safe(?) in oakland

i’ll get back to work in a moment.

my thoughts on NBC’s coverage of the equestrian sports: it sucks. even online, you can’t watch the full competition unless you do so live - and that means 7:15 wednesday morning for the dressage competition. NBC’s prerecorded video feed for the dressage portion of the 3-day event seems limited to two or three highlighted riders.

pff.

RSVP, and don’t forget, X marks the spot.

picked it up at a thrift store last week while looking for stuff to wear at burning man. now, what to DO with it?

for ease of arm motion, i’ve already taken off the sleeves. but i’m looking for any and all other suggestions. “get married in it” won’t fly, b/c afaik, bigamy is still illegal in these here parts.

dress back Close

dress front Close

first, the food, because that’s what i said i’d post. i started off with the chilies and yak cheese served with bhutanese rice. the red rice is the bhutanese rice; i gathered from other sources that the white rice was added as filler. all in all, it was pretty good - a bit like queso dip, actually. only somewhat runnier. i ate almost all of it, and was still hungry.

so then i meandered down to the viet-tex fusion tent (”texas noodles,” i think is the name of the place) and ordered some steamed pork buns. they were the spitting image of dim sum pork buns, but the filling was a bit more western barbecue-like. also yummy.

but what was really neat to see at the folklife festival was the buddhist monk working on a sand mandala:

so if you’re in dc, go check it out the festival. it’s pretty cool.

today’s the first day of the smithsonian folklife festival, so i headed down to the mall (america’s front yard, apparently) for a sampling of bhutanese cuisine. and i have one thing to say: yak dri¹ cheese - pretty good.

photos to follow.
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¹ i have been informed by a highschool classmate that you can’t get cheese from a yak, b/c yaks are male. the female of the species is apparently a “dri” or a “nak.” why he knows this, i have no idea.

this isn’t so much a comment on the problem with blogs, but a comment on what happens when you have access to a window into an author’s personality, and you find you don’t like what you see.

i read a few authors’ blogs. neil gaiman, warren ellis, wil wheaton, posner and becker.¹ perhaps that should read “very few,” because that’s the sum total i read regularly. (there’s a whole list of ‘em here, though, should you be curious about other authors who blog.)

some, i really like: neil gaiman, wil wheaton.
others, i read because they’re good for me: posner and becker, and, back in law school, volokh. (also not an author, except of law-school related headachiness. and it’s a group blog.)

one, i’ve decided to take off my feeds: warren ellis. i guess i’m tired of reading angry, self-involved, cooler-than-thou posts about things i don’t find that relevant. let’s face it: if i wanted to waste time with that, i’d just read the archives of baggage carousel 4.

so bye-bye, warren. i’ll probably keep reading freakangels, but maybe i’ll replace his feed with david brin.
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¹ okay, posner and becker aren’t really authors in non-scholarly sense, but they do write quite a bit. although for the purpose of this post, they really don’t count because they don’t write much about themselves, but use the blog as an extension of their scholarly thought. for all i know, they may have nothing but scholarly thoughts.

i explored the northern neck of virginia this past weekend. (does that mean VA has a southern neck? google suggests “no.”)

photos to follow within a reasonable time.

following my not-quite-diatribe about the ridiculous ondcp report, i began to wonder if the problem (politicized research) was being exacerbated by poor reporting skills. and while an n=2 doesn’t make for a very good sample (at least where N=the universe of washington post reports on surveys or studies), evidence for the poor reporting skills hypothesis is mounting.

take today’s wapo article covering the findings of the third annual autovantage road rage survey: for two years in a row, washington region drivers have been found to be the fifth-rudest in the nation. staff writer jonathan mummolo takes this to mean “we aren’t getting any ruder.”

wrongo, jonathan. what it means is that our relative ranking hasn’t changed. it doesn’t say squat about our actual level of rudeness. we may indeed be getting ruder, or (unlikely) we may be getting more polite. don’t you idiot uneducated moronic journalists know anything about basic research?

*sigh* at least there’s free iced coffee at dunkin’ d tomorrow. and no, they’re not related.

i really need to stop reading the washington post in the morning. every time i do, it seems i find reason to blog.

take this report being released today by the ondcp, finding that “teenagers who smoke marijuana put themselves at risk for future mental illness and higher rates of depression.” sounds scary! but the report also states that “too often teens do not seek treatment for their depression, choosing instead to seek relief by smoking marijuana. they do not realize that pot can make their problems worse and can set them up for serious health consequences.”

that’s right. the white house report says that depressed teenagers who don’t get treated have a higher likelihood of growing up to be depressed adults. i call that one for the file marked “duh.”

or take this gem:

The report also found that teenagers who smoke marijuana at least once a month are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-users. It said that even though the percentage of teens who are depressed is equal to the percentage of adults who say they are depressed, teenagers are more likely to seek solace in marijuana or other illicit drugs.

add that to the previous information and what you have is the following: teens who aren’t treated for depression are likely to have suicidal thoughts. the causality of marijuana just isn’t borne out in the analysis presented in the washington post article. by their logic, i can safely assert that home schooling leads to smoking pot from corpses’ heads. (and thanks, james, for that link. i was eating lunch.)

*sigh*

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in other news, also reported by the wapo, it seems the u.s. commission of fine arts has its nose out of joint because the working model of the new mlk jr. memorial features “a stiffly frontal image, static in pose, confrontational in character.”

heaven forbid a man who led marches, who packed the mall, and who - yes - confronted the racism in america be depicted in full frontal suitedness, arms crossed.

but what the commission is really bent about, apparently, is the artistic style of the proposed piece: the commission sec’y, thomas leubke, wrote that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

call me crazy, but i don’t think the sculptures to which he’s referring (saddam, anyone?) were removed out of aesthetic concerns. and in demanding that the dr. king sculpture be altered to evoke the “works of sculptors such as michelangelo and rodin,” leubke is completely missing the appropriateness of depicting dr. king in the social realist style: art that “belongs to the people and to the land and not to the exclusionary cliques of art world elites.” it almost seems that despite being sec’y of the fine arts commission, leubke is unfamiliar with the wpa.

ed dwight, a denver sculptor, has said the sculpture doesn’t look like dr. king. now that seems to be a more valid criticism.