American in Spain

Today I stumbled upon a website that is rather incredible. The technology to run it is utterly unremarkable. What’s amazing is that the internet is becoming so ubiquitous that such a sight is possible at all. The site is called OMGICU, which is teenager/text message language for “Oh my god, I see you”. The way it works is that, when you spot a celebrity, you submit a sighting report to the site, saying who you saw, where you saw them, and what they were doing. Obviously only a small percentage of the users of the site, mainly those living in Los Angeles and New York City, will be submitting sightings. The key is the service that minority will be providing for the other curious majority. The whole point of the site is that you can follow a celebrity that you are a fan of, and get real-time updates of what they’re up to. Amazing!
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Last April, I was contacted, via this blog, by the Art Director of Golf Digest, the most respected magazine related to golf. They were doing a story about a pub, The Ailsa Pub, that my friends and I had been to in Myrtle Beach, and wanted a copy of a photo of us gathered around a table. I was happy to provide such a photo for a chance to be published in such a prestigious periodical. Recently I have learned, from one of my very surprised friends, that my photo has, indeed, been used in the August 2009 edition of Golf Digest. My face, however, has been “selectively removed” by the artist.
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Okay, Media. Let’s get one thing straight: The only time you should use the article “an” with the adjective “historic” is if you are not pronouncing the H in “historic” like some British people do. Think ‘enry ‘iggins. Got that, Media!!?!? If I ever see any of you that misuse this phrase crossing the street, you will be the victim of an hit and run.
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Right at bedtime, I came across Lawrence Lessig being interviewed on Charlie Rose, went to his blip.tv site, and got caught up watching this hour-long video about copyright and creativity sharing. I’ve seen some videos of Lessig online before, and possibly a TED talk. But this video perfectly demonstrates his arguments and the values he’s promoting. It really is worth watching. But save 60 minutes to do so.
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As I have been learning more and more about the way our economy functions and how bankers have gotten us into this “credit crisis”, there has been something nagging me, a distant voice in my head shouting and pointing to the elephant in the room, the big obvious problem that no one is talking about. I have been unable to put my finger on it, and have been actively trying not to think about it. But it keeps coming back. We all hear the figures. The US national debt is increasing by three billion dollars each day. Congress proposed a 700 billion dollar “bail out package”. The question that no one ever asks, and has been nagging my logical mind is: Where does all that money come from?
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My wife works in an anchovy processing plant. They do the entire process: freshly caught fish go in and cans come out. Last Friday, she came home very stressed.
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Anyone who lives in Spain and has a television that they turned on this past Easter will have seen video of two celebrities kissing on a balcony under a McDonalds sign. I care zero about the Spanish celebrity gossip scene that overruns the broadcast networks day and night. I do my best to remain uninformed about what’s going on, so I don’t really know who the kissers in said video are. Actually, in my search to find an image of them, I was unable to avoid learning that the man in the video is the son of Isabel Pantoja, the diva and queen of all that is celebrity scandal gossip in Spain. Whatever.

As I was watching this video loop repeatedly hour after hour as people discussed the implications of this new intimate relationship, I started subconsciously wanting a hamburger. That’s when it hit me! (more…)

I’m way late to the game on bringing this topic to the blogosphere, but I wanted to post a few comments on this, now infamous, comment made by Geraldine Ferraro, the gist of which was, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position [as a Democratic nominee front runner].” The first I heard of this was through Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment, in which he was convincingly harsh on both Ferraro and Clinton.
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I miss Jon and Stephen. Luckily the writers are still generating content.
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I was just flipping randomly through some of our upper cable channels and came across a blast from the past. We get this “ESPN Classic Sports” channel (the only ESPN channel we get) that shows old games from years ago. I can barely muster the interest to watch live sports, so you can imagine how useful this channel is to me.

Imagine my surprise to see a UNC vs. Duke ACC game from 1995! What’s funny is that there’s only a small window from 1995 to about 2000 where I followed ACC basketball enough to recognize any players’ names. I knew all these guys! (more…)