Month: March 2004

Well, I get on the plane and then the next day there’s a few substantive blogs to read. Woo, I should needle more often hehe….

I feel… traveled out (I think that can be a feeling or emotion?). About 7 weeks out of the country going from one place to another and now I’m back. Not sure how I should be feeling other than…. tired ? I’m glad I wasn’t hassled at SFO immigration and customs. I get off and while immigrations was easy, “Hi, Mr Blah, Bleh?” “Yes,” [stamp] “Thank you”. I saw a huge line in customs “Nothing to Declare” Line. The custom’s officer seeing my 2 large suitcases and carry on says, “Please exit” when I try to head to the big line. Cool! I feel bad for all those people probably still waiting to get cleared from customs.

I don’t know but the airlines look pretty full to me. All my Asian flights were fully booked and no detection that there’s an airline slump. I flew EVA unfortunately not a UA code share partner. I will try to see if I can get my trip miles post flight. I worry that all my air miles will go poof when UA decides to go out of business. I think it’s about 75% sure in 2-3 years. They just can’t seem to get themselves fixed up…. Oh, and why is Boeing getting their lunch eaten by Airbus? Because those seats are simply too small!!! I flew the Boeing 747-400 and sorry, it was really uncomfortable. Now, I know I’m a pretty big guy by comparison but people are getting bigger all the time. Boeing hasn’t kept up with the times and will soon be obsolete too.

I’ve survived my trip not having totally gained back all the weight I lost going there… Now it’s sorta back to semi-normal US California life although it’s sort of weird to say that since I have no idea what that means anymore. Given that I am going back to my “un-rooted” phase of life again, I guess emotionally, I can’t be attached to any one place. From the East Coast, I’ve moved out West for almost 5 years. I’ve made a number of friends and have started to get completely used to the lifestyle here. I’ve always missed the NYC Metro area and my friends there. In the back of mind, I’m still in NYC. I’ve traveled and moved to many places that making friends and keeping them is really tough. One of my oldest friends is returning to his roots, and moving to Chicago with his wife and kid. Without IM, e-mail and hopefully soon for more people, video-cam; I’m not sure how to keep it all together. It’ll be so much harder as I’m moving to Taiwan in May.

=YC

I’m awake and a game is on tv – Duke v. Seton Hall. In my brackets, I picked Duke, but Seton Hall’s a sort of hometown team – I feel almost torn. CBS has also showed way too much Duke stories on tv – good grief, they’re like the NY Yankees – on all the time.

NY Times has a nice story on the two NY metro area Catholic schools (who are both strangely detached from the urbanities of their connected areas) – Seton Hall (leafy university campus far from Newark, although the law school is still by the PATH station in Newark) and Manhattan College (which is actually in the lovely land of Riverdale, Bronx).

For the record, I’ll let you all know that my final four picks are: Gonzaga, St. Joseph, Duke, and Stanford. Unknown if it’ll happen, but each team is still alive at this hour. The only corner in my bracket where there’s much still standing is the Phoenix (West) region – only one out of 16 picks wrong – not bad. Not an altogether bad bracket this year. But where’s a Cinderella I can be content with?

And, no, I’m not that big NCAA junkie – just a mildly interested one (if I were a real junkie, then I ought to have followed all season, not just in March).

Historiography in action – what is history and what does the history of history reflect, and what does it mean when politics uses history for its own purposes? In an article for the NY Times, Antonio Feros shows how it’s getting messy when Spain’s elections seem to suspiciously recall its civil war of 70 years ago:

“But many historians in Spain are still troubled by the trend toward using history as a weapon in political debates. “The use of the civil war to interpret the present is very dangerous,” [Enrique Moradiellos, a historian at the University of Extremadura, Spain] warns. ‘And I am afraid that if we continue to do this we might provoke a radicalization of the political situation that could bring unwanted results.'”

Interesting point.

Other interesting questions about historical (so to speak) research: more on the Blackmun papers, and wondering whether they really reveal much at all, according to one of his former clerks , (who is very much a direct source as we can probably get for now).

In a NY Times op-ed, William B. Rubenstein, UCLA professor of law, goes into an interesting analysis on politicians’ use of framing arguments along Constitutional lines (i.e., asking how we keep within the governmental structuring), rather than getting to the heart of an issue (i.e., discussing what we want society to be and to do). He notes that maybe this Founding Fathers of the USA made the political system as it is to raise possibilities of compromise (evade the harder discussion of what kind of society we want by making us talk about the “easier” one – how do we stay within the Constitional frame – first; the Founding Fathers’ plans certainly would keep (and already have kept) the country stable before we tumble into disarray over the battle of issues). But, as Rubenstein notes, it is a real odd way to “discuss” politics.

Taiwanese election results just out; curious developments there.

Back to basketball…

Spring has sprung, and there is some traces of snow melting before our eyes, but can we remember what we want to forget? Haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but based on the reviews, I can see that we live these attempts to remember and forget every day. I’d love to wipe out the memories of this winter. The movie sounds awesome — it has a high Fresh-o-Meter — maybe we’ll see it on the way to San Diego next weekend with P-.

Saw The Big O Part 1. This anime is basically (dark) Batman meets big-ass Godzilla sized Japanese robot warrior. The major premise is that because of some unknown type of warfare, the entire city-state has lost their memory, but nothing physical has been destroyed, so they are reconstructing civilization based on what they have around them. Recommended.

Judged a moot court competition on Thursday. The plot: reality show producer puts cast(aways) on U.S. territory out in the middle of the Pacific. Turns out it was a former nuclear and biological weapons test site and everyone gets sick and dies, including the producer. The network scores high ratings. The producer, 2 weeks before kicking the bucket, pleads guilty of manslaughter for the castaways’ deaths and points the finger at the network. The government wants to prosecute the network using what the producer said in court, but she’s dead and she can’t be cross-examined. It’s much more intricate, involving attorney-client privilege, public relations firms, Homeland Security, and a bothersome Supreme Court case, but that’s the outline. For those legal geeks here, the bizarre thing is that we have an inanimate defendant pressing its Confrontation Clause rights against a dead woman. Definately not what the Founding Fathers were thinking about.

Food craziness : today dimsum at Dim Sum Go Go, a work dinner party at Tavern on the Green. Thursday, we did La Paella in the East Village, recommended.