IHT: "Company accused of abducting Filipinos to build U.S. Embassy in Iraq"

MANILA: The Filipinos thought they were flying to Dubai. One of them told a fellow passenger how excited he was about his new job as a telephone repairman at a hotel in the emirate.

It was only after liftoff from Kuwait, when the captain made an announcement, that they learned their destination was, in fact, Baghdad.

"All you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting," said Rory Mayberry, an American passenger on the flight who had been hired to work in the Iraqi capital.

The Filipinos settled down only after a security guard from the company that had hired them waved a submachine gun, according to Mayberry. "They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad," he said.

Now that's what I call Enduring Freedom!

Apologies for the parade of Youtube clips, but I'm too busy/inert for anything more at the moment.

I don't dislike Lilly Allen, but when Alright Still first started getting reviewed in the states and people kept dropping The Specials as a clear influence, I didn't get it. Was it just because she was a white british kid making Jamaican-influenced music? Given the abscence of a two-tone politics in her work, wouldn't Madness have been the more appropriate referent? Anyway here's Allen doing the Specials' Prince Buster-soaked "Gangsters" with Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of said band. Hall looks and sounds pretty good, given that this (starts about 40 seconds in) was thirty years ago, and Allen is sufficiently reverential/deferential. I really don't have anything more interesting to say than that i think this is kinda cool.

Today was rather productive. Ran into a friend from college while on my walk into manhattan, got in two and a half plus hours of solid phonebanking, set up some lab visits, did a class visit, read, fed spooky, watched a little TV.

I also had the second bizarre NYC celebrity sighting in a week. (Last tuesday it was Russell Simmons at VP2, today Aida Turturro aka Janice Soprano outside the NYU dorm on University between Waverly and 8th.) It's such a bizarre existence, trying to live some sort of meaningful life among the walking figments of spectacle. Perhaps is this which makes us all such sarcastic hollow desperate rakes. That sounds profoundly reactionary, doesn't it? And also, incontrovertibly rooted in a certain racial and racist logic of the city in which something like grad school is very much implicated for me, and dreams of flight cannot dislodge or decenter even if my non drivers-license having, ratty passport holding-obligated to teach for two years ass could even figure out a way to realize them. But from here on out i stop complaining about New York in the age of American Apparel and Theory not the abstract noun but the soho boutique and instead i start moving forward. I am relying on you to hold me accountable to that.

And with that, i'll go to sleep.

He's lip-synching, i'm pretty sure.

I also could care less.

This is amazing.

This is why i won't go to therapy

school hazed?

The pilot of Greek ABC Family's summer drama about college fratfolk and their wacky doingds, was a free download on iTunes, and with nothing more promising to do ona saturday evening (i hate grad school) i will admit to having watched it. With the exceptions of A Different World and Felicity, TV shows about higher education seem doomed to fail. Class of '96, Saved By The Bell: The College Years, and Undeclared all illustrate this point, although I think if Apatow had made Undeclared a one hour drama rather than the half hour sitcom it was, it might have been a much better show. College, for some reason, seems to have been more the domain of movies. Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds 1-5, Dead Man on Campus, First Daughter etc. I'm sure i'm missing some big ones, and I'm excepting the shows that shifted from high school to college, like 90210, Buffy, Gilmore Girls, or The O.C., because these were never really about college, though see my analysis of Buffy and the University below. Anyway, Greek wasn't particularly terrible, though it wasn't particularly good either. Some plot elements felt like they were being recycled from other shows or from films. the protagonist was doing a less awkward Jay Baruchel. And i guess the crazy christian roomate becomes the voice of conscience because it's abc family and not, like fox not fox news fox, where the crazy christians just fuck up your sex life and then disappear into non-continuity. Though there is a QPOC character, which would be interesting if i had any faith that the plotlines for the character wouldn't just wind up being lame. Mostly, Greek is somewhat hammy drama. Undeclared was probably a more accurate representation of someone's undergraduate experience - though not mine.
And Greek does nothing to make me a)understand why someone not as fascist as my freshman year roomate would want to join a fraternity or b) why i should stick around long enough to find out.

is this a song or an ipod commercial?