Received this email today: Dearest, I got your contact from the internet and decided to contact you for my investment plans, hence it is the cheapest way for today’s communication. I am 19yrs old girl and sincerely wish to have your assistance in investing in your country so as to enable me relocate there to [...]
Michael Kazin penned a piece on The New Republic attacking “independents” in the U.S. (i.e., people who are neither Democrat or Republican, which as we all know are the only two schools of thought that can possibly exist). I single him out because his column reeks of the kind of narrow-minded thinking that stifles true [...]
I went to Kuala Lumpur about a year ago, and had visited Malaysia Airlines’ website in search of some information. This is the gigantic splash screen image that greeted me, which I saved and then forgot about until now: It says “World’s Best Cabin Staff. More than just an airline code, MH is Malaysian Hospitality”. [...]
Came across this humorous article on BBC News today. Indeed, a major gaffe for the company to paint SHCOOL in giant white letters across a road. FAIL indeed. Then, I read the related links at the bottom, though, and the BBC…you guessed it…spelled the name of the school wrong. Oy vey. (It should be Southern [...]
Today my current RSS reader of choice alerted me to an article at one of my favorite publications, the Christian Science Monitor. The title of the article says it all: “Top five greenest nations on the planet.” Naturally, whenever you read something like that, your bullshit detector should be beeping and flashing, because apart from [...]
I am a twitter user and a facebook user. On facebook, I have it set so that the status message is automatically pulled from my twitter stream. Recently, I’ve noticed that many of my tweets don’t make it onto facebook. One reason I like the twitter messages going to facebook is that facebook has a [...]
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s somewhat rambling post on the subject: even if the government expels the company, Google won’t be leaving China. Seemingly lost amidst all the windbaggery on this topic is the fact that according to Alexa, google.cn is as of this writing the #3 most-trafficked website in China. google.com, though, is [...]
The Chinese expat net-o-sphere is abuzz this week with Google’s challenge to the Chinese government. I’ve seen commentary ranging from mindless protestor-like exaltations of a company “sticking it to The Man” to the more patronizing and pragmatic “why would Google want to give up all the money they can make?” First, as someone living in [...]
As an expat I don’t do much driving in the U.S. these days, but in May I went back for a visit, and after a little drive through 5 states, I was reminded of a problem that needs to be addressed: civilian Ford Crown Victorias. I can’t for the life of me figure out why [...]
I was going on with a normal day, getting work done, listening to music, and now, here I am drowning my sorrows in beer and questioning the significance of my existence. I visited a site that I never visit today: Walmart. This screen capture is a portion of the site’s header. But it was this [...]