Someone sent me this video, friggin hilarious it is… About time someone made a video making fun of how IGNORANT people mispronounce Pho and other asian things… Check it out here edit: removed the link, as it’s dead.

Anyhow, there’s a new Technorati plug that figures out the estimated worth of your site based on links that go to it and other pull features… Here’s mine:

Monica on her blog, posted about this cool site called Opacity that has nice pics of abandoned uban decay and uban exploration. Pretty cool. After finding out about the Staten Island ship graveyard, I’m really tempted to go and take pics myself. It’s like the Bermuda triangle there… LOL

There was this interesting article on Yahoo news about the EU considering adopting the Danish (thx Monica) labor market model. Essentially the unemployment there is 90% of your salary up to $2,245 (US) which is around $30k a year. Funny because the article talks about a guy taking a job that barely pays more than that, and he states he’s not worried if he gets fired since he makes roughly the same on unemployment. Plus the cost of this is 50% subsidized by the goverment, and there are government-sponsored retraining programs available. A program like this would never survive in the US, especially with the general American work ethic and the mentality of entitlement. On top of that, I could see how corruption would be rampant in who gets awarded those goverment contracts to make those retraining programs. If such a program existed, the number of kids finishing high school or college would plummet, as $30k a year doing nothing is great money for them. The last sentence of this article reiterates that as there’s a quite large percentage of the freeloaders burdening the program. A program like this would probably survive better in a society that has very strong work ethic and “family-based” morale. Japanese and Korean societies are a good example of this. The whole work hard, make your family proud, keep the family’s reputation mentality that is so pervasive in these 2 cultures is to the point where is understood law. (In Japan even moreso, as they have one of the lowest crime rates in the world, and violent crime is almost unheard of). Anyways, take a good read at the article… post your opinion. Press (more) to view my cache of the article.
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I went to the PhotoExpo 2005 at the Javitz Center with Dan GSR and a few other fellow photographers. I took a vacation day to go to this, but it was totally worth it. Andrew (PurelySwift) told me that “some photographer was going to talk about his portfolio,” and I was like whatever… However, I found out later it was the renowned photographer Douglas Kirkland, famous for a lot of his portraits of celebrities as well as award winning photos he did for Time/Life. I got lucky and was given a ticket for a free book by him of his exclusive work with Marilyn Monroe, and the above picture is where he signed it for me. The guy is an awesome photographer, and he was going on about how he’s been shooting digital and loves it (take that you hardcore film whores!)

Here’s a pic of him discussing his work. Note his famous Audrey Hepburn photo in the upper left.

Awesome.

For years Chinese food has dominated as the #1 preferred cuisine of NYC for nearly the majority of the latter 20th and thus far into the 21st century. However that has changed now. According to this AP News (via Yahoo) article, Japanese food is now #1 in NYC. LOL, I guess it took THAT long to get people to eat raw fish. It’s a fairly healthy meal, esp. for the carb or health conscious person, as it’s high in lean protein and has HDL (the good cholesterol). Press more for my cached version of the article.
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I’m not sure what to make of this article I read on yahoo’s newswires… Cliffnotes: French vigilantes that hate SUV’s let air out of the tires (not slash them), and throw mud all over the car, as well as other non-destructive vandalism. They leave you a note stating that they’re dangerous and pollute. The scarier part is that they have the support of the local governemtn. As much as I hate SUV’s and thought this was somewhat funny, as a car owner I’m also kinda disturbed. How far can this go? Anti-Japanese cars like in the 1980’s? Anti-non-hybrids? This has huge room for abuse is the local government supports this sort of behavior. I agree that SUV’s are dangerous (they heavier and have more mass to move in an accident, as well as roll over easily and gives the driver a false sense of invincibility), they pollute heavily (SUV’s are considered trucks and have truck engines with lenient emission rules), do damage to roads (SUV’s now curb-weigh at over 3 tons now, and some 5 tons) where most delivery trucks of this weight are banned from most roads since they do damage to roads and create potholes. But there’s ways to combat this through high tax levies, as well as killing the tax break that the SUV manufacturers get for selling each SUV. As a commuter I see tons of idiots in huge 4 ton SUV’s driving ALONE, tailgating the car in front of them, talking on the cell phone, doing their makeup or drinking coffee. Anyways the article is an interesting read. Press MORE if you want to read it from my cache, as yahoo’s articles tend to die after a few weeks.
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There was this article on Slashdot about how a hoax appeared on some obscure business magazine from the UK claiming that Microsoft had created a play once DVD that wasn’t readable after it was read once. Paul Thurrott of Windows IT Pro magazine, used the story without referencing the source, and a whole slew of media reporters ate the story up quoting Paul. The funny part is that it was a hoax, where even internally at Microsoft were wondering where the hell this news came from. Stupid gullible media. I have this cool bridge in Brooklyn I wanna sell… I’ll sell it to you cheap. (idiots)