People in Germany need to have more sex. Or keep their clunkers. According to the Economist. Well, kind of.

People in Germany really need to start having more sex.

Otherwise they are really going to need Death Panel for Grandmas, you know, when there are no more young people to take care of the old people.

That was my first thought when I saw this chart.

On second thought, sex does not necessarily lead to pregnancy, unless you are having it in the back of your parents' car. Or your very first beat-up old clunker. Better if you are drunk.

So my revised word of advice:

Germans need to have more drunken sex in the back of their parents' car, or get more clunkers.

Then I saw this other chart, comparing government sponsored "Cash for Clunkers" programs in several countries:

Hold on a second, while I take a mental note...

Note to self: Great cocktail conversation tidbit - "Do you know the U.S. is not the only one, and definitely not the first one, to come up with the 'Cash for Clunkers' program?"

Note to self, again: Scratch that. Someone is bound to say, "Exactly. Those are all socialist, or Facist, countries, or whatever, European! countries. That's why we should object to it loudly. Preferrably bring a loaded handgun with you to town hall meetings." And then the cocktail party, if I were ever invited to one, would go downhill from there... So, NOT A GOOD IDEA! Ok. Fine! Scratch the entire Note to Self 1.

When I saw this second chart about Cash for Clunkers program in other countries,

Eureka! I thought.

See how the government in Germany spent $7.1 billion on their "Get Rid of Clunker" program?
There you go, my friend. That is why the birth rate in Germany remains the lowest.

How Nordstrom honors the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month...

First of all, for all of ya who are uninitiated: May is designated by the U.S. Congress as the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Don't fret if you didn't know until now. The first week of May is actually Asian Pacific American Heritage WEEK. Between the Swine Flu and the Oprah-KFC debacle (Seriously, folks. How much does it cost to just pay for those grilled chicken? They look extremely unappetizing to me anyway...), I don't think the mainstream media even remembered. So, you are forgiven.

Secondly, I promise I will not get on my soap box. There are many books/articles/websites out there if you are interested in reading about stereotypes, underrepresentation, Fu Man Chu, Lotus Blossoms vs. Dragon Ladies, blah blah blah. (That would be me preaching to the choir - the conundrum is if you are, you would have known already. If you don't care, you are not going to check it out anyway...) Yup. Otherwise known to the "mainstream" society as, cough cough, "whining"... I say that because the common comment, from the "mainstream" society, to the critics of stereotypes is, "It's just a joke. YOU PEOPLE have no sense of humor!"

"You people". I wince every time I read or hear it. In real life. In the movie, Tropic Thunder, it was hilarious how they played with it.

Anyway, I digress.

So in honor of the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Nordstrom is hawking designer t-shirts by, you guessed it! Asian American designers. Anna Sui and Koi Suwannagate. YES! Represent, girls! (I just have to ask: Was the ubiquitous Vera Wang too busy or too expensive?) Don't get me wrong. These are extremely gorgeous tees, at $60 a pop. And the profits will go to the scholarship fund for OCA, an organization dedicated to advancing the cause for Asian Americans.

I am sure Nordstrom's efforts are appreciated but I am quite amused by the irony in this shirt.

Call me nitpicking if you wish. And I assure you, I have a great sense of humor.

Latest Poll: Less than 40% of Americans believe in Evolutionism... Wonder whether Canada fares better

as they have more Democrats and Liberals than we do?

This is the latest poll by Gallup this month, in honor of Darwin's 200th birthday, an update from the Economist Daily Chart that I posted a week ago: data for that chart was from 2006, and at that time, less than 50% of the Americans believed in Evolution.... What happened??!! We all collectively took the stupid pill?

Well, I am not sure what an "honor" the result would be. Darwin is probably turning in his grave.

Summary of the survey findings:

"On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they 'believe in the theory of evolution,' while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity."

What bothers me the most, or surprises me the most, is the fact that only 86% of the people holding a postgraduate degree correctly answered the question: "Can you tell me with which scientific theory Charles Darwin is associated?"

One can argue that whether you believe in Evolution is a matter of heart, which is subjective, and should have nothing to do with how many books you have read (esp. if you have been reading all the wrong books... and the definition of "wrong" varies by which side you are on...) But the theory with which Darwin is associated? This is basic knowledge, people! If you cannot answer this question correctly, you should march back to your alma mater and give them back your diploma!

The Comcastic Super Bowl Happy Ending. Watch porn and we'll pay you $10!!

This story is too funny to be true. I have to hop over to Snopes.com to make sure that the story itself is not a prank, and verify with The Onion that they did not pen this story. So by now everybody in the US has heard of the surprise given to 85,000 families in Tucson, AZ, home of one of the Super Bowl teams, the Cardinals. They were offered 30 seconds of free porn!

My male friends cried foul, "Why couldn't it happen here?" Well, they would be happy to know that the porn segment that they so sadly have missed actually featured full male nudity. Comcast and the police vowed to get down to the bottom of this. Ha ha. And Comcast is also offering $10 credit to any customer who viewed the clip. (So, even if you did not, just say you did. Or maybe there are people who would rather not discuss this any more... "My eyes! My eyes!")

There is another catch: Apparently, those who watched the Game on high-def TVs were not affected. Only those who received standard-def signals got to watch the free show. I am still trying to decide whether this makes a good argument for finally getting that high-def TV or not...

I just want to say this again,

COMCASTIC!

Joe the Plumber's Book is out... Out of Stock already?

A friend of mine recently paid more than a month of her salary for a plumber's visit. I commented on her Facebook page, jokingly: Is it Joe the Plumber?

This reminds me that, well, Joe is probably not doing house calls any more, since he is supposed to be living off the sales of his book, right? I completely forgot about it and decided to Google "Joe Plumber Book". I could not find a single result with an announcement with the book being published, rather I got tons of blog entries about the announcement of the book "deal" last November. Fear not. Amazon.com came to the rescue after I wised up and added "Amazon" to my search keywords. For sure, it showed up on the top of the results:

JOE THE PLUMBER: FIGHTING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM

Is anybody surprised by "American Dream" being in the book title?

And the publishing date is listed as February 6, 2009, but the book is listed as Out of Stock already. Lots of people apparently want to know what Joe has learned from his 15-minute of fame. (Or, has he?)

Granted, I have not read the book. Free, maybe. Definitely do not plan to shell out any dough for this book. Sorry, Joe. Please don't take it personal. It's just that all my hard-earned money apparently is going to pay for the bonuses for the Wallstreet Hotshots!

Judging from the reviews though, it is a pretty one-sided book. As a matter of fact, folks expect it to be one-sided, so that Liberals/Democrats will rate the book 1 or less star, and Conservatives/Republicans will give the man some credits for "telling it like it is," no matter whether the reviewer has actually read the book or not. My prediction? Reviews and ensuing verbal fights on Amazon.com will be more entertaining than the book itself. (Don't forget to read the comments on the reviews too! Got to love the Internet!)

Obama is in Da House! Day One: Capping pay for White House employees and banning gifts...

Those who are affected, i.e. those whose salaries are more than 100K a year, are probably not too happy about this, but we are thrilled to hear that the man seeks immediately to rule by example.

"All of you are committed to building a more responsible government... Families are tightening their belts and so should Washington," said President Obama to his staff.

The president also signed new executive orders to implement new ethics rules to ban lobbying by current staff after they leave the administration, including a ban on gifts!

Say that again? I cannot believe this. Amen to that!!

Bush commutes sentences of 2 Border Patrols - Finally, after 8 years, W did something that I approved of...

I am sure a lot of my liberal friends are going to treat me like a traitor for saying this, but I am glad that the two men, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, will be out of jail in March, without having to serve the 11-year and 12-year sentences that they were given. There are already a lot of outcry and celebration in the blogsphere: On the Huffington Post, most of the comments expressed outrage at this "anti-immigrant" gesture, and conversely, on the "white supremacy" or self-proclaimed "red-state-leaning" oriented blogs (I am not going to provide links here, just google on your own and you will see...) , this act was celebrated as confirmation that white people won.  Eh, first of all, I believe that Mr. Ramos is not white...

 

I heard of this story last year when my husband got a hold of the wonderful book series "The Best American Writing" for the year 2008 (which by the way is a series worth looking forward to every year, making Christmas all the much better for grown-ups!), and inside The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 , is an extensively researched and well-written article by Pamela Colloff, published in the September 2007 issue of Texas Monthly.  Here is the reprint found on the US Attorney website.  Read this before you make any judgement! 

 

It is hard not to feel bad for the two men once finishing reading the entire article.  The point, in my mind, is not whether they have shot an unarmed-man while he was running away, in the dark, but rather, the fairness in the sentencing of the two men for longer than a decade on the excuse of their violating bureaucratic procedures.  Anybody that is arguing the merit (or demerit) of the commutation of sentence from the perspective of immigration, whether pro- or anti-, is not looking at this issue rationally. 

 

And how many people that are now outraged simply by the sensational headlines or out-of-context comments such as the one posted on Salon.com by Alex Koppelman:  

 

"Bush commutes sentences of former Border Patrol agents - Anti-immigration forces won a partial victory Monday, as President Bush commuted the prison sentences of two of their heroes..." 

 

Alex Koppelman published a long article on salon.com in January 2007 on this case as well which I was not aware of until just now.  He has a completely different take on this case: as a deliberate cover-up by the right wing and a transformation of criminals into folk heroes.  Guess I need to withhold my own judgement now too before I can make up my mind on this... 

 

Why is life so complicated? 

The London Beer Flood of 1814

After I learned about the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, I quickly got wind of a rival event that happened more than a century before the Bostonian food disaster: the London Beer Flood.

In short, on October 14, 1814, heavy metal hoops that held a larger vat broke and ignited a chain reaction that smashed the other surrounding vats. In total, 1,224,000 litres of beer under pressure exploded through the twenty-five foot high brick wall of a London brewery and literally flooded the crowded area nearby. Two houses were destroyed in its path and nine people lost their lives because of the unusual flood.

Although the death toll was not as high as the Boston Molasses Flood a hundred years later, there were several fascinating details that if reenacted in the movie today, would have been accused as sensationalism, but life, alas, sometimes does ring stranger than fiction. Read on:

"Fearful that all the beer should go to waste, though, hundreds of people ran outside carrying pots, pans, and kettles to scoop it up - while some simply stooped low and lapped at the liquid washing through the streets. However, the tide was too strong for many, and as injured people began arriving at the nearby Middlesex Hospital there was almost a riot as other patients demanded to know why they weren't being supplied with beer too - they could smell it on the flood survivors, and were insistent that they were missing out on a party!"

One of the victims actually died some days later of alcohol poisoning!

"Because of the poverty of the area, relatives of the drowned took to exhibiting their families' corpses in their homes and charging a fee for viewing. In one house, though, too many people crowded in and the floor gave out, plunging them all into a cellar half full of beer."

(source: BBC)

I guess too much food really CAN kill ya...

Again, the best succinct retelling of the event is by Tony Sakalauskas, a free-lance writer, on 3AmMagazine.com.

More on the US Air plane landing in the Husdon River...

The BOOT - The Business of Online Travel: Can a plane land on water and have survivors? Of course it can!

This blog post has many more links to information concerning the US Air plane landing in the Hudson River. It is interesting to view this incident from the perspective of someone from the travel industry. (Again, I am able to do all these theorizing now only because everybody was safe and sound).

All of a sudden, there is a Sully fever: apparently more than one fan site was created on Facebook alone, and this one has almost 74,000 fans! And of course, guess what? The domain Chelseysullenberger.com was immeidately bought and put up. America, you never disappoint!

Today is the 90th anniversary of The Great Boston Molasses Flood

It happened on January 15, 1919: a giant vat containing thick heavy molasses exploded, and the heavy goo flooded the streets of Boston's North End, reportedly clocking at 35 miles an hour. In the end, 21 people died from this tragedy and hundreds of people were injured. It took many days and efforts afterwards to clean up the mess and put people's lives back together.

The cause was surmised to be the drastic rise in temperature from the day before: the molasses expanded too quickly and the structure simply couldn't withhold the sudden expansion.

Amazing!

I found the best retelling of the event by Tony Sakalauskas, a free-lance writer, on 3AmMagazine.com:

"Chunks of metal flew everywhere, piercing into people and buildings for hundreds of feet around. One huge chunk of steel smashed through a massive stone pillar supporting an elevated railroad. A piece of the railway sagged and fell. An alert train driver had his locomotive come to a screeching halt just moments before it would have plunged over.

The disappearance of that huge tank sent out a blast of air that pushed people away. But seconds later a counterblast rushed in to fill the vacuum and pulled them back in.

But most of the damage was caused by the molasses itself. It splashed onto city streets in all directions, speeding as fast as a man could run. The molasses smashed freight cars, plowed over homes and warehouses and drowned both people and animals. A three story house was seen soaring through the air as well as a huge chunk of the shattered vat that landed in a park 200 feet away.

Rescuers were bogged down in the stuff and were scarcely able to move as the molasses sucked the boots right off their feet. Trapped horses couldn't be removed so they had to be shot to death. The black sticky stuff filled cellars for blocks around and it took months for the hydraulic syphons to pump it out. Salt water had to be sprayed on cobblestone streets, homes, and other buildings because fresh water would just wash off the stuff. For months afterwards, wherever people walked, their shoes stuck to the goo. Some people even claimed that on a hot day one could still smell molasses even after thirty years."

The following is a mesmerizing account taken when it was happening: (Courtesy of Bostonist)

"[Boston police patrolman Frank] McManus picked up the call box and began his report to headquarters. A few words into it, he heard a machine-gun-like rat-tat-tat sound and an unearthly grinding and scraping, a bleating that sounded like the wail of a wounded beast. McManus stopped talking, turned, and watched in utter disbelief as the giant molasses tank on the wharf seemed to disintegrate before his eyes, disgorging an enormous wall of thick, dark liquid that blackened the sky and snuffed out the daylight."

I would love seeing a computer-generated re-enactment of the whole event. Who'd have thunk that molasses can do such damage?!

USAir crashed into Hudson River; Twitter received the first picture of the scene

This is the title of the blog entry: "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work". A Twitterer sent a photo from his iPhone.

This sort of illustrated what I talked about yesterday. I guess THIS itself is a great reason for Twitter... Instead of coming to my blog, or emailing everybody I know, or updating my Facebook status, the first thing I did when I got an email about the news was to log into Twitter and read the messages there. I also Tweeted myself.

(All of this, I think, is made ok by the fact that all passengers are safe and accounted for, otherwise it would be heartless to talk about the role of social media in the face of a tragedy...)

What amazed me is the cause of the crash: Birds!

A flock of birds apparently hit the engine of the plane. Wow. Apparently this happened more often than we think.

ABC news coverage: The plane is completely submerged under the water now other than the tail. Extremely scary to think of, "What if..."

The hero pilot's name is Chesley Sullenberger, and according to the news report, he even searched the aircraft before he himself left. Lots of people are saying now that this is NOT a plane crash, but a well-executed emergency landing based on an experienced pilot's intelligent split-second decision which turned out to save all the lives on board. It is refreshing to hear of news where people are praising the airlines rather than complaining about the fees they are charging. On the other hand, I am so glad that Mr. Sullenberger did not leave the airline industry because of the financial difficulties felt by all major airlines.

What's the strangest-looking package you have ever received in the mail?

Goodies: this one from my fav radio station (actually the only station I listen to, other than the station that starts playing Christmas music in October...) and one of my fav magazines:

 

Wired Magazine wanted to find out 9 years ago, so they started the "Return to Sender" Contest...

 

Wired Magazine's nine-year "Return to Sender" contest challenged readers to send any "mailable" item through the postal system without packaging.

 

"During the nine years of Wired's Return to Sender contest, we received some weird stuff in the mail: broken hard drives, a 5-foot felt "long tail," a wooden DNA helix, and an 8-track player containing an Engelbert Humperdinck tape. The rules called for readers to send us any mailable object; if it came in an envelope or a box, it was disqualified. Winners had a photo of their entry published and received—drumroll, please—a Wired T-shirt. Oh, and immortal glory."

 

Read more to learn how you can send your own POOP (permissible objects of postability)!

 

The same concept of POOP is behind this company called "Send a Ball": quite literally, you send a ball via mail!  I guess someone out there should be able to start a new company with a different sort of POOP...  (Ok, not the REAL kind, IYKWIM...)