Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.
It was just another hot day in Jaipur when Harish, an autorickshaw driver, sees Whitney, a University of Chicago student, in the distance and was awestruck. He asks her out for a cup of tea and she says no. He asks again, and she says no again. But Harish's persistence pays off, by the fourth time she comes around and they both grab a cup of tea. He shows her around Jaipur and, at the end of the day, he proposes to her. She accepts.
I'll admit, there is a part of me thinking, "typical colonized South Asian men always chasing after white women. I give it two months." And to that part of my brain I say shut it,let them bask in their happiness. What do you guys think?
Here's the trailer for the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bleakly horrific, post-apocalyptic novel The Road. It looks mighty grim. I'll be first in line to see it on November 25.
It's been a couple of years since I checked on Clifford Pickover's The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, a blog about deleted (or marked for deletion) Wikipedia articles. I forgot how much fun it is!
Maja Einstein is the younger sister of great scientist Albert Einstein. Maja was the only friend of Albert during his childhood. When little Albert saw his sister for the first time he thought she was a kind of toy and asked: “Yes, but where does it have its small wheels?”
In December of 2007, Free Range Studio released the excellent video, "The Story of Stuff", in an attempt to educate people about over-consumption. It has been so well-received that many schools include it in their curricula.
Now, in what may likely be an opening salvo in the coming attack on Cap & Trade legislation, Right Wing front-man Glenn Beck is attacking "The Story of Stuff" as socialist propaganda, suggesting that it is un-American.
Beck suggests, "The reason why America is not as happy as it was in 1950 or 1920 or whenever, 100 years ago, is because our priorities are wrong, but it has nothing to do with exploiting the planet and has everything to do with losing faith in God."
Photos, above and after the jump, shared with Boing Boing by Audrey N. Carpio of The Philippine Star. Her first-person account from the ongoing disaster follows, and includes recommendations on how you can help the victims. She shot the photos in this post two days after the typhoon, on a relief drive in a town called Tumana. Link to Flickr set.
Typhoon Ondoy by Audrey Carpio
Typhoon Ondoy, aka Tropical
Storm Ketsana dumped 40 cm of rain on the Philippines last Saturday before
he/she left to wreak watery havoc upon Vietnam and Cambodia. But Manila and its
surrounding environs are still in various states of calamity, with many parts of
the city still submerged under dirty brown water and others, while drying out,
caked in leptospirosis-inducing mud. The government and its presidentiables have
been slow to act upon what could've been their Hurricane Katrina-hero moment but
quick to seize upon relief efforts for electioneering. Instead, it is thanks to
the generosity and ingenuity of the Filipino people who mobilized themselves
through Twitter and Facebook that hundreds of thousands of victims have been fed,
clothed and sheltered.
As early as Saturday evening, when people began to realize that floods have
flashed rather quickly and videos of drowning trucks emerged on YouTube, relief
plans grew almost organically on the networks. Tweets encouraging people to
gather food, blankets, and clothing for donations were some of the earliest; by
the next day there was an updatable and sharable Google spreadsheet on all the
drop-off and volunteer centers; by Monday, almost all status updates and tweets
had to do with emergency hotline numbers, relatives of friends who were stranded
on a rooftop, and traffic advisories warning which roads were impassable. A Google map of people in
need of rescuing was uploaded, although its usefulness is questionable,
considering the general low-techness of the National Disaster Coordinating
Council's rescue squads they only had 13 rubber boats with which to deploy to
the affected barangays
†or villages (to put it into perspective, 1.9 million people were inundated
with flood water, nearly 380,000 have been evacuated into schools, churches and
other emergency shelters, and 246 people have died.
Aaron sez, "George Preti has a fridge full of human body odor samples. John Daly of the National Institute of Diabetes had a refrigerator packed to the gills with amphibian toxins.
Ivan Amato, a C&EN editor and avid photographer, is collecting photos of interesting lab refrigerators. If you have any good pics, send them to i_amato@acs.org ."
Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.
Competition is now closed. We have about 380 entries to look through. Thank you everyone, will announce winners tomorrow.
UPDATE: We just got word from the Eggers camp that they will be providing us signed copies of Zeitoun! Not sure how many we'll be given for the giveaway, but will tell you all as soon as we know. Also, there's a new deadline - tomorrow, Thursday at 7 AM PST. We'll announce winners this Friday! It'll be hard to top zombie haikus, but let's try!
After I linked to a post of mine on Credit.com about miserable lottery winners, I was directed to this book, Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions, by Ed Ugel. After listening to a This American Life story about him, I had to get the book.
This American Life producer Alex Blumberg talks with Ed Ugel, who had a very unusual dream job: he bought jackpots from lottery winners. When you win the lottery, your prize is often paid out in yearly installments. And Ed would offer winners a lump sum in exchange for their yearly checks. He's talked with thousands of lottery winners, and the vast majority, he says, wish they'd never won. Ed is writing a book about his years in the "lump sum industry" called Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions. It comes out in September 2007.
The Royal Air Force accidentally killed a young girl in Afghanistan -- by dropping a box of leaflets on her. The British
Ministry of Defence is carrying out a full investigation. Meanwhile,
the seemingly-antiquated practice of leaflet bombing continues. In the
21st century, it remains one of the primary tools of psychological
warfare; U.S. Special Operations Command is even looking to build
leaflet-carrying missiles.
Maja Einstein is the younger sister of great scientist Albert Einstein. Maja was the only friend of Albert during his childhood. When little Albert saw his sister for the first time he thought she was a kind of toy and asked: “Yes, but where does it have its small wheels?”
