Travels & Tales. A bit long.

[snowflame]

A variety of topics, with recent events but a way to string them together.

Wednesday

I'd just like to say that while I've been to passover seders before, as a non-Jew, I don't usually help run them. Still, the really informal apartment-style seder was in many ways way cooler than the real version, since we got to make things up if we couldn't

Comments

[snowflame]

Yup. Once I saw the hordes of natives, I started thinking more about the modern cinemtography, and that maybe I'd made a wrong assumption in assuming that the movie was from the 90's... and then I remembered seeing Jon Stewart interviewing Adrien Brody about the change in gravitas between "Holocaust... giant apes." Ahhhhhhhh. (This was about 5 minutes before the natives started saying "Kong!").

[homais]

You were in DC? Pity, would have liked to catch up

[snowflame]

I'm actually going to be in Washington again next weekend, although definitely no guarentees. But yeah, I was definitely busy this weekend, so it worked out anyway. (By the way, Bubbletea in New York is way more expensive than in College Park, even in Chinatown. Sigh

[homais]

Heh, since we last met I discovered a cheaper, much better bubble tea place, also in college park (and yet a third, that I find unimpressive). I suspect that the unusually high concentration of Taiwanese students at the university has something to do with our tapioca-surplus. Perhaps there will be things about Maryland that I'll miss...

[kiyomori]

Yeah, for media like the National Review (and Fox News, for that matter), I often find the commentators are coming in from such a different worldview from my own that it's difficult to understand why anyone would have the views that they do. It's not even that they're conservative--there are conservatives that I can read and make me think--it's that they're just on a different plane.

Incidentally, I find Fareed Zakaria's line about immigration illuminating. The one about how the United States does immigration better than almost any nation in the world, and why would we all of a sudden want to start copying the methods of France and Germany, who both have a semi-permanent underclass of radicalized foreigners who can never become citizens, thanks to their guest worker programs. I realize that including a path to citizenship would make that different here, but still.

[snowflame]

Yeah, I read that. I definitely think that Zakaria is on point; I like his writing generally. I'd recommend checking out his book on liberalism if you get a chance; I read it while in a (train station? airport?) book stop, and enjoyed it enough to buy it on the spot.