Last week, I saw M.I.A. at First Avenue with Pulao and some friends. M.I.A. (a.k.a. Maya Arulpragasam) is a British hip hop musician and visual artist, and, as a child, a refugee from the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

The show was spectacular and high, high energy. I danced my butt off. M.I.A. rhymed from atop the speakers, crowd-surfed, and, at one point, climbed from the stage to the balcony without missing a beat.

For the song “20 Dollar” M.I.A. said, “Turn off the lights! I’m going to take you to Africa.”

The house lights went down, leaving M.I.A.’s sparkling podium and the screen behind her DJ, which was filled with simple pixels of arcade-game soldiers, at either end of the screen, shooting at each other. Their bullets were dotted white lines. The explosions, vintage Centipede. It looked like a more violent version of Pong.

The song itself is heavy, with electronically drenched guitar loops playing what sounds like a dirge (it’s actually a tricked out version of New Order’s “Blue Monday.”) The titular verse:

Do you know the cost of AK’s up in Africa?
20 dollars ain’t shit to you
But that’s how much they are

The chorus takes the lyrics, if not the melody per se, from the Pixies song “Where is My Mind?”: “With your feet in the air and your head on the ground . . . you’ll ask yourself: where is my mind?”

Put the sound, the lyrics, and the video together with M.I.A.’s palpable on-stage charisma and you get a lot of raw power. But to what use?

Okay, I get it, a little. I like taking the Pixies lyrics, which resonate with a lot of the audience at First Ave (and anybody who’s seen Fight Club or a number of other movies that use “Where is My Mind?” on the soundtrack), and take whatever Frank Black was talking about (drugs? the existential angst of life? fucked-upedness for fucked-upedness’s sake?) and turn it to a situation with more material consequences. “You know what’s really crazy?” M.I.A. seems to say, “Violence in Africa.”

But all that was really clear from the song’s performance was that Africa is dark, crazy, and violent. This is, I think, the generalized opinion of a lot of people anyway—I’ve heard water-cooler talk in the Twin Cities where co-workers said, “It’s all crazy tribes fighting each other in Africa, won’t ever stop.”

The stereotype works against what we might assume M.I.A’s point to be—to help stop the violence in a specific place like Sudan or Somalia. As one of my concert-going friends said afterward, how can you tell the difference between a critique of violence and an avowal of it?

Some of the lyrics clue you in: “And the leaders all around cracking up,” “looting just to get by,” “little boys are acting up.” You can get another hint when you visit her MySpace page and see that M.I.A.’s top friend, out of 21,000-some friends, is a fundraiser, “Education for Darfur.”

But maybe most importantly, something approaching awareness (even a vague awareness) could do wonders for the people in the crowd, myself included to the nth degree, who might be a hell of a lot more likely to surf Metacritic than read a NYT piece relating to the Darfur Conflict.

I got a fortune cookie the other day that wasn’t really a fortune, but more like advice. This happens to me sometimes. The best fortunes, in my opinion, predict the future, as a good cookie should. But more often than not, I end up with a platitude. “Good things come to those who wait.” Yeah, I want to say, but are good things coming my way or what? When, cookie, when?!

This is what I got:

All right, I thought. I’ll get right on that. I kept the fortune for posterity but I didn’t, you know, do anything with my loose ends.

Next time I had Chinese, I got this:

Oh, God, cookie, I don’t know! I looked over my shoulder for my problem, was it here in the restaurant? An assassin of some sort?

Tell us, renowned 12apostrophes readers, your disconcerting fortune cookie stories.

p.s. Everyone knows that to have good luck, you have to save your fortune cookie until the end of the meal. The very end, mind you. Pick your fill of sesame chicken from the lettuce on your plate before you crack open that fortune and taste the cookie, because there’s no turning back after that, or else you’ll have bad luck. Or a bossy fortune cookie.

Last Monday night, Pulao and I hit the first-ever Triple Rock Social Club Pub Trivia Night with some friends. A good time was had by all. Well, I can only be certain of myself, but many other people exhibited warning signs of fun-having.

We were on the only team I saw to gather the max of six people, we knew one of the hosts, and there was a question about Harry Potter, but we still didn’t win. Life is unfair.

There was a music round, a picture round, and a taste round; the taste round was a small piece of Turkish delight, infused with a flavor you had to guess (rose syrup; thanks, Pulao!). The winners got a bar tab and tickets to some shows and the eternal glory that is trivial victory in front of friends.

Although all six of us knew the answer to a TV question about The Office without using any brain cells (Dwight Shrute’s farm? Beets. I mean, come on), none of us could name the current UN Secretary General (Ban Ki-moon), no matter how hard we scrunched up our foreheads and pretended that it was on the tips of our tongues. This is why I don’t publish my last name on this thing. But at least you know you don’t have to be well-informed to take home fourth place. Woo-hoo!

Pulao and I were playing around beforehand, asking each other questions we thought up on the spot, and I could think of nothing whatsoever outside of funny character names in American literature. This was random, even trivial, you might say, but I thought I would test the illustrious 12apostrophes readership on their funny-character-name knowledge.

See if you can place these characters safely inside their respective books:

1. Stamp Paid
2. Kilgore Trout
3. Sal Paradise
4. Honey
5. Happy
6. Quentin Compson
7. Ras the Exhorter
8. Dr. Hilarious
9. Esme Squalor
10. The Dauphin
11. Major Major Major Major

Answers (click your mouse and roll over the grayed text to read it):

1.

Beloved – Toni Morrison

2.

He shows up in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, Bluebeard, and Timequake, all by Kurt Vonnegut

3.

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

4.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee

5.

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

6.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

7.

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

8.

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

9.

A Series of Unfortunate Events – Lemony Snicket (First seen in The Ersatz Elevator)

10.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

11.

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

I just got a new laptop from work. This is a joyous, joyous day.

My old laptop was five years old, which is 127 in laptop years, and my 2002 vintage RAM had gotten very tired. To be brutally honest, it had lost some of its mental capacity.

Sometimes I would try and load a Web site and the hard drive would spin and spin and the laptop would shake and I’d stare at the green bar at the bottom right, never quite filling all the way up, and a bird would chirp outside the window and I’d look out at that and get lost in a reverie about the wonder of nature and, before you knew it, it was lunch time and I had forgotten what Web site I was trying to load. And then it would cough to life and I’d remember, oh yeah, I was going to look up that song on All Music, and I’d hit refresh and soon enough the workday would be done. My productivity suffered slightly.

But this new laptop! It flies on gossamer wings. I can have my work e-mail running in the background while I play Flash games. Most importantly, without the games freezing up.

The real secret to my new laptop’s success, I realized, is that while my company upgraded the hardware they were perfectly happy with the same software from 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to see all my old friends on my new laptop. Hello Qwark Xpress 5! Qwark 7.3? Never heard of you. And I’ve got Photoshop 7.0, which practically runs in DOS, but by God it’s fast.