Category: linkdump

The handful of people who follow this blog might find infuriating my reluctance to post on a regular basis, but I do write a lot elsewhere and privately. Also, I have been busy with technical things.

Here I ask a blogger about the Honduras coup why the person doesn’t identify himself. Lots of good replies.

Screed about the blandification of TV sci fi shows on a pro-male site. Don’t bother reading the comments. 

Two articles about Netflix.   Daniel Roth writes about  how Reed Hastings accomplished Instant Watch and how it will revolutionize watching.  (Read my thoughts about the Roku—which I am still loving to death).

Health insurance companies seeking a loophole to discriminate more in  rates: financial incentives to participate in wellness programs.

A consensus is forming in the US Senate to support the Kerry-Graham climate bill. Gigantic news.

Guide to backing things up on Vista.

Ask the Headhunter articles. Good stuff. See basic job-hunting mistakes.

New Yorker Review of Books has a podcast. My only complaint (if you can call it that) is that the people interviewed are usually literary biographers and historians..interesting but only up to a point.

I am now reading Vivian Gornick’s End of the Novel of Love, an excellent discussion about love and relationships through the lens of 20th century literature. Here’s an interview. Here’s her statement regarding a pseudo-scandal where she is alleged to have faked parts of her memoir.

Dating Videos: Lovedrop on bad male body language. See the essay on compliance and value.

Brooks Jackson explains why medical malpractice is an overblown threat.

Hitler finds the truth about Santa.

Did Glen Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?  Maybe not, but a person attacks Glen Beck’s style of insinuation. Recommended: the lawyer’s brief defending him (PDF)

Please cut the crap compiles some anecdotes about how health insurance mistreats customers. Part 1 and Part 2.

Timothy Noah explores the reasons the US hasn’t yet been attacked by terrorists after 9/11. Among other reasons, he argues that 9/11 was a tough act to follow.

Also here is a video of the USCC Naked Run 2009, (an annual tradition of students running naked in the rain in California). Totally safe-for-work, but the girl who videotapes is having a good time. Pity the poor company which unintentionally bears the same name.  I predict this tradition will NOT last much longer (now that everybody and their dog has a cell phones nowadays).

A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.

Paul Ohm contends that Netflix aggregate customer data will enable individuals to be identified.

Two incredible videos by my favorite Albanian singer Eli Fara: Here’s a traditional folk song with Fara’s haunting voice (my favorite) and a delightful singing at a hotel for 2009 New Year.

How to get more bicyclists on the road: make them more friendly to female cyclists.

Ferdinand Bardamu on the provincialism of American literature:

The acquisition of publishing houses by larger media corporations has worked to kill innovation and make everything safe and marketable. Novelists themselves have to remain safe and marketable if they want to be published. There’s no room for the characters of yesteryear who made writing interesting. If the womanizing spendthrift Lord Byron was writing today, for instance, no editor would touch him. Truly talented writers who upset popular shibboleths such as Maddox and Tucker Max had to go the indie route in order to get their books published at all. The Nobel literature prize judge Horace Engdahl accurately described [in a London Telegraph article … link apparently lost] American writers as too "insular" and "isolated," and the controversy-free nature of modern publishing has done its best to ensure this.

How not to build a sidewalk.

Sam Greenspun on Strange romance genres: medical, Nascar, Viking, Mail Order Bride, time travel. Brendon Kelley talks about medical romance:

There was a marked preponderance of brilliant, tall, muscular, male doctors with chiselled features, working in emergency medicine; they were commonly of Mediterranean origin and had personal tragedies in their pasts. Female doctors and nurses tended to be skilled, beautiful, and determined, but still compassionate; many had overcome substantial personal and professional obstacles in their lives. Protagonists of both sexes had frequently neglected their personal lives to care better for their patients, many of whom had life-threatening illnesses from which they nonetheless managed to recover.

These novels draw attention to the romantic possibilities of primary care settings and the apparent inevitability of uncontrolled passions in the context of emergency medicine, especially as practiced on aeroplanes. These novels suggest that there is an urgent need to include instruction in the arts of romance in training programmes for doctors and nurses who intend working in these settings.

4 articles on whether the male seduction community is all it’s cracked up to be. Counterproductive attitudes. From the same site: Basic Things No One Told Me about Sex (worksafe, but very explicit).

An article I wrote about the horrors of graduate school still receives a steady stream of comments.

I read an article about the 20 minute video called story of stuff almost a year ago, but I finally got around to watching it. It’s great.

Cabel Sasser describes a funky Japanese restaurant where you never receive what you order.

Pat Garofolo on how David Koch and other billionaires enlist the support of right-wing activists to keep their taxes low.

Pew report on the inadequate way journalists cover the recession:

Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles of the U.S. auto industry. Together they accounted for nearly 40% of the economic coverage from February 1 through August 31. Other topics related to the crisis have been covered much less. As an example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

…

Fully 76% of the datelines on all economic stories were either New York (44%) or metro Washington, D.C. (32%). Only about one-fifth, 21% of the stories, originated in any other city in the U.S. And just 3% were reported from overseas locations.

The New York-D.C. coverage axis was even more evident in the economic storylines that generated the most overall media attention. Fully 90% of stories about the No. 1 economic theme, the troubled financial sector, originated from either New York (50%) or Washington (41%). The numbers were similar when it came to the second-biggest theme, the $787-billion stimulus package, with 83% of the stories datelined New York or Washington

This chart says it all:

By the way, what ever happened to global warming? Permafrost in Greenland?

Other differences in media coverage:

• Newspaper front pages stood out for devoting the most attention to the economy, offering more localized coverage, giving voice to a more diverse range of sources and producing a higher level of enterprise reporting than other media sectors.

• The network evening newscasts distinguished themselves by focusing on the recession’s impact on the lives of average Americans, with all three major commercial networks airing regular features on the subject.

• Cable television and talk radio, two platforms that rely more than others on ideologically driven debate, focused more on the Beltway-based political aspects of the economy, such as the stimulus package battle. And in both sectors, overall coverage of the economy plunged dramatically when the story became less Washington-centric.

By the way, Paul Solman’s Business Desk blog stands out as one of the better places for coverage about the recession.

Public Citizen sues Texas to enforce its Clean Air legislation.  Actually the comments from readers (rude and ill-informed as they are) speak a lot about the attitudes that Texans have about global warming.

John McFarlane reports that Texas just started a massive wind farm (reported the biggest in the world).  From the great Green Tech blog on cnet, I see this article by Candace Lombardi (with a little more informed comments).

(I collected this at least two months ago, but then forgot about it….Oops!)

Mark Ames reviews two dissimilar books: a Satanic heavy metal music and a ho-hum Richard Perle political screed. Hilarious.

And why not go all the way for murder and arson, considering what the "consequences" of murder are in Northern Europe. Oo, a Northern European jail. Oo, I’m so scared! The sentences, when they’re even given out, are laughably light, while the jail conditions were described as a "holiday" by one of the victims’ mothers, or "time flies when you’re having fun" by one of the perps.

One lesson of Lords of Chaos is that it pays to murder in Northern Europe. Literally. Going to prison there is like getting comped at a Comfort Inn. You can’t possibly get locked away for long, and even if they give you 10 or 20 years–and that’s if you’re lucky–you can still get off on weekends for unaccompanied home visits, enough time to participate in another murder. Prisons there are so comfy that even the metalists complained about getting treated too well. As Varg Vikernes sneered, "It’s much too nice here. It’s completely ridiculous. I asked the police to throw me in a real dungeon, and also encouraged them to use violence." Naturally, they didn’t.

Mark Ames is a political satirist who was founding editor of the satirical biweekly eXile in Moscow. Other articles by Ames .  Other book reviews by Ames. I blogged about eXile a few years ago about the Russian beauty contest scandal. Ames has two books: Going Postal and an anthology of Exile pieces. Mark, if you’re ego-surfing and stumbling upon this piece, why not self-publish these as ebooks on smashwords.com?

God, did you remember the hullaballoo about the Cheney energy task force? Turns out there was a lot of THERE there. Sourcewatch reports.

James Fallows points out how Turkish media’s distortion of the Xinjian/Uighur problem is just as bad as Chinese media’s:

The point about separate fact-universes is one of the sobering marvels of the modern info-age. It’s true within the United States, as discussed long ago here; and it’s true between countries, as China, Turkey, and the rest of the world all digest different versions of the Xinjiang "truth." Main point: the internet, mobile phones, and other info technology, far from eliminating the country-by-country differences in information and belief, in some ways may increase them, as each little info-sphere is able to reinforce its own view of the world.

(Wow, I was going to remove that link when I discovered that it’s a link to Fallow’s very  book on the  subject. Bravo!)

Here’s an article I wrote for teleread about global warming and the publishing industry.

Various unrelated links of general coolness.  Looking over this, I see that a lot of links come from Marginal Revolution (a social science and economics blog).

A philosophic debate about progressivism vs. libertarianism. Arnold Kling tries to describe progressivism. Tyler Cowen tries to elaborate in a less pejorative way.  Matt Yglesias tries to explain libertarianism (and how it’s supposed to work). Mark Thompson analyzes libertarian principles by looking at quotes from Monty Python.

From a commenter on a blogpost about cross country comparisons:

All the wingers I know hold three immutable beliefs:

1) They believe everyone below them in society is immoral, lazy, contemptible and undeserving of anything they have.

2) They believe everyone above them is moral, industrious, admirable and deserving of everything they have.

3) They greatly overestimate their position in this food chain.

Speaking of health care, I keep forgetting to blog this although I’ve mentioned it on facebook several times. Here’s a comparison of European health care with American health care. 

Progressivefox on how I lost my health insurance at my hair stylist:

Your ex comes by to pick up your son and tells you that the municipality he works for’s administrator told him in absolute shock that the insurance company slapped a million dollar surcharge on the municipality’s insurance policy, and said it would go on yearly until you are off, but since you had exercised your right to COBRA it would “do no good” if your ex was gone. The administrator said he was so shocked and offended that he went to ALL the other carriers possible, and one by one they all gave him back a “no bid” with the proviso that they would welcome the opportunity to bid…just as soon as that leukemia patient’s COBRA rights expire. So barring leaving all the municipality’s employees naked of insurance they were absolutely trapped.

Matt Yglesias on the false use of the word “rationing" when talking about health care:

Similarly, your kid is entitled to go to a public school. They’ll teach him reading and writing and some science and history and probably Spanish or French or some such. But in the vast majority of places, you can’t have your kid taught Japanese at taxpayer expense. Again, though, we don’t live in a dystopian universe of “language rationing” in which it’s impossible to learn Japanese, you’d just have to pay someone else to do it. We of course could ban the market in private foreign language instruction, but it’s not clear why we would do that, and the existence of public sector provision of Spanish language instruction doesn’t in any sense imply a ban on the teaching of other foreign languages. What’s more, even if you’re incredibly troubled by the fact that today’s poor children don’t have the chance to learn Japanese in public school it’s still the case that eliminating public schools and lowering taxes isn’t going to leave those kids any better off. They still won’t know Japanese and now they also won’t be able to read.

David Goldhill proposes an alternate way to provide insurance: require  catastrophic insurance for  everybody and HSA’s for ordinary procedures. I don’t agree with the prescription, but he has a lot of interesting ideas in this article.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson analyzes how the media is providing inadequate coverage of health care legislation by focusing on town hall meetings.

BILL MOYERS: So the protests seem to be making some people more sympathetic to the protesters?

KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: And potentially the press then picks that up, polls, finds that sympathy, creates a structure that suggests that health care reform initiatives are losing support. Now polls have driven press coverage which says "Obama on the defensive. Obama struggling to explain. Obama trying," when, in fact, the dynamic under that has been created by a news structure that decided to cover this in a certain way, to do polling in a certain way. And those two things played into the process to make it more difficult for the discussion to actually happen about the substance of what’s going on.
DREW ALTMAN: So it’s exactly right. So we have the protests, the media coverage, especially the 24-hour news cycle, follows the protests and the town meetings. Then the polls poll about the media coverage of the protests. And we create almost an alternative reality about what is occurring out there.
When you look at the real polls about where the public actually is, what you see is there’s been a little bit of a tick down in public support and people are getting a little anxious as they follow the media coverage. But still the majority of the American people are for moving forward with this.
And we have seen more people begin to say, "Gee, I’m not so sure that this is good for me and my family," but it’s still a small number. It’s only 20, 22 percent who say, "I’m a little bit worried about this." And a much bigger number say, "I still think this is good for me and my family." And then you’ve got a group in the middle who’s not so sure. And everyone’s fighting for that group on both sides.

Gummy Bear song video. Wildly popular among children. (Found from a list of top 10 search terms by children).

Google video has episodes of Sifl and Olly (a 20 minute puppet  show on MTV in the 1990s). Here’s episode 1. If you go on a watching marathon,  watch only the clips which are 20 minutes.

Various essays about the role of sexual fantasies.

List of the words most commonly looked up on the New York Times site.

A commenter explains why “Google is the #1 search term on other search engines.

Many users get confused between the search bar and the address bar. Also, if the URL is invalid ("google"), Internet Explorer will use the default search engine (often Google) to search for the invalid URL, then redirect the user to a search page. The user ends up where s/he intended to be, so this behavior doesn’t change and becomes ingrained.

The end result is, yes, that Google users end up googling for Google. The top search term on Bing and Yahoo is "Google", unsurprisingly, and the top term on Google is "Yahoo". The second term on Google is now "Google", edging out the former top contender "sex".

˙ɟʇn sǝʌןoʌuı ʇı :ʇuıɥ ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ ǝʞɐɯ oʇ uoıʇɐɔıןddɐ qǝʍ ןooɔ

I have been very busy with various things over the past few weeks. Sorry I haven’t had much time to blog regularly.

Also, I’ve been watching Lost on my Roku. Can’t get enough of it!

Cartoon Law of Physics.

Advertisers are dumping Glen Beck. Finally!

Digby: It’s Ok if you’re a Republican.

From a trackback, I see a blog about weird garage sales.

Sex columnist and blogger Dan Savage gives some hilarious talks (available on youtube).

Whack a Kitty, a humorous cat video.

Video: How to Tell People they Sound Racist.

Michael Blowhard on lies that a women’s  magazine’s tell you. My fave:

• Drinking green tea and pomegranate juice will ensure that you’ll never get sick.
• Nevertheless, you’re always just this far from discovering that you have breast cancer.

Friend and film expert Michael Barrett on why now we are in the golden age of cinema. Here’s his piece debunking whether film scores should be memorable:

When I read interviews with Golden Age composers, it seems they always repeat this homily about their craft: "The background score is supposed to support the movie without calling attention to itself. The moment the audience notices the music, that means it’s bad and not doing its job properly."

…

And it’s a crock, isn’t it?

If we take this standard seriously, then it’s easy to name some of the worst scores in film history: Bernard Herrmann’s work for Hitchcock, John Williams’ for Spielberg, Ennio Morricone’s for Leone, John Barry’s for the James Bond films, Elmer Bernstein’s "Magnificent Seven," Jerry Goldsmith’s "Patton" or "The Omen," Michael Nyman’s "The Piano," Henry Mancini’s work for Blake Edwards, Nino Rota’s for Fellini and "The Godfather," and Prokofiev’s work for Eisenstein. My word, don’t they jump right out at you.

And who let that guy Anton Karas into the room to write "The Third Man"? P.U.!

By this "you shouldn’t notice it" standard, some of the most mediocre hackwork must be top-drawer stuff. Indeed, the most forgettable must be utter genius.

Fascinating economic analysis of sex.

From the fascinating science blog Gravity and Levity comes a discussion of mortality percentages:

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year?  Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100?  1 in 10,000?  Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.”  Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years.  For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000.  When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on.  By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%.  This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

The conclusion:

Imagine that within your body is an ongoing battle between cops and criminals.  And, in general, the cops are winning.  They patrol randomly through your body, and when they happen to come across a criminal he is promptly removed.  The cops can always defeat a criminal they come across, unless the criminal has been allowed to sit in the same spot for a long time.  A criminal that remains in one place for long enough (say, one day) can build a “fortress” which is too strong to be assailed by the police.  If this happens, you die.

Lucky for you, the cops are plentiful, and on average they pass by every spot 14 times a day.  The likelihood of them missing a particular spot for an entire day is given (as you’ve learned by now) by the Poisson distribution: it is a mere .

But what happens if your internal police force starts to dwindle?  Suppose that as you age the police force suffers a slight reduction, so that they can only cover every spot 12 times a day.  Then the probability of them missing a criminal for an entire day decreases to .  The difference between 14 and 12 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the result was that your chance of dying during a given day jumped by more than 10 times.  And if the strength of your police force drops linearly in time, your mortality rate will rise exponentially.

This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate.  When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year.  But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year.

Please cut the crap is a great debunker of right-wing nonsense run by Milt Shook. Here’s his castigation of birthers (people who believe Obama wasn’t born in the US).

You have to believe that this birth announcement, which was discovered and posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger during the thick of last year’s primary fight, and which was found in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper and dated on August 13, 1961, was part of the conspiracy. In other words, you have to believe that someone living in Honolulu back in 1961 had an inkling that the "colored boy" (that’s what the baby would have been called in those days) who was born on August 4, 1961, might want to become president someday, so someone planted the birth announcement in the paper.

More importantly, he rebuts the usual Republican jibes on health care reform.       

Personal Note: I have been interviewing author Jack Matthews about his work. Details forthcoming.                         

Despite my lack of blogging, I regularly come across some things that are amazing and bloggable. I have second thoughts about sharing them because 1)most other bloggers already know about them, and 2)I have so few readers as it is. I’m going to resolve to do a linksdump at least once per week (although to be fair I have a lot of things going on).

• Andy Worthington summarizes the number of prisoners brutally murdered when in US custody overseas. This mainly includes Gitmo, but also a few deaths in Iraq as well. I already knew about most of these cases, but  few were new to me.
• I knew that there was a way to view saved passwords in Firefox, but I didn’t realize the security implications. This guide tells you how to create a master password for access to your Saved Passwords. This is an inelegant solution (even in the latest Firefox 3.5), but it’s better than nothing.
• Robert Frank on why drive-up ATM machines have Braille dots. Also, why does your fridge have a light but not your freezer?  Why do brides buy wedding dresses while grooms rent tuxes?  Here’s an introductory interview with Robert Frank here.
• F. Roger Devlin on gender issues and critiques of feminism. Michael Blowhard writes an introduction to Devlin’s writings. I’ve only started delving into Devlin’s writings, but the lengthy book review of Wendy Shalit’s book Girls Gone Mild seems a good place to start. I’ll probably blog about Devlin’s remarkable essays later.
• Fascinating background report about the green economy by Joshua Green. Basically the changing incentives at the state level made it difficult for green energy companies to grow. Obama’s stimulus package will solve this problem:

The stimulus was the first of three major initiatives intended to steer the economy toward something more like Amory Lovins’s soft path. To fill the tax-equity gap, the stimulus provides $32.7 billion in direct grants and another $134 billion in loan guarantees to attract new investors to large projects. To impose stability, it extends a variety of tax credits by anywhere from three to eight years. Most striking of all, it instructs the Department of Energy to invest directly in promising cleantech companies (though the payoff comes in jobs and environmental gains, not equity). By a stroke of his pen, President Obama made a federal agency the world’s largest venture capitalist. When the official in charge of the program appeared at a Santa Barbara energy conference in March, he was mobbed by eager CEOs.

So far, so good. “The stimulus package essentially saved the renewable-energy industry in the United States,” says Raj Atluru, managing director of the venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

• Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. (The 50 minute video presentation is worth watching by the way).

• Finally here’s a steal from Tom Tomorrow. Sorry Tom!  His children’s book Very Silly Mayor will be released in October.  I just wanted to say I remember Tom Tomorrow’s pieces about health care reform in the early 1990s. So when he talks about 20 years, he knows what he’s talking about!

Good discussion of .epub format. Surprising revelation: because ebook readers have to load up the entire xhtml/html file into memory, that causes latency and slow loads.Eric Wild on XInclude processing in XSLT 2.0 processors. Apparently it works a lot better in 2.0 than 1.0.

Drew Carey political video on free market solutions to traffic problems. Comments to the video are informative as well. (Did you know that tollway companies sometimes use secret covenants with the city about competition and exclusivity deals?)

Guide to filing suit against Telemarketers. I have been swamped with telemarketing calls recently. All of them are messages left on my answering machine and sound like a debt collector. All of them are about names I’d never heard of. The problem is the onus is on the consumer to call them back to straighten things up. If the don’t call back, the autodialer will keep calling and calling and calling. One of two things are happening to me. Either 1)this phone number is being used by a single individual with a variety of names as a kind of practical joke or 2)these are in fact legitimate debts to be collected, but from long ago.

Lately I’ve been trying Windows Live Writer for blogging. (I don’t use it for idiotprogrammer yet). It seems to work fairly well, and apparently it’s going to remain free even after the beta expires. As long as the wp theme is compatible it seems to function a lot better than google docs (for instance). My main lament is that there’s not a way to save it locally as a kind of file that could be useful for ebooks (as xhtml for example). (Oops, that is wrong; now I have a folder labeled My Weblog Posts). Apparently, today’s 2.31 release of wordpress fixes some compatibility problems between wordpress and Live Writer.

Anne Gentle is an Austin-based technical writer who runs the Write Click Now blog (clever title by the way). Here’s her interview about using wikis for documentation. (Here’s another thoughtpiece about wiki documentation and a link to a Harvard Business school case study by Sean Silverstone. She comes from a DITA background and has written about documentation and agile programming.

Here’s a weblog by Solveig Haugland with lots of open office tips and tutorials. (Unbelievably, she was in Houston training NASA people on it). Here’s also a great free package of OpenOffice extras (templates for presentations and even books/ebooks) Looks like this package was put together by Sun.

I’ve been doing research into online evite services. All of them seem to suck, with evite.com sucking more than the rest combined. What I’m looking for:

1. must be able to create an address book, with the option to send all people on the address book invitations (whether they have joined a website or not).
2. These email invitations must have a RSVP function (and not require recipients to become members first).
3. must be able to create recurring events and save previous venues.
4. Should offer some advantages to those becoming members. (in the 2.0 social networking sphere).
5. Should offer ability to add event to your calendar.

As it happens, the three most promising sites are Mypunchbowl, planypus, and eventful . Mypunchbowl seems to have the most positive buzz, but apparently it’s for impromptu parties, not for groups that meet regularly. I’m getting to the point where I may look into using some drupal or plone module to solve the problem (loath as I am to run and support these things).

I’ve been adding to my Houston technical writer portfolio site. Here’s a succinct list of technical writing resources, which includes many things I’ve mentioned here already.

Here’s info about the upcoming election in Houston. (By Easter Lemming Liberal).

Next week I expect a lot of news in ebookland. I predict that both Cybook and Amazon.com will be announcing new ebook readers. I will probably buy the Cybook (although I miss the ability to make annotations on mobipocket files). The big question is price and will Amazon kindle look as ugly as the screenshot from a year ago looked?

I’ve been unusually busy this last month. The computer repair/purchase really took a lot of time! Looking for work, etc. Actually, I’ve been reading several good books, including the entertaining Ovid’s Art of Love (Michie translation).

I haven’t seen any decent films this year, but on Tuesday I saw the excellent documentary about a Chinese elementary school. Will you vote for me? Apart from the political implications of the film (there are many), I was riveted by the elementary school classroom.

Also, on Monday, I’ve upped the battle against roaches in my apartment. An exterminator fumigated my apartment and then treated crevices. Yesterday, a maintenance man at my apartment caulked up some of the crevices. It’s been a grueling battle. Every evening I am exhausted by it. (I could go on, but it would gross people out).