EEE PC Review 1-1/2 Years later

In November, 2008 I squired a Asus EEE PC 1000H after careful examination of the market.

I wanted a portable computer, new or used, for travel with the following qualities:

1. Long Battery Life
2. Lightweight
3. 100GB+
4. Less than $500
5. Bluetooth
6. SD Card port

The EEE PC seemed to meet my expectations. My previous laptop was a Toshiba Portégé tablet PC that I bought used off eBay. I was fairly satisfied with it until I dropped it too many times and irrectifably damaged the motherboard while living in Ireland.

The Toshiba was once of those Tablet PCs with a rotating keyboard so could alternate between laptop-style and tablet-styler. When I got it in the summer of 2007, I took notes for class in tablet-style fairly easily. It had a fairly acceptable rate of recognizing my handwriting and converting it to text. The voice regonition software it came with was amusing. It was the kind of tablet PC that required a stylus. It was a very good device for doodling and creating graphics.

When I looked in Fall 2008 for a new portable, I considered many options, including buying a used one again. The EEE PC 1000H had only been on the market for a few months.

The 1000H features a 10.5" screen and is one of the larger netbooks. I had read a warning while considering my options that any smaller would make typing cramped. The 1000H seemed to meet all of my requirements, so I went with it. I also debated using their Linux distro which was optional, but since I would have had a Windows partition anyway, I didn't want to waste space.

I mulled for a while over the solid-state driver versus the disk-platter hard drive, but was persuaded by the larger capacity of the traditional hard drive.

Reactions:

• The 1024 x 600 screen is tiny, I set it to 1024 x 768 with vertical scrolling. Nevertheless, it's amazing how much MORE productive you can be with a larger monitor. Using Gmail with double-sidebars on a 1024 x 600 display takes 2-1/2 times as long as it is does with a typical desktop widescreen monitor.
• The battery life is not "all day computing" as claimed by Asus. The battery life claimed for the 1000H was up to 7 hours. When I first bought the computer, I believe it was possible to watch two movies with the wireless off and the brightness on low. Now, a year-and-a-half later, I have just over an hour of battery life.
• It was slightly heavier than I expected--3 lbs 2.2 oz, nevertheless, still light for a computer, but not as light as it looks. It's all in the battery.
• The touchpad gets hot.

Overall I am happy with it, the price was right. It combined everything I needed.

The battery is my biggest frustration. It now needs replacement. I partially blame this on being required to use my own computer for my current employer.

Lithium Lion Batteries typically deplete at 20% per year. Continiously charging a fully-charged battery is bad for the battery, but at work my power gets kicked out fairly frequently, so I cannot remove the battery during the day.

Also currently at work I use a monitor as a second display, which works very nicely. I normally have a broswer open on the monitor and a Word Document open on the netbook's display. A battery-charge off-switch would be a useful device.

I just installed Windows 7 last night. It seems to be all-right thus far.

Cleatus vs Asbestos

WHAT HAPPENED!?

Source: http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Cletus

Note that this graph's peaks are similar looking and 50 years behind Asbestos usage:

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

The Curious Colonialist Subplot of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

I found Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland to be an enjoyable film, but a bit underwhelming. There was nothing wondrous about "Underland", as it's known in the film, and no spectacular visuals you might expect from a dream world.

...but one thing that upset me was the ahistorical idea that Alice's little multinational would be "the first to trade with China". The first what to trade with China? Not the first European to trade with China, the Portuguese arrived in Macau in 1535. The British East India Company established a post in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1711.

In 1865, when Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), it was five years past since Britain's victory in the Second Opium War and one year after the end of the Taiping Rebellion and in the middle of the Dungan revolt, a rebellion of the Hui, Uighers, and other Muslim minority groups in China (the Taiping Rebellion was actually lead by a Christian convert, Hóng Xiùquán 洪秀全, who proclaimed himself the brother of Christ).

The Opium Wars were largely result of the efforts of the British East India Company trying to correct its trade imbalance through getting the Chinese addicted to opium from India. Like today, this MNC had a huge deficit with China, there was a high demand for Chinese goods, silks, porcelain, and tea. The "Canton System" limited Foreign Direct Investment to Canton (Guangzhou) and foreign companies established thirteen factories, essentially a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ). Chinese government policy only accepted silver bullion as payment, a serious macroeconomic problem in the long run. It's interesting to note that the first modern FTZ in China was created in Shenzhen, in between Hong Kong & Guangzhou, in 1980 as one of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 first and most successful economic reforms.

After 1757 the East India Company directly controlled Bengal and an ever-increasing amount of the sub-continent. By 1773, the company's costs of administering its own country and its deficit with China nearly drove it bankrupt. Parliament passed the East India Company Act 1773, bailing-out and partially nationalizing the company. Parliament also expanded its powers of monopoly and passed the Tea Act, allowing it to import directly to the American Colonies and indirectly sparking the American Revolution, as I have written about here. It still had to contend with its huge silver payments to China in order to sustain the increasing demand for Chinese goods. The sale and smoking of opium in China was banned since 1729 and reaffirmed in 1799. The company started to sell opium from India to be smuggled and sold into China. By 1773, opium exports from India was at 75 tons, up from 15 tons in 1730. The Opium trade with China became very strong and the East India Company had a British government-supported monopoly on the product, in 1820 900 tons of Bengali Opium was illegally imported to China.

In 1833, Earl Grey's Parliament (yes, the tea-loving Earl Grey) Abolished Slavery, it restricted child labor, re-conquered the Faukland Islands, and it abolished the East India Company's monopoly, reasserted the government's control of the board, and forbade employment discrimination of race, religion, and heritage in the company, although the territories of the East India Company as well as Sri Lanka (Ceylon) were explicitly exempt from abolishing slavery. Britain also sent a representative to China to see if it couldn't lobby the government to liberalize the restrictive Canton System which even forbade Westerners from learning Chinese. The government mandarins would not see the envoy or read his letter, contact was also forbidden.

There's a statue of Lin Ze Xu 林則徐, the world's first Drug Czar, that's near the Manhattan bridge and I passed it often when I used to take the Chinatown Bus from Philadelphia. In 1839, before the first Opium War, he wrote this open letter to Queen Victoria:

We find that your country is twenty-four or twenty-eight thousand miles from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience?

When Lin Ze Xu demanded that the British forfeit their opium, the British refused and the Chinese imposed an embargo. The British Superintendent of Trade relented and promised to compensate for all confiscated opium. The British treasury didn't want to pay for that and some people back in London and Calcutta were pretty furious that British property was being confiscated, so they went to war instead and sent the British Indian Army. And that's how the British got Hong Kong... which is referenced in the movie as "a new stronghold in Hong Kong" or some rubbish like that.

And then there was another Opium War in 1856 and a big mutiny leading to war in India in 1857 triggered by the introduction of a new rifle which resulted in the dissolution of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. All of this happened BEFORE Alice in Wonderland was published, and therefore presumably before the film takes place.

I did a search to see if anyone else who has written about this ahistorical subplot and found these words by Frederica Mathewes-Green in Christianity Today:

At the movie's end, Alice re-emerges at the garden party, refuses the young man's hand, and then speaks to his father—one of her dad's partners of old, it turns out, and now owner of the company. She talks of the thrill of international trading, and stresses particularly the opportunity to be the first to initiate trade with China. The lord is impressed, and invites her to be his apprentice. In the final sequence we see Alice standing nobly on the deck of a ship, heading out to the open sea.

This is wrong on so many counts it's hard to know where to start. It's a dud, dramatically, to go from multicolored Wonderland to the world of business planning. It's hard to picture capitalism as the ideal calling for the girl who fell down a rabbit hole. And were those 19th century international corporations really so admirable? In the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Depp's character fights against exactly the same type of business that Alice champions here.

And did it have to be China? Won't some history-savvy viewers wonder how many years Alice can profit from that nation, before its citizens rise up against foreigners in the Boxer Rebellion? "Let's be first to trade in China" is a bit like "Let's be first to invest in the Hindenburg."

Eileen Jones at The Exile writes:

The frame story of the film is pretty bad—best to ignore it as much as possible. It’s standard girl-power boilerplate projected back onto the Victorian Era, courtesy of screenwriter Linda Woolverton, who’s already cursed us with Disney crap like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. In her vision, Alice is a frowny teen who refuses to wear a corset or marry a total git, and opts for a career instead. Problem is, her chosen career is colonial-era exploitation—at the end she’s going to go expand trade routes to China and parts East, standing tall at the prow of an English ship, and we know how that kind of thing turned out.

And Todd McCarthy writes in Variety:

A jaw-dropping coda pivots on a "visionary" character's forthcoming voyage to open up trade with China, provoking musings about Disney's rationale for this sort of corporate encomium to a vast young market, as well as thoughts of a never-to-be-made sequel set among 19th-century Chinese as inscrutable and combative as the population of Underland.

ABC announced it was buying the rights to syndicate Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The actual original book should be in the public domain right now, could NBC release a series based on the source material? Will it contain this subplot? 19th-century international trade and capitalism are fascinating topics but also fairly dangerous to cover. I don't think objectivity is an obtainable goal, tell it from whatever perspective you want; accuracy, however, is.

I'm sure the screenwriter thought, "ooo, trade with China has become extremely important in the United States in the past two decades, let's try to connect the history with yesterday with current trends." This is done in every period film, it's a habit most screenwriters can't avoid. But now millions of people who don't know any better are being lead to believe that British trade with China happened sometime in the later-half of the 19th century, after the British obtained their "stronghold in Hong Kong". It's not the tail that wags the dog.

ahistorical analysis

What if during the Cold War a serious political scientist, diplomat, politician, foreign policy analyst wrote about the Berlin Wall or the Berlin Blockade:

The conflict doesn't date to the establishment of the GDR, German States have always been in conflict with each other. In order to truly understand the division of Germany, you have to go back to Charlemagne, who united Germany in the 8th century, but whose empire crumbled when he died.

That might sound intelligent historical insight--and it's true that history would be very different had Charlemagne not divided his kingdom when he died--but it's also a horrible example of trying to explain contemporary events as direct results of historical actions.

Sloppy historical parallels are made all the time in writing about policy or grand ideas. Be wary.

asinine middle east analysis

"Muslims Wont Play Together" Elfraim Karsh, New York Times

Efraim Karsh in Saturday's New York Times published this hilariously bad article about the 2010 Islamic Solidarity Games which were canceled over the Persian Gulf Naming Dispute. It wouldn't be so bad if he were not "the head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London" and the New York Times was not considered a reputable newspaper of record.

He treats the Persian Gulf naming dispute like it's the only naming dispute in the world. Maybe he should ask a Greek about Macedonia, an Irish republican about Londonderry. You don't have to go to travel to the Middle East to find sectarian conflict, Belfast is less than a one-hour flight from London and is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, thankfully the violence, for the most part, has ended with the Good Friday Agreement.

But most asinine omission is the fact the Taiwan has to compete in the Olympics as Chinese Taipei! Here's an article from today about the use of the term Chinese Taipei by NOAA's Pacific Tsunami Warning Center which outraged a Taiwanese DPP politician. Czechoslovakia broke up largely over a conflict regarding the name of the country in the Hyphen War.

The rest of the article is also a bunch of crap written by someone who definitely lives in London and thinks about "big things". I was brought to the attention of this article by The Abu Dhabi Review twitter feed, written by Peter C. Baker and Jonathan Shainin.

Efraim Karsh, ladies and gentlemen: "the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world)". http://nyti.ms/ddnZvf10:40 PM Feb 28th via webNot a day goes by that someone in Abu Dhabi doesn't ask me "Where are you from in the House of War?"10:40 PM Feb 28th via web@sepoy @abuaardvark I like his idea that the putative opposition of the "House of Islam" is the only possible downside to attacking Iran.10:45 PM Feb 28th via web in reply to sepoyMy work visa lists my nationality as "War, House of" and my religion as "kafir". For occupation it says "fitna", whatever that means.10:52 PM Feb 28th via webTweeps over in the House of War all riled up over hockey. Tehran, take note: Canada-hating Americans will not object to attack on Ottawa.12:52 AM Mar 1st via web

The blog, The Mezze, written by graduate students in the Middle East Studies program at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, wrote about the article in their post: "How to do really terrible Middle East analysis".

Talk about the essential nature of Muslims and/or Arabs and rely on events from the 7th century and the crusades to make your point. Karsh writes: “It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased.” This is a popular tactic in bad Middle East analysis: trying to understand today’s politics and and prescribe policy based on tracing the essential nature of Arabs or Muslims back to the birth of Islam. This is like trying to understand EU politics only by reading histories of the Middle Ages. Later, Karsh repeats the error by using Muslim actions in the crusades as support for his policy prescriptions of today.

...and the key to understanding anti-immigration attitudes and rise of the BNP in Britain is 1066 and all that (also the name of a hilarious satire on British History).

Make the actions of Arabs or other Middle Eastern people sound strange or different, even when people all around the globe exhibit the same behavior. When explaining why there are divisions within the broader Muslim community, Karsh writes: “not only do Arabs consider themselves superior to all other Muslims, but inhabitants of Hijaz, the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam’s birthplace, regard themselves the only true Arabs, and tend to be highly disparaging of all other Arabic-speaking communities.” So, there aren’t ethnic or religious groups in the US that consider themselves to be superior to others? Does Karsh not remember growing up in Israel and seeing how Ashkenazi Jews spoke disparagingly of Sephardic Jews? I’m not saying that the facts in this quote are wrong, but Karsh makes it sound as if this case is special to the Arabs, which is patently false.

Yes, Levantine Arabs have a different culture and consider themselves different than people from the Gulf, Somalia, Morocco, too. Why would this be a surprise to anyone? It's not hard to imagine that the culture and people in Beirut would be different than the people and culture in Riyadh.

travel writing

I haven't read any Wilfred Thesiger, but somehow I came across this well written eulogy from 2003 which describes the post-Thesiger, post post-colonial state of travel writing:

Usually, the travel-writers had to be 1) posh, 2) young, 3) photographed in native garb at all times, and behaving like a self-conscious imperialistic adventurer (such as Thesiger); then they had 1) to denounce wicked modern culture that had destroyed everything good and pure, while acclaiming the charms of any relic of the Empire;

2) to pretend that they were constantly in personal danger; 3) imply that no Westerner had ever been there before (even when these places crawled with tourists and backpackers).

...So, the genre of post-Imperial travel-writing is extinct - or it should be. A new travel-writing style... is already developing; one free of the confusion about modernity and Empire that characterised the British elite of Thesiger's generation.

Human cultures have always been hybrids: civilisations are certainly changed by the arrival of CNN or Britney Spears T-shirts, but they remain distinctive - and often in the most terrible ways. Chechens still behead their enemies even though they listen to Eminem. The boy soldiers of Congo have mobiles and watch Friends on cable. But they still eat the livers and brains of their prisoners.

Challanging Balkan Exceptionalism

I found the quote in the last post in this review of two books on the Balkins in the London Review of Books written by Misha Glenny during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. It begins with the absurd quote by Tony Blair that Kosovo is "on the doorstep of Europe", what does this metaphor even mean? This doesn't make any sense geographically, it must mean something else. Mr. Glenny ends the review of Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination by Vesna Goldsworthy and Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova with listing these six little known facts about recent Balkan history:

1. The only country allied to the Axis that refused to allow any of its Jewish citizens to be deported to Nazi death camps was Bulgaria.
2. There were twice as many Turkish casualties at Gallipoli as Allied ones (the Turks, lest we forget, were defending their home territory).
3. The single most violent period in Balkan history in terms of casualties sustained and the territorial extent of the warfare was a direct consequence of Hitler’s decision to occupy Greece, a decision prompted by Mussolini’s failed attempt to invade Greece in 1940. The Nazi resolve in March 1941 to dismember Yugoslavia was accompanied by the installation of a brutal Fascist administration in Croatia that was entirely
   unrepresentative of the political aspirations of the Croat people. Until Pavelic
   was installed in Croatia, there had been no history of mass violence between
   Serbs and Croats.
4. The Stalinist dictatorships that took root in Romania and Bulgaria were imposed by an agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill. In exchange for handing over these territories to Soviet influence, Churchill, and later Truman, were given a free hand by Stalin to smash a Communist insurgency in Greece that was on the verge of taking power with minimal foreign support.
5. Since 1989, the governments and people of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia,
   Albania and Greece have all resisted attempts by nationalists to destabilise the
   local or regional polity.
6. The main victims of the sanctions imposed by the UN on Serbia have been the surrounding states, a number of which are attempting to steer their economies through the transition from Communism to capitalism. Bulgaria, for example, has been losing an estimated $2 billion a year. The impact on the economies of Western Europe and America has been negligible. The UN refuses to give Bulgaria any compensation.

Here are some more quotes:

Its inhabitants were in the main white and Christian, but in important
contrast to the Middle East, the region was never colonised by Western powers,
which allowed it to become the repository of any manner of fantastic
imaginings.

[Bram] Stoker’s Gothic novel [Dracula], published in the 1890s, demonstrates an important development in representations of the peninsula. In the period beginning with the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and ending with the protracted negotiations that led to the various treaties of Paris after the First World War, the adjective ‘Balkan’ ceased to be a vague geographical concept and was transformed (for the 20th century at least) into one of the most consistently pejorative epithets in Western political discourse. [see Balkanization]

The new [post-1878 Congress of Belin] Balkan states were thus accepted into the great European hierarchy at the invitation of the Great Powers. As the long list of
conditions attached to their recognition as independent states made clear, they
were expected to know their place and to accommodate the foreign policies of
those Great Powers that demonstrated an interest in the region...Yet already, in
the minds of Western policy-makers and public alike, the new Balkan states were
part of an unbroken pattern of wild, aggressive behaviour stretching back
centuries.

The term ‘Balkans’ was barely used during the Communist period.
Four of the countries were subsumed into the phrase ‘Eastern Europe’ while
Greece and Turkey were ‘Nato’s southern flank’... After the fall of Communism,
Goldsworthy observed how some preposterous portrayals of the Balkans were

"dusted down and cited by journalists and newspaper columnists who, lacking the time to research their subjects thoroughly, are ever eager for readable – and quotable – accounts of life and death in the Balkans. While the turmoil of the Nineties forged new perceptions of individual Balkan nationalities, these frequently grew out of the archetypal representations of the region which were first established in the 19th century and then transmitted and transformed by successive generations of writers."

And you'll never look at the Balkins the same way again.

whoops

"Today the Great Powers are manifestly unwilling to make war. Each one of them, Germany, England, France and the United States, to name a few, has discovered the obvious truth that the richest country has the most to lose by war, and each country wishes for peace above all things."

-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, early 1914

Does this sound like the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention?

Wishes are like assholes, everybody's got one.

flowerpot filter coffee hack

In my previous post I lamented the popularity of Nescafe and talked about the history of coffee drinking. Anyway, I drink a healthy amount of coffee and tea every day and I like to start my day with a cup of black brewed coffee. I use a french press and an electric coffee grinder to make my coffee when I live in the States. Now that I'm overseas I don't have the implements to make brewed coffee and it's not so common here as well.

I was able to find a tin of ground "American Coffee". I bought a small flower pot and hacked it so it's now a coffee maker for making filter coffee. The flower pot sits perfectly on top of a standard mug:

Shove knife into bottom of flower pot:

put filter in flower pot, put coffee in filter

place coffee making apparatus on top of coffee mug

pour in boiling water

enjoy delicious black coffee:

coffee and tea

The coffee that is available here is primarily Turkish Coffee and the horrible abomination known as Nescafe--instant "coffee". This was the same when I was in Turkey, which was even more appalling considering the Ottoman Empire introduced coffee to the western world--they weren't able to to conquer Vienna with armies but they conquered it with coffee and cafés and from there coffee culture spread westward and northward (read this story of the first Viennese coffee shop). For Turks to drink instant coffee made by a swiss conglomerate (Nestlé S.A.) is a very bizarre thing, in my opinion.



Americans colonists drank tea like their fellow British citizens and then the British government started changing colonial industrial policy regarding tea, including the Tea Act. This expanded the monopoly power of the British East India Company--the Nestlé of the 18th century--the giant corporation that by the late 1700s directly controlled all of Bengal and nearly the entire eastern coast of India. The act allowed the British East India Company to directly import tea from India to the American Colonies, previously it was smuggled. Americans would be able to get higher quality and legal tea direct from India, but they also would have had to pay the Tea Tax, the only part of the hated Townshend Act that was not repealed by parliament. A bunch of smugglers and other angry colonists were upset in this change in Industrial Policy and threw a bunch of tea in Boston Harbor in 1773. Parliament responded with reprisals (Intolerable Acts) and tensions built until war broke out in 1775. Coffee drinking became a patriotic duty.

There's a Thomas Jefferson quote saying that, it's really quite remarkable that the American Revolution became set in motion all over a three-penny tax on tea. I can't find it, every few months ago I try to search for it. I did, however, find a quote from Frederick Douglas 1852 speech, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro", "You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country." ...not quite the quote I was looking for, but a very interesting speech from 10 years before the Emancipation Proclamation none the less. It would be interesting to know how many opinion-leaders of the current Tea Party movement know the history regarding tea in America.

I also ran across this while I was writing this post: "The Women's Petition Against Coffee". It's from England in 1674 and it's a hilarious satire lamenting that men are spending too much time drinking coffee and ignoring husbandly duties:

Since 'tis Reckon'd amongst the Glories of our Native Country, To be a Paradise for Women: The fame in our Apprehensions can consist in nothing more than the brisk Activity of our men, who in former Ages were justly esteemed the Ablest Performers in Christendome; But to our unspeakable Grief, we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigor; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us...

The Occasion of which Insufferable Disaster, after a furious Enquiry, and Discussion of the Point by the Learned of the Faculty, we can Attribute to nothing more than the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE...

At these [Coffee] Houses (as at the Springs in Afric) meet all sorts of Animals, whence follows the production of a thousand Monster Opinions and Absurdities; yet for being dangerous to Government, we dare to be their Compurgators, as well knowing them to be too tame and too talkative to make any desperate Politicians: For though they may now and then destroy a Fleet, or kill ten thousand of the French, more than all the Confederates can do, yet this is still in their politick Capacities, for by their personal valour they are scarce fit to be of the Life-guard to a Cherry-tree: and therefore, though they frequently have hot Contests about most Important Subjects; as what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great Turk be a Lutheran or a Calvinist (the Great Turk was a name for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, who was a Sunni Muslim -TSD); who Cain's Father in Law was (Cain was the son of Adam & Eve in the Bible -TSD), &c., yet they never fight about them with any other save our Weapon, the Tongue.

Some of our Sots pretend tippling of this boiled Soot cures them of being Drunk... THe Coffee-house being in truth, only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing foop prearative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill'd themselves with a morning draught of more Ale than a Brewer's horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain... once more they troop to the Sack-shop till they are drunker than before; and then by a retrograde motion, stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee; Thus like Tennis Balls between two Rackets, the Fopps our Husbands are bandied to and fro all day between the Coffee-house and Tavern, whilst we poor Souls sit mopeing all alone till Twelve at night, and when at last they come to bed smoakt like a Westphalia Hogs-head we have no more comfort of them, than from a shotten Herring or a dryed Bulrush...

Wherefore the Premises considered, and to the end that our Just Rights may be restored, and all the Antient Priviledges of our Sex preserved inviolable; That our Husbands may give us some other Testimonies of their being Men, besides their Beards and wearing of empty Pantaloons: That they no more run the hazard of being Cuckol'd by Dildo's: But returning to the good old strengthning Liquors of our Forefathers; that Natures Exchequer may once again be replenisht, and a Race of Lusty Hero's begot, able by their Atchievments, to equal the Glories of our Ancesters.

We Humbly Pray, That you our Trusty Patrons would improve your Interest, that henceferth the Drinking COFFEE may on severe penalties be forbidden to all Persons under the Age of Threescore (60 years old -TSD); and that instead thereof, Lusty nappy Beer, Cock-Ale, Cordial Canaries, Restoring Malago's, and Back-recruiting Chocholet be Recommended to General Use, throughout the Utopian Territories.

Here's the mens answer to the womens petition against coffee, vindicating their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their Scandalous Pamphlet.

So there you have it, coffee. Now I'll write the post I intended to write...

Amman part II

Some more notes from Amman

• All the buildings are made of stone. There are no trees, besides small trees, so there is no wood. It's hard to date buildings because a stone building is timeless.
  
• Mostly everything is less that 50 years old, many things are less than 20 years old
• The architecture here is very distinct, definitively middle eastern
• most Apartments are in 5-story 10 unit buildings that are detached from other buildings, no soviet-style apartment blocks or row-homes either
• the mosque minarets are fatter and shorter than the ones in Turkey, many have green florescent tube lighting near the top.
  
• there are many sedans here, no coups or small cars
• there are a lot of American cars here, many of the Hondas and Toyotas are imported from the United States or built for the American market, including my friend's Hybrid Camry
• there are not many small cars here, or motorbikes, scooters, motorcycles. Very different vehicles on the road than the mix you see in Western Europe
  
• There are an increasing amount of hybrids. Jordan eliminated price controls for petroleum
• Large American cars are popular here, or at least they were until price controls for gas were eliminated
  
• Children are taught English in grade school, most people know basic English, more than any non-Western European country I've visited
• The English everyone knows is American English
• People don't remove their shoes at the door as much as they do in other countries
• The city is sprawling, everyone knows how to navigate it by using the main circles (roundabouts) as monuments.
• The American Embassy is massive, it's a sprawling complex the size of a small farm
  

Amman

A few surprises:

1. Propane tanks for stoves and heaters are delivered around by a truck that plays music, like an Ice Cream Truck
2. Less people smoke cigarettes than I would have immagined
3. In Turkey, the social greeting between men was a kiss on each cheek, it's less common here, but it's done for family
4. There was snow on the ground at a house I visited, I knew it was colder and it flurried when I arrived, but it's maybe 10 deg F colder than I expected. I'm glad I brought a pair of long underwear
5. Taxi are extremely cheap, it cost $1 USD for a 10 minute taxi ride. A partial reason for this is that the bus system is unreliable and there is no metro (currently).

Flight to Amman

rand new

My sister rented a car and drove down to Philadelphia to attend my Philadelphia Going-Away Party and help me move some things.

Many things were not ready to leave and a friend stayed until 3 AM helping pack things. After a full day of packing on Wednesday, we left Philadelphia at 4pm--my sister had hoped to make it in New York by 9AM.

My sister took a nap and I left at 8 for my New York Going-Away Party. Instead of using a map to find the proper subway route, I relied on my phone to give me transit directions. I read that it said to take the F train and to get off at the "Christopher Street" station (it probably didn't actually say this). I turned on the "Number One Party School" Episode of This American Life about Penn State. I'm glad I didn't go to that school like my parents encouraged me, listen to the episode to find out why.

I was listening for the "Christopher Street" Station. It never came. Pretty soon the trained looped back east and crossed into Brooklyn. I got off. There wasn't any other lines going to that station so I got back on a train headed east. I then hopped on a Manhattan-bound train at the next stop and got off at Fulton/Broadway-Nassau and got on the 3. Unfortunately, the 3 did not stop at Chistopher Street and I had to get off and get on a Brooklyn Bound 1 train at the 3's next stop.

I arrived at Fat Cat (Billiards) in West Village sometime around 9:30. My party was supposed to begin at 9pm and some people were already waiting for me there.

Fat Cat was a cool place, it's was the right atmosphere I was looking for. They have ping-pong, billiards, and board games. Live Jazz played the night we were there. PBRs were $3. We were able to get enough chairs together to match the size of our party, but it would have been better to reserve space ahead of time. I actually called a few nights before, but it was at 3am and they weren't taking reservations there.

I'm glad everyone attened and that different groups of friends and my sister could all meet each other.


The next day I slept in and packed up and rearranged some things I had moved to my sister's apartment.

I had a lot of things packed to go to Jordan, a large suitcaseful, a backpack, and a shoulder-bag. My sister gave me money and a phone number to take a Town Car from Jackson Heights to Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR). After packing my things, I decided to try taking public transportation and pocketing the money. I made it to near the subway and a Town Car honked at me and I asked him how much it was to EWR, the number he quoted was less than the number given by my sister's prefered livery company, so I gave in.



During my hour-or-so-long ride from the East-Side (Queens) of the NYC metro to the West-Side (New Jersey), I decided to forgo listening to my iPod or making phone calls and make conversation with my driver. My driver was originally from Lahore, Pakistan, he moved to Brooklyn 8 years ago and Jackson Heights a few years ago. He liked Brooklyn much better, I think he said he lived in a largely-Hasidic neighborhood. It was much quieter and cheaper than Jackson Heights.

The electronic check-in didn't like my Continental One-Pass number. I didn't get a reminder phone call or "it's time to check in" email, did I actually purchase a ticket? Fortunately, the Orbitz-purchased ticket which consided of a Continental leg to Heathrow and a BMI flight to Amman, just wasn't linked to my OnePass number the way a Continental-purchased ticket would be. Continental had to "take ownership" of the ticket and process it. I they printed my boarding pass.

I weighed my suitcase, it was 49 pounds. The limit was 50. This wasn't the first time that has happened to me, although I have learned to pack light over the years... many of the things in the suitcase were things I will be giving away or leaving in Jordan. I watched "Citizen Kane" (1941), "Bullitt" (1968). I first watched "Law Abiding Citizen" (2009), but after 10 minutes I found it stupid and fast-forwarded through most of the scenes not showing Philadelphia.

St. David's Peninsula, Wales from my window:


The 9:20pm flight to Heathrow was 2/3-full and on a Boeing 757. I've never flown transatlantic on a plane so small. The 757 is a mid-sized narrow-body (one aisle) airplane, the size of a plane I would fly to a second-tier US city from a large city.

I arrived at Heathrow and almost went through immigration until the immigration officer told me I didn't need to (although, if my layover were longer, I would have). I went to Terminal 1 and used my computer and got online via Boingo.

The 12:50 BMI flight to Amman was 2/3 full. It was a b It didn't look like a flight to the Middle East at first blush, meaning there weren't many people whose region of origin could be easily determined by their appearance. From a cursatory glance at the Visa line when I arrived, there were a large amount of vistors to Jordan on the flight. Somewhere in the middle of the flight it occured to me that I only had $14 USD in my wallet. I started worrying about the cost of a visa. The visa for Turkey was $20, if I recalled correctly. I hoped that there would be an ATM before immigration and customs. Arriving at Amman's Queen Alia International Aiport, I saw there were none. Fortunately, the cash exchange place had a visa sign... but they would not take my bank card. I gave them $14 and I got 10JD back. The visa cost 10 JD.

The "Prime Minister's Question"-ification of the State of The Union Address

I fully support the "Prime Minister's Question"-ification of the State of The Union Address by Pres. Obama last night. The President expressed many emotions, directly attacked and mocked his political opposition, and joked and whatnot. Perhaps the change in tone is a result of the last time he addressed a join session of congress, when Rep. Joe Wilson broke decorum and yelled "YOU LIE".

For those unfamiliar with the weekly "Question Time" that the British PM has to endure in front of a lively opposition:

music industry

49 year ago, the #1 single in America was "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" by the Shirelles, the first single to top the charts by an All-Girls group. It was co-written by an 18-year-old Carole King in the famous Brill Building and was her first hit.





The current #1 record in America is independently distributed, which means a guy in an Astro Van goes around and delivers it to "record stores". A dozen other "independent" records have topped the charts. The best selling album of last decade was by a band that broke up in 1970, The Beatles. 10 years ago I had to do a "History Day" project for school on the subject of "inventions that changed the world". I chose Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. Without Napster, it's unlikely the mp3 player would have viable, the iPod would have released, or the iTunes store would have been created. The History Day judges didn't select my project to move on to the regional competition.



Now read this December 18th Article from Variety by Christopher Morris: Music sales took a hit: Piracy, technology send sales model back to the '50s ...

Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago... Department stores (Walmart, Target) dominating the market. A singles-driven industry. Pop music dominating radio. TV musical talent shows all the rage.

But as the '00s dawned, a Pandora's box opened when computer-savvy college student Shawn Fanning's website Napster allowed users to share compressed MP3 music files -- at no charge. Napster was eventually knocked down by the courts (and absorbed by a major label), but other illegal Internet file-sharing services sprang up to replace it.
...
Labels had snuffed the physical single in the '90s... Consumers, who had long believed CDs were overpriced and packed with filler, embraced the MP3 -- either legally or illegally -- as the "new single."

Within a year of opening in 2003, the iTunes store sold 100-million tracks.
I think my position from a decade ago was vindicated.

Top 20 films of the Naughties

Top 20 Films of the Naughties

1. There Will Be Blood 2007 ...a touching father-son story, the "Mr. Holland's Opus" of the 00s
   
2. The Royal Tanenbaums 2001 ..."Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.
3. No Country for Old Men 2007 ...A Western set in 1980 with no soundtrack. Call it, friendo
   
4. The Last King of Scotland 2006 ...historical fiction done right
   
5. The Prestige 2006 ...few can leave watching this film without remembering it
   
6. A Serious Man 2009 ... I'm a serious man, Larry.
7. (500) Days of Summer 2009 ...best film about a relationship
   
8. O Brother Where Art Thou? 2000 ...the Coen brothers stage an epic in the depression-era Deep South and pull off an entertaining, memorable, funny, well-made movie. Its soundtrack started a Bluegrass revival
   
9. Thank You For Smoking 2006 ...a movie that actually upsets mainstream conventions
   
10. Good Bye Lenin! 2003 ...not everybody in East Germany eagerly embraced the collapse of their state. A well-told story about an elaborate farce put on by a son for his mother.
    
11. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou 2004 ...Vivid, funny, brilliantly crafted with an elaborate cut-away set, this film is definitely one of Wes Anderson's best and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
12. Gran Torino 2008 ...learning to love your neighbors
    
13. The Incredibles 2004 ...the best CGI-animated film to-date
    
14. Waltz with Bashir 2008 ...an Israeli animated film which takes on serious issues and war in a serious way that few other animated films have
    
15. Grizzly Man 2005 ...man is man and bear is bear and never the twain shall meet
    
16. The Departed 2006 ...Southie culture of violence done right (versus "Boondock Saints"), well-made American adaptation of Hong Kong's Internal Affairs (2002)
    
17. Idiocracy 2006 ...an accurate portrayal of our dystopian future, Mike Judge's next film directed after "Office Space", it unfortunately only released in seven cities
    
18. About Schmidt 2002 ...you retire, your wife dies... (just like in Gran Torino) what's next? What's life? Alexander Payne's About Schmidt tackles many of the issues of examining a life without being sanctimonious, patronizing, and insufferable (i.e. American Beauty).
    
19. Road to Perdition 2002 ...best mob movie of the 00s, well made, well told, Paul Newman's last film.
    
20. Cloverfield 2008 ...nearly the entire film is shot as if it were on a camcorder and it actually pulls it off without seeming derivative of Blair Witch. Clever, exhilarating, and well paced.
    

Honorable Mention: Avatar, The Illusionist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Casino Royale, Blow, City of God (Cidade de Deus), Coffee and Cigarettes, The Squid and the Whale, Cast Away, Lost in Translation, A History of Violence, High Fidelity, The Queen, Batman Begins, The March of the Penguins, The Fog of War, Minority Report, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Appaloosa, For Your Consideration, Team America: World Police

Have yet to see: Downfall, Adaptation, Spirited Away, A Mighty Wind, Hotel Rwanda, The Man Who Wasn't There, Valkerie, My Winnipeg, 12:08 East of Bucharest, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Day, Sideways, Enemy At the Gates, No Direction Home, Man on Wire, Bowling for Columbine, A Long Night's Journey Into Day, Vanilla Sky, Momento, Broken Flowers, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, I'm Not There, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Nixon/Frost, The Wrestler, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Death at a Funeral, Death to Smoochy, A Scanner Darkly, Dirty Pretty Things, Churchill: The Hollywood Years, Pan's Labrynth, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Avetar, Everything Is Illuminated, Fast Food Nation, Flags of Our Fathers, 8 Mile, Gangs of New York, Good Night and Good Luck, Helvetica, Infamous, Little Miss Sunshine, Love in the time of Cholera, Bridge of San Luis Rey, Me Myself & Irene, Mean Girls, Memoirs of a Geisha, Requiem for a Dream, Stranger than Fiction, Running with Scissors, Syriana, Taken, Mulholland Drive, My Kid Could Paint That, School for Scoundrels, The Night We Call it a Day, Adeventureland,Thirteen Days, La Vie en Rose, Volver, Babel, The Wendell Baker Story, Welcome to Pyongyang Animal Park, Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock, Y tu mamá también, Dogville, The Lives of Others, Punch-Drunk Love, Gosford Park, Capturing the Friedmans, Inland Empire, Before Sunset, Yi Yi, Cache (Hidden)

...next I will tackle the best comedies and the most overrated films of the past decade