Thursday, September 17, 2009

Not a good year for Asian grad students

But apparently, it is very important to every journalist writing about this case that Annie Le was 4'11" and weighed 90 lbs.

I've been following the story as best I can, and literally every single article points this out. Hey sure, she was slight and could have been easily overpowered, I get it. But every single story?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The hillbillies next door

So, we have new neighbors, who my team leader affectionately calls "the hillbillies."

Seeing as how I have seen like three white people (not counting us) around here, I don't know if the term hillbillies can properly apply to a bunch of TCNs, but it does seem to match their approach to life.

First, they are bad neighbors. There has apparently been some land dispute over who gets how much space on the compound. The new people (the hillbillies) have decided to claim their space via the simple means of marking it out with trailers. Not that big of a deal except going to bed one night, my car was parked like this:



And when I woke up, it was parked like this:



Nice of them to tell us so we could move our cars beforehand... luckily, they left us an exit, about a hundred feet down the row.

Moving on, here is a comparison of how our people place their trailers:



And how the hillbillies do it:



To the uneducated eye, it might appear roughly the same. However, notice how on our trailers, the trailer itself is supported by a nice big solid piece of concrete:




And how on theirs, the trailer is supported by, well, what is most likely a piece of aluminum:



Notice here what happens when the cheap metal has some extra weight on it:





I know it doesn't look like much, but for anyone who has tried to move a desk or table single-handed, and turned it just a little too far, that bit of torque is all it takes to cause a collapse...

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Old White Dudes

So, I have a friend who used to constantly confuse David Strathairn and Sam Waterston. I can sort of see the similarity, but I'll let you decide:



Personally, I thought these three guys were the same actor: (one of them plays a villain in a TV show I watch, the other just had a bit part... but I was totally like "Ooh, the big demon guy is in this one... I was wrong, nor was it the grumpy old man from like every Primetime drama ever, apparently)



Can you figure out which one is which?