Owlspotting

There are several things that excite me technologically, but few manage to amuse me. Sending SMS to Google (46645) or Yahoo (92466) is pretty funny. Today, you can bypass the money-hungry 411 and text message Google (or Yahoo) and ask about movie showtimes, the nearest bars in your zip codes, or even recipes for cocktail. […]

It’s true, I don’t feel comfortable using the dishwater. It’s, well, too American for me. On Friday I was catching up with episodes of This American Life that I missed and came across this piece by Diane Cook called “That guy” (the link a RealPlayer brodcast of the episode. “That guy” is act two). The […]

Vince — friends call him Vito — picks me up from the hotel I’m staying at in Myrtle Beach, SC. He has a plaid short sleeve shirt held together by the only buttons he crossed successfully over his belly. He looks like a cross between a skinnier Don Vito (of “Viva la Bam” fame) and […]

Am scris pentru “Dilema Veche” un articol despre uraganul Katrina si efectul pe care l-a avut asupra solidaritatii (sau lipsei de) americanilor: Puteti sa-l cititi aici.

Saturday afternoon I was walking into the NYC subway several yards behind this girl with a backpack. She was flip-flopping down the three flights of stairs ahead of me when she suddenly stopped, turned around and ran back. I watched her and assumed she was a stupid Japanese tourist. However, as I went further I […]

It was an interesting “pick your poison” day in downtown Washington, D.C. with a the huge antiwar protest that brought more than 150,000 people into the streets (says the Washington Post) and a huge National Book Festival. I took my camera off the shelf for the first time in a while and descended to the […]

So if conspiracy theorists likened hurricane Katrina to a fetus…. …what are they going to make of this image of hurricane Rita? What is God trying to say?

It’s official — I (sort of) follow baseball. It’s not my fault. It’s certainly not the fault of the game, which I’m still learning about and which I still consider a bore compared to soccer. It’s my city’s fault, I blame Washington. This what happened. Washington finally got a baseball team this season — the […]

We are on the heels of a week of embarrassing debates regarding blame in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Embarrassing because the government, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are trying to pass the buck to state and local officials, while urging the country not to play “the blame game.” This week’s episode of […]

Go through the past couple of weeks worth of coverage of hurricane Katrina and you’ll see scores of themes recurring: from George Bush’s trinity of mistimed comments (the best of which involved Trent Lott and his porch) to the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s 2002 story that laid out the scenario for a devastating hurricane. Semantically, there […]