On my way to work Thursday morning, I was greeted with a light dust of snow on my car. That’s Thursday morning like Thursday, October 12. I realize that I live in Minnesota now, but come on.

A few fast-melting flakes in Minneapolis were a little out of place for October, but nothing compared to the record-busting blizzard in Buffalo, NY on Thursday and Friday — over 22 and a half inches. The NYT headline: Snowstorm Blankets Buffalo, Killing at Least 3. Now that’s some serious snow.

Trying to read all about it, my quick google search led me down a dark path of anger and hate: right-wing Web journals and blogs.

The Wide Awakes Web site (tagline: “Your Right Wing Back-Up”) reports:

10.9 inches in Buffalo the next day.

Earliest snowfall in recorded history there.

Depew, NY: 24 inches of snow.

But we’re supposed to spend billions of dollars to “stop” global warming.

And then, over on The Right Angle blog, the Buffalo snowstorm was reported with this grain of salt:

Maybe it’s time for the liberal hysterical media to change their tune again on climate change.

This stuff is strewn about the Web; lots of jokes about Al Gore and a lot of, “Hey, snow in October? Global warming’s a joke!”

Ha ha. As counterintuitive as it might seem, a study from Colgate University in 2003 directly links heavier snowfalls around the Great Lakes (like Buffalo) to global warming:

Records of air temperature, water temperature, and lake ice suggest that the observed lake-effect snow increase during the twentieth century may be the result of warmer Great Lakes surface waters and decreased ice cover, both of which are consistent with the historic upward trend in Northern Hemispheric temperature due to global warming.

Climate and weather patterns are not as simple as the hot and cold faucets on your sink; Buffalo’s blizzard on Friday was caused by “lake-effect” or “lake-enhanced” snow; when cold air passes over warm water, picking up a bunch of moisture and dumping it off-shore. The hotter the lake, the more the snow piles up in your driveway.

The lake wasn’t particularly warm or anything, was it? From weather.com:

THE INSTABILITY PARAMETERS ARE ALMOST HISTORIC WITH SUCH A SITUATION WITH A 62 DEGREE LAKE INVOLVED MAKE THIS ALMOST UNPRECEDENTED.

Oh, right. But where did all the cold air come from this early in Autumn? Apparently, global warming fueled disasterous weather in Alsaka last week pushed it down through Canada. From Sto Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel:

I have written on the impacts of climate change upon day-to-day weather patterns in these pages during the past year . . . For now, suffice it to say that I think the occurrence of this event in Alaska was not an “accident.” . . . By the way, there’s a connection betwen that system and the chilly blast about to enter the lower 48 from Canada.

When you get over 20 inches of snow in mid-October — thundersnow, with frequent lightning — don’t be so quick to discount patterns of global, catastrophic climate change when they rear their ugly heads, just because they didn’t manifest in a heat wave like you thought they might.

A couple weeks ago, Duodecad posted a link to a study by researchers at Princeton that demonstrated how easy it is to rig an electronic voting machine, and get away with it.

Here’s an update with some old news, via BoingBoing.net this week: former Yang Enterprises computer programmer Clint Curtis says that, in 2000, Rep. Tom Feeney (R) asked him to do just that — fix voting machines to spit out 51-49 splits in your favor.

Watch video of Curtis’ testimony, under oath, on YouTube.

Six years ago, Feeney was a member of the Florida legislature, as well as Yang’s corporate attorney and a registered Yang lobbyist. A year later, Curtis quit Yang. In 2002, Feeney was elected to Congress.

Curtis’ story has some holes in it. Yang Enterprises and Mr. Feeney, of course, deny the meeting ever took place. And there were no touch-screen electronic voting machines in West Palm Beach Florida in 2000 to rig at the time.

But Curtis sticks to his story, nevertheless, that Feeney asked him to write some code that could do it. He’s testified to it in court, taken a polygraph, and even staked his own Congressional bid on it, running against Feeney as a Democrat (although Curtis was a lifelong Republican).

Plus, Feeney was named one of the 20 most corrupt Congressmen in the land by a government watchdog group (the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — good luck, guys). So there’s that.

Add my natural partisan subjectivity, the Princeton report, and I’m a believer; democracy is for sale in Florida!

A couple of days ago, I completed a year at my job. Unremarkable, perhaps, but for two facts taken in tandem – I am now 29 years old, and this is my first real job. Oh sure, I have been paid a stipend for teaching in grad school, I washed dishes in a cafeteria for minimum wage, taught kids at summer camp, even made a few bucks my freshman year fixing people’s computers. And I got myself through my last summer in the United States by playing poker (nothing on the level of some on this site, though). But this is my first salaried-with-benefits, qualification-based, full-time job. I started it a month after I moved back to India, which makes a month ago the anniversary of my return, and it’s an occasion. 

Or is it? I never thought that I wouldn’t get through a year. Perhaps it more a celebration of staying in one place for a year than having a job, perhaps the occasion is the validation of my commitment. But I love my job, it pays me handsomely, I get two-day weekends (very rare in India). I would have been a fool to leave. 

What, then, makes it something I (or people around me) need to make a note of? Anniversaries are nice, whatever the reason, because they give us another mark on the life-chart I am sure we all keep; we collect dates and durations as, perhaps arbitrary, indications of progress. Still, I don’t think that’s what it is. I get the feeling that it is linked to my larger, trans-continental, move; it is symbolic of a level of “success” in satisfyingly transitioning not only from one culture to another but also from debauched student to proper adult. And as soon as I type that, I laugh out loud. 

Most of my money has gone toward a tricked-out PC, 50-odd DVDS (The Criterion Brazil kicks some serious ass), 20-odd video games (Oblivion kicks some serious ass), eating out, beer, assorted electronics, and around 300 cheap books (I’m talking 90 per cent off list price). I’m not boasting – I just think, for me, that’s the whole point of having a job: being completely immersed in what I want and being able to get it. I’m swimming in materialism, indulging my desires, and dying of glee. 

Oh I believe in what I do; I believe in education, publishing, editorial responsibility and all that. But at the end of the day, I am yet to move completely into the realm of “responsibility” as seen by the world I live in – being unmarried, kid-less, mortgage-free allows me to extend my student sensibilities and aesthetics into a sphere where I can always get the things I want. 

Shameful? Definitely. Perhaps one day soon this will change. For now, I am happy with the thought that what society (specially Indian society) demarcates as desirable and what satisfies my hedonism can, actually, be reconciled with such little effort. 

Now if only this fucking job would give me the time to play Oblivion.

For the first time in human history, around the world, overweight people outnumber the undernourished. In BBC News online last week, it was reported somewhat ominously:

[University of North Carolina Professor Barry Popkin] said the “burden of obesity”, with its related illnesses, was also shifting from the rich to the poor, not only in urban but in rural areas around the world.

“The burden of obesity”? Like most white, middle-class Americans, I’ve never not had enough to eat. The most hunger I’ve experienced is between a skipped breakfast and a late lunch. No other class of folk could be so disturbed by a few extra pounds. Ask the rural poor aroud the world: “Will you accept the burden of obesity?” You may be surprised by the answer.

I don’t intend to belittle health problems associated with being overweight. Diabetes is a debilitating, chronic disease and a growing international problem (including, according to the NYT, “developing” and populous nations like India and China). I’ve seen a little of the dangerous, painful effects of diabetes from watching my grandfather, who suffered from it for 40+ years.

But that does indicate something important — unlike starvation, diabetes is a manageable disease. And if more people are dying from chronic diseases, like diabetes, than from communicable ones (as the NYT also reports), then give a shout-out to penicillin, clean water, mosquito netting, and sanitation, that might help you live long enough to die of a heart attack.

Yes, as professor Popkin suggests in the BBC online article, let’s subsidize fruits and vegetables in the U.S. But first throw a party. There is less hunger, and more people around the world have enough to eat.

(If you need another reason to celebrate, consider that a top fashion show in Madrid just enacted the first-ever ban on unhealthily thin models, in an effort to stop promoting heroin chic as the ideal to women around the world who have ever seen a magazine cover. Woo-hoo!)

My first thought as I watched Good Night, and Good Luck was:  Did George Clooney just quit smoking?  I know people loved their cigarettes in the 1950s, and I had read many comments on the amount of smoking in the movie, but those little cancer sticks kept stealing the stage.  There’s a loving shot of a lighter.  There’s an ad for Kent.  Even the black-and-white hues suggest exhaled blue clouds.

Eventually it hit me:  Clooney uses cigarettes to make a point.  You see, back in the 1950s, people didn’t know that cigarettes caused cancer.  Or, more accurately, smokers didn’t know.  Big Tobacco knew.  But rather than acknowledging that their products killed, thereby sacrificing profits, Big Tobacco companies concealed the harmful health effects of cigarettes and instead funded biased studies claiming that cigarettes weren’t hazardous to health.  They did this in order to keep consumers smoking, and their own pockets lined with money.

If you read that paragraph and said, “Wow!  Powerful people can’t be trusted!”, then Good Night, and Good Luck is the movie for you.  If, however, you said, “Uh…I took American History, too,” then you’re probably on my page.  As a movie, Clooney’s directorial debut is a piece of political propaganda, and an irritating one at that.

Before my liberal card gets revoked, I should say that I went in with high expectations and a good feeling.  I like black-and-white.  I like politics.  I don’t like George Clooney (he can’t act), but I agree with his politics, and I liked that he didn’t take a star turn in his directorial debut.  It was good to see David Strathairn and Reed Edward Diamond, both of whom I’ve liked since I first saw them 15 years ago (…wow) in Memphis Belle.  I’ve heard good things about Patricia Clarkson, and Robert Downey was a lot of fun in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

But this is really Clooney’s movie—in addition to directing and taking a supporting role, he co-wrote the script—and he reveals that behind the camera, he’s serviceable.  That’s not a compliment.  His ear for dialogue is not natural, and his sense of pacing is not effective.  In a few scenes, he goes for a Robert Altman overlapping-dialogue feel, but he forgets to point the camera at anything interesting as people talk.  His one unconventional idea is to feature Joseph McCarthy as himself, using the wonders of archival footage.  Though it’s an interesting move, I actually think it hurts the movie:  since the primary antagonist is nothing more than a talking head, it’s hard for Clooney to create the climate of fear and destruction that ultimately leads one character to commit suicide.  I know it’s there, but I’m not feeling it.

If Clooney weren’t involved, Good Night, and Good Luck would have aired as a TV movie.  It’s at that level of quality.  And it’s also at that level of analysis.  That’s what frustrates me the most.  As David Strathairn, playing Edward R. Murrow, opens a banquet in his honor with a speech about the dangers of media (and citizen) passivity, I got a queasy feeling.  I finally identified it as arthurmilleritis.  There’s no point so obvious that Clooney doesn’t underscore it with a clunky line of dialogue.  (Clarkson gets most of these lines, and fails to pull them off.)  There aren’t any subtle points at all.  You see, when Big Tobacco went unquestioned, they managed to profit off a fatal product.  When McCarthy went unquestioned, he ruined innocent people with his fearmongering tactics.  Could it be that, when George W. Bush went unquestioned, he unconstitutionally spied on Americans while simultaneously torturing alleged terrorists in secret prisons around the world?

It’s not that I think the movie is wrong.  It’s that I think it’s a bumper sticker.  And as valuable as bumper stickers are, they don’t make good cinema.  Neither does George Clooney.

If I hadn’t seen Lady in the Water with Salma, I would have walked out. But since I didn’t walk out, the question is—when would I have given up hope? When Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), “Thank you for letting me wear your beautiful shirt”? (When she could have stood to ask him for some pants, too?) When the writer (M. Night Shymalan) describes his current project as being his thoughts on “all the social problems”? (Could he maybe have named one? Poverty? Pollution?) When the crossword freak drops a meta dis on movie critics that results in the movie’s one likable, relatable character—a cantankerous movie critic played to perfection by Bob Balaban—getting eaten by a grass dog?

I think I wouldn’t have made it past the scene where M. Night finds out that through his masterwork, The Cookbook, he will exert a major influence on the world—posthumously. It’s bad enough that Night had to feature such an obvious Jesus figure. It’s worse that he had to play the Jesus figure himself. Claiming persecution is a rich move for a multihyphenate millionaire at any stage. Let’s call the celebrity’s persecution claim, be it Eminem’s “They try to shut me down on MTV” three albums into his career or Lindsey Lohan’s whining about tabloid rumors on her very first single, the jump-the-shark point of the fame trajectory. Such a claim indicates that the celebrity has officially reached critical mass and will soon become that black hole of fame, the has-been.

Besides, to paraphrase Salma, sometimes people hate a moviemaker because he makes bad movies. I can’t give a good plot summary of Lady in the Water because I’m not sure what happened. Story, a narf, lands in a pool and carves out a cave beneath it. Someone needs to see her to make something happen. Once she’s seen, she needs to leave, but she can’t do it without help. People help her. She leaves. Besides the narf and the grass dog, there’s a huge eagle, tree monkeys, and a bunch of quirky oddballs. It all goes down in an apartment complex that is simultaneously in Philadelphia and the deep forest. The movie reads like an eighties children’s-fantasy movie—The Never-Ending Story, say—only with adults. It probably would have worked better with children; it’s hard to buy that a bunch of adults would have nothing better to do with their day than help Spooky Chick fly the friendly skies. But even talented children couldn’t overcome all the self-aggrandizement Night commits to film. This and King Kong are competing for the title of worst movie I’ve seen this year—and, people, I just saw Gigli.

Yesterday, waiting for my ride, I stood on the corner of La Salle and 9th Street in downtown Minneapolis and played with my new camera cell phone doodad. I’ve never had one before last week and I’m enthralled with the instant gratification of snapping and there’s your picture (better than polaroid!) — I can spend hours taking pixelated pictures of my foot, the wall, the carpet, etc.

I was looking skyward, framing a particularly boring shot of the top of a building, when 2 women and a man walked by. One of the women stopped beside me and looked up where I was looking. Then she said, “You can take a picture much better from this angle,” squatted low to the ground, and thrust her widish bottom waaay out towards my crotch.

She was about an inch and a half away from molesting me.

She stood up and laughed and walked off, and her friends laughed, and I laughed. I wish now that I had taken a picture of her ass. But that might have been me harrassing her (no pun intended). More importantly, though, taking her picture might have led to more interaction or conversation with a woman who was obviously insane. And then, too, I would have had a picture of her butt on my cell phone. Nobody wants that.

I felt kinda dirty afterward. But I was asking for it. You should have seen the tight jeans I was wearing.

A couple of days ago, I posted a comment on Gandhi’s attitude towards doctors and nutrition, which surprised me. The quote had come from a book called “Hind Swaraj” (“Indian Home Rule”) which was first compiled in 1909. It contains many rather upsetting and mind-boggling assertions of Gandhi’s, including a tirade against railways for working against natural segregation of people and thus spreading the Bubonic plague. I figured this was a decade or so before Gandhism truly took off, and the, how can I put this delicately, craziness of his words could therefore be attributed to the early unformulated thought of a subsequent wiseman.

Today, in a completely different text, I came across a quote of his from 1929 that has me truly rattled.

Just as it is the duty of the ruler to be the trustee and friend of the people, so that of the latter is not be jealous of the former. The poor man must know that to a great extent poverty is due to his own faults and shortcomings. So, while the poor man must strive to improve his condition, let him not hate the ruler and wish his destruction…He must not want rulership for himself, but remain content by earning his own wants. (Qtd. in Dominance without Hegemony, pg. 37)

Did anybody else know that Gandhi was a neocon?

A recent study shows that there’s an increasing tendency of overweight babies, and this is something that parents should really be worried about. Apparently, at six months, there’s a chance you’ve already been slated to be overweight through adolescence and adulthood.

Is 21st century culture too obsessed with weight/nutrition (3 out of my last five posts have been about food and weight) or are we, as a group, so lackadasical about fitness that we’re now endangering the truly innocent?

What to say? I saw this image on a bumper sticker and missed my turn so I could make sure it said what I thought it said.

He’s cute. You’re not the hamster of doom, are you little hamster?

Googling “flying hamster of doom” and “coconuts” yields 116 results (meaning this hamster barely exists in Google terms), one of which is the above image, exactly what I saw on the car.

None of the results explain. All of them are like me — “saw this on a bumpersticker,” “inspired by a sticker at Hot Topic,” “hehe . . . BEWARE THE FLYING HAMSTER OF DOOM!!!”

They range from the misspelled:

the flying hamster of doom, which reins coconuts upon your pitiful city, …

To the cursed:

May The Evil Flying Hamster Of Doom Rain Coconut On Your Pitiful Town….

To the present perfect tense:

The Flying Hamster of Doom has rained coconuts on my pitiful city. …

To the political:

Our mascot will the flying hamster of doom who will rain coconuts down on Congress.

Good idea!

I finally turned to the Urban Dictionary, which had this helpful result:

1. flying hamster of doom

a winged hamster welding coconuts.

Well, why didn’t you just say so?

If anyone has any information regarding this hamster, send it in — before it’s too late.