I don't normally promote specific events here, but in this case I'm making an exception. Those of you in Holland or surrounding I really want to recommend the Dutch Meet and Ego Kornus Performance on December 20th. Click here for more information; there will also be discussions of future events in the area and more! I got to meet Kor while in Amsterdam and really have nothing but good things to say! |
Saw a weird comment on ./ last night… In a discussion of Google Code Jam, someone was upset about the winnings — not a single American had been able to place with the awards going to Europeans, Scandinavians, and a Canadian (this is fairly normal on the TopCoder competitions; it's fairly rare for Americans to rank — although I think it's important to point out that the numbers may be skewed because of the volume).
Last time I checked, Google was an AMERICAN company. You think that they would have the decency or the patriotism to give at least one award to an AMERICAN. Sorry Google but you are no longer my search engine of choice. Altavista here I come.
It just seemed kind of weird that one would expect that the “decent” thing to do would be to give an award to an unqualified person as a form of national pride — or that when seeking a tool, quality of engineering is less important than nationalism… I don't know about you, but if “my team” doesn't have a winner this season, it would be kind of embarassing to have a sham victory. It would make us look kind of dumb…
SNL's opening last night was disturbing (maybe not as disturbing as the fact that they've had Alec Baldwin host eleven times now)… Just a weird upsetting and not-at-all-funny parody of Bush going on about killing Americans, screwing them over, things getting worse and worse, the elections all being rigged, and so on. SNL is definitely not a part of the right wing media conspiracy it seems.
Things continue to get decidedly worse in Iraq, with another successful guerrilla attack downing two black hawk helicopters (more, more) killing almost twenty more Americans — and, perhaps more dangerously, allowing the guerrillas to show the population that they can win. As long as these types of small victories continue, the guerrillas can keep recruiting people (more, more) for more:
"What difference does it make? If they arrest two [from the resistance], another 100 will take their place."
Not a nice thing to read alongside stories about National Guardsmen being sent over for the long haul (more), talking about how important it is to them to spend time with their kids because they just might not be coming back.
When National Guardsman John Schreiber learned he could be sent to Iraq before Christmas, his 7-year-old son told him, "Dad, you're going to die."
Also stateside, the Republicans are funnelling money from children's charities into late-night neocon parties (more) — it's crazy, it just sounds so Cruella DeVille, but it's real! The thing I don't get about this is that it's so self-destructive. I think it was Seymour Hersh that pointed out recently that Bush won't get (legally) re-elected because “you have a war fought by the underclass, financed by the underclass and for the profit of the upperclass.”
So the question that's really being answered right now in America is,
“does the underclass have a voice?”
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