Participant Observation

Forget The Fast and the Furious (all soon-to-be-four of them)– the street drifting scene in Saudi Arabia leaves other countries in the dust. Instead of modifying vehicles to handle the dangerous motorsport, many young Saudi men opt to rent stock cars for the day and slide them across often-busy roads, the pavement smoothed by sand. They risk their lives in more ways than one: if convicted of criminal negligence in the event that they kill others with their vehicle, they can be hit with the death penalty.

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Are you worried about your online habits? Do you click on many links, or watch lots of YouTube videos? Would you like to sit back, relax, and enjoy the slow loading of a website?

The City of Minneapolis has a solution for you!

In case you didn’t already call bullshit on the “smiley face murders” months ago, the Blotter over at City Pages has a criminal profiler to do it for you! And she says, “it’s just absolutely insane.”

The premise is that a group of people, maybe meeting online, are killing drunk, vulnerable men around the country and leaving a smiley face by the scene of the crime. (How original!) The profiled killers are unpopular, dumb, and possibly unemployed, according to the detectives. “The type of person that would be the opposite” of the men who were being targeted.

Scores of male college students who all happen to get drunk and end up dead, in bodies of water? Must be a serial killer, because nobody ever has impaired brain function when they are intoxicated! I’m not sure why it’s such a stretch to think that these guys could have brought about their own tragic, accidental downfall through excessive alcohol consumption. Drunk people are naturally attracted to sources of water, but often it’s simply to puke in them, not to necessarily replenish their hydration.

A woman does Sudoku in line for the Obama rally at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, MN.

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I like convenient technology, but I am not sure how extreme I would go to be able to hear normally without my hearing aids. The Envoy Esteem implant feels like another crutch rather than a cure. Do I really want the machinery I wear behind my ears put in my skull? It just creeps me out. It’s unfortunate because I qualify perfectly for their trials with my hearing loss. However, as much as I like science, I don’t feel like offering myself up for it, especially when I think it is not solving the problem itself.

While it may be years before anything could be done for hearing losses with stem cells, I’d rather deal with an equally invasive procedure that would leave me “healed” instead of going through one that just prolongs actual advancement. Given how functional stem cells are, further research would be beneficial to everyone on the planet.

My search for an affordable cell phone with an equally affordable rate plan began about a week or so ago. I’ve been perusing the prepaid phone aisle at Target (’cause I’m broke and poor and all that) and reading the brochures from T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, and Tracfone. I stayed the hell away from Jitterbug/Firefly/etc. Everything seems to suck except Virgin Mobile. Probably not a huge surprise– all their customers are prepaid, so it’s not an afterthought. They also had unveiled some new, cheaper prices this past March.

I’m picky, and want a phone with a lot of functionality. I don’t care about ringtones or games, but I do care about being able to send a lot of text messages (SMS, MMS, IM, even email) easily. It is also highly important that I don’t need to pull out my hearing aid to be able to hear the phone’s microphone, or preferably, that it is compatible with telecoil. I also enjoy having a camera phone, and missed having that ability with my Sidekick iD.

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One of my favorite rap songs is about an alleged combination of “three different kinds of weed… grown all together” from Chicago, named “Bin Laden,” by Three 6 Mafia. It is a nice, sordid tale about doing drugs and being a rapper.

I swear sometimes I gotta get high to hang around my ho,
Sometimes I gotta get high to hang ’round niggas I know.
I sped it up on weed, I slowed it down on snow,
‘Cause I seen so many niggas fall off that blow.
One day they got it all, and ain’t got shit to show,
So often nasal my nazzle, I had to cut that ho.
But now I’m feeling happy, I’m on that binny Bin Laden,
And niggas is acting like they don’t know what the fuck just happened.
My vision’s getting blurry, I’m about to fall asleep.
Or am I dying, if I O.D. it ’cause this some potent weed.
My life start flashing like holograms like right in front of my own face,
I never felt this way on one blunt…

And so forth. A “post-9/11″ song for the times we’re in.

The era of the Ghettoputer ended violently last weekend.

The Ghettoputer was a 466 MHz PowerPC G3 with 768MB of RAM. Defying aesthetics, it lived in a faded beige PC case with a retro, rainbow Apple sticker on the front. It was hacked to absolute bits graciously by my father in order to run Mac OS 10.4.

Ghettoputer came into my life a few months after my G4 PowerBook died in a cat/hot chocolate accident. Before, I was used to using programs like Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Aperture. With Ghettoputer, starting up felt like a miracle.

Ghettoputer’s descent into the afterlife began with shared library errors while trying to open various applications, inability to upgrade to the latest version of Quicktime, mysteriously shutting off during use, and eventually being unable to start up at all.

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I thought mosquitoes and tornadoes were decent-enough plagues for Minnesota. Then, in 2007, the Monster from SimCity 2000 attacked a bridge of ours and we had to choose between fording the river, taking a ferry across, or just waiting until they rebuilt the damn thing. This summer, it’ll be swarms of Republicans descending upon the Twin Cities in fucking Zubaz.

I suppose it will be an incredible week for prostitutes, taxi drivers, pick-pockets, the Mall of America, area hotels, and anyone else who can think of ways to profit. The rest of the Twin Cities will just have a 4AM closing time to look forward to.

Comparisons drawn between the upcoming Olympics in Beijing and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin are almost too easy. We cannot trust the measures taken in preparation by China, such as the relocation of 200 factories and removal of 60,000 buses and taxis from the congested roads. Just as the Nazi agenda held onto its facade of peace, using the Olympics as a debutante ball, China is readying itself for international spectators and scrutiny.

Despite protests, the US ultimately did not boycott the 1936 Olympics. US Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage held pro-Nazi sentiments, alleged a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” behind boycott motivations, and received a contract for his company to build the Germany embassy after the Olympics.

Similarly, the West has too many business ties to China to criticize them. Labor rights suppression yields cheap goods, covered in toxins for companies who sell them for massive profits.

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