. Perhaps the most shocking thing in the article is that these groups sometimes have a locksmith show up, change the front door lock, and hand them a key, which they then hand off to the new occupants.

So yeah, I'm conflicted, I guess. It's great to put a roof over a family's head. It's not so great to steal. Not only is the advocacy group helping people steal a vacant house, it's a house that in theory the bank could be renting out for some real amount.

Link: http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/mothers-milk/2008/11/12/selling-michelle

It's my own fault for reading the fashion section of newspapers before the news, but take a look at this from a recent article in Slate's The Big Money:

Semiotics brand analyst Scott Hamrah says we can expect to see more faces like Obama's in mainstream catalogs not because she's exotic to Americans, but because she's just the opposite. "It's about restoring normalcy to the mainstream. Michelle Obama is an avatar of our desire to be normal again," he says, pointing out that the Obamas have redefined normal to include smart, middle-class black people. He argues that her race grounds her in authenticity. "Being black is equated with being real," he says. "Black people are more authentic than white people for various reasons, but primarily because they've suffered more. So it makes sense that in a time that not only wants to return to normal but also wants to emphasize realness and expects to be suffering a lot, that this nation should have a black first lady, that only a black first lady could be the next Eleanor Roosevelt.

What surprises me most about this article is how....well, surprised I am by it! "Black people are more authentic than white people for various reasons, but primarily because they've suffered more." My jaw actually dropped.

I guess I am not so cynical as I thought I was.

Well, Liz and I decided not to go down to Grant Park tonight.

But, pretty huge night for the country, the city, etc.

Finally we can get back to talking about things other than the election and the campaign. Moreover, we officially know the date on which there will no longer be a republican president. Hopefully in the next week or so we can all forget Palin exists. Maybe even McCain can go back to being the guy he was before he chose to run for president.

Good game, Obama, congrats.

So Liz and I have watched the last handful of the debates. We'd tried watching a couple times when there were still a zillion Democrats left, but it was pretty unbearable. It's been interesting to me.

First, it's interesting that there have been more Clinton/Obama debates than I can recall there ever being between the Republican and Democratic final candidates. Second, I've been intrigued by the varying formats of the debates, though to be fair, the candidates often make a mockery of the format in order to talk about the "more important" issues. Most interesting, to me at least, has been watching the change in debate tactics and tone used by Clinton as she has shifted from prohibitive favorite to presumed prohibitive underdog.

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On Saturday, right on the heels of the Northeast's first major crazy big snowstorm, I volunteered to canvass for the Barack Obama campaign in Concord, NH.

I've never canvassed for any political candidate before, although I have canvassed for specific causes. And personally, I have more interest in day-to-day local politics, and say, Daley's take on public transit in Chicago, than I do in national level politics.

But despite my overwhelming preference for stories about zoning and permit distributions at the local level, and stories about rare coins and silver shovels and trucks, I am tired of fear and anxiety and gutlessness that I perceive to be the general atmosphere of the country right now, and that's why I became interested in actually participating in the presidential race.

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What's the first thing that comes to mind when you see this image?

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I went to a book drive dance, where I ran into H, as promised. Things seemed pretty smooth, so not all is lost to the charybdis that is my awkwardness. There's another swing dancer, P----, who is kind of a jerk (well, he went to northwestern, so what do you expect), but first he remarked that during this one dance all of the follows were taller than the leads. P---- is tall himself, and in retort H (who is also taller than me) said that height didn't matter, although P---- is still probably a better dancer than I am.

Then he remarked that this other follow, E---- looks like a barbie doll. And it was true. E---- is really tall, has a very plastic looking face, oddly geometrical, disproportionate breasts, and an hourglass-ey figure. This is not attractive at all, notwithstanding the ugly blondified hair-that-is-supposed-to-be-nice-but-just-looks-messy and the fact that unlike barbie, she never smiles. But I began to wonder if she had actually spent time, effort, and money on trying to look like barbie. I began to feel sorry for her, even though I had no evidence to the affect.

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One of the nice things about being > 25 is that renting cars is no longer a hassle. When I visited friend and my great aunt and uncle in Maui, despite my political leanings, I decided to do nature a little favor and rent something ecologically mindful. Although two rental agencies were renting out prii (which, incidentially, is the car that I wanted when I graduated -- instead, I had to settle for the civic hybrid) both were far above my price point, and furthermore, not available.

Using the internets, I found a small company named "Bio-beetle", which was featured in the New York Times. They were offering vw beetles, golfs, and rabbits, which all run on biodiesel. More importantly, the price point was within my range ($10 more than the cheapest car from the mainstream agencies). I called them up, expecting to not be able to rent a vehicle on such short notice, but they got me the hookup.

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God bless (wiki*). Usually, people who are too obsessed about etymologies make me annoyed, myself included. However, there's a handful of people huddling in their corner, constantly updating wikipedia (and wiktionary) with minutiae about language. These are the people who bother to put in those unintelligible IPA pronunciations after every article. Admittedly there is some level of geek-pleasure that comes out of being able to deftly navigate the endless array of UTF characters that are required for this pursuit.

In any case, I was looking for the chinese characters for my name, which took me an absurdly long time since the chinese radical index is this really awful compilation of tradition mishmashed with logic, the problem being that many characters secretly have two or even three radicals, but they get classified under just one, just not necessarily the most obvious one. Using a chinese character dictionary is an artform.

Anyways, my asian name is "Takashi", don't worry, it's not my mother's maiden name, so you can't steal my identity. The wiktionary article is here:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/孝

In japanese, chinese characters can be read up to 9 or 10 different ways depending on context, and there are often "special readings" (nanori) which are exclusively for names, which is why you don't see Takashi there. A particularly crazy offender is the "su" character for "sushi" which has 20 readings.

So, yeah, I'm also xiao. But I suspect the meaning is totally different from Xiao's xiao.

Kicking around this poorly phrased hypothetical:

When Bill Gates dies, will he be acclaimed as the greatest humanitarian to ever live? Feel free to extrapolate future accomplishments you believe he has high likelihood of completing, compare or contrast with other do-gooders, or take points off for anything evil you think he's done.

As examples, I'd say that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has pretty high probability of finding a cure, or a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, and or ending the threat of Malaria across the globe. Additionally, the Foundation's work is so impressive it convinced Warren Buffet to give something around a gazillion dollars to the cause. The Foundation gives more money to these sorts of causes than governments, the UN, etc. All probably old news to anyone reading this.

I guess I'm just wondering how well this means Gates stacks up next to other great humanitarians. Personally, I think in time he'll be seen as the most accomplished, influential humanitarian ever.