A thousand words

Flip-flop prosthetic. Pailin, Cambodia.

The world’s first interactive travel magazine

Eva, all-around blogging goddess and contributor to WorldHum, introduced me to a new social network/travel magazine – Matador Travel. It’s facebook meets bootsnall meets WorldHum.

There’s a little bit of everything in the Matador community.

Do-gooders

Destinations

There’s a page on travel writing and a lot of opportunities for writers and travelers to share their tales and earn some cash (perhaps even more than $7/hour) to put toward that next meal or trip.

Eva contributes to Matador Pulse, which “scours the web for overlooked stories about travel, place, and culture, while also digging deep into our own Matador community to “discover” interesting people and the things they’re doing at home and on the road.” The most recent post touches on DIY aid to Burma.

You should become a member, visit my profile, and friend me. Currently, I only have two friends, which is pretty pathetic.

Read the official press release below the cut.

Read more

Clinton funded by Saipan garment Tycoon

The story is a little dated, but I just saw it here.

I first read about Willie Tan in Nobodies by John Bowe. Tan owned the majority of garment factories on Saipan, which were almost entirely supported by importing workers from China, Bangladesh, etc. In 2006, he and his family donated $8,000 to the Clinton campaign. Some are calling for Hillary to give it back and refute his support.

Pay per hour to live and write a book

After expenses, time, pain, suffering, and writing, I’ve made a whopping $7 per hour (so far) writing my book. To all those aspiring authors stocking the shelves at your local book store: it is possible to do what you love, work more, and earn less.

Living the dream!

Undemocratic disasters or Let’s invade Myanmar

Myanmar, 100,000 killed by cyclone

China, 10,000 killed by earthquake

Myanmar, China, cyclones, earthquakes – all undemocratic.

I’m not saying that disasters struck Myanmar and China because of their lack of democracy. That would make me no different than off-the-wall preachers claiming Hurricane Katrina was the price New Orleans paid for its “celebrations of sin”, or 9/11 a result of fowl coming home to roost. But I would like to say, these uncontrollable disasters are an opportunity for nations, not to capitalize on, but to reach out to the people of Myanmar and China.

The scale of the disaster in China, although massive, is much smaller than that of Myanmar and the Chinese government is probably more capable of responding to a disaster than the U.S., so I think heaping them with moral support and funding will be enough, but Myanmar is whole other story.

The Myanmar government will not allow the full wave of international aid into its country. This could result in 100’s of thousands of preventable deaths as disease and starvation set in. This is the kind of country that should be invaded, not by dropping bombs, but by dropping food and supplies. Why not have an air raid on Myanmar? What, are we afraid of their air force? Do they have an air force?

Excerpts from a CNN piece on the disaster in Myanmar:

Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, was on the first of three U.S. aid flights allowed into Myanmar this week.
He described meeting with a Myanmar three-star general who opened up a map of the country and pointed to the areas worst-hit by the cyclone.
“[He] characterized activity there as returning back to normal — his words,” Keating said. “[He said] people are coming back to their villages, they’re planting their crops for the summer season, the monsoon will come and wash all the saltwater out of the ponds.
“His manner, his demeanor, his attitude indicated something less than very serious concern.”
A former Yangon resident now living in Thailand told AP that angry government officials told him that high-energy biscuits rushed into Myanmar on the World Food Program’s first flights were sent to a military warehouse.
Speaking on condition of anonymity over fears for his safety, he told AP that the biscuits were exchanged for what officials said were “tasteless and low-quality” biscuits produced by the Industry Ministry.

Why would a government stand and watch as its people die needlessly?

(Insert lengthy critique of U.S. government during Hurricane Katrina here, which pretty much erases the footing of the rest of the argument)

My theory: They are afraid of exposing their people to democracy and compassion, which breeds more democracy and compassion, which erodes at the fear and power that these jackasses hold over their countrymen.

I guess what I’m saying is…Let’s invade Myanmar!

Who’s with me?

Time magazine is.

Misremembering the English language

I watched Roger Clemens testify before Congress. I laughed at him when he busted out “misremember” after “misremember”.

“That’s not even a word,” I said to the TV, talking around a bite of cold pizza.

Months later and I find “misremember” entering my everyday speech. I always say it with a wink and a nod and maybe a pair of air-quotes, as if everyone had spent hours on the Tuesday or Thursday – or whatever day the testimony was – watching it. Like it was our own inside joke.

Last night the guest on the daily show – some Washington crony whose book Stewart touted as “well foot-noted, making for a very slow read” – busted out “misremember”. I laughed, smug with the knowledge that I knew “misremember” wasn’t a word.

This morning I sat at my computer to write about how amazing it is that Roger Clemens, a baseball player, had invented a word that looks like it’s taking hold. But first I decided to look it up in the dictionary, even though I knew it wouldn’t be there. It was.

Misremember is a word.

And what a great word it is. Instead of having to say “I don’t recall” or “I can’t remember” or some other multi-word phrase, “misremember” is a tight little package of “hell, I don’t know.”

Have you used “misremember”? You should give it a try. Although if you’re testifying before Congress, you might want to be a bit more formal: “Sir, I cannot (conjunctions are too informal for Senators) at this time.”

Reasonable Writing Advice from Mark Twain

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what one was intended for.

I was lucky to start writing for pay from the beginning. However, I was not so lucky that for the first few years that pay was about half-a-penny per word. Twain’s advice hits especially close to home considering my day job is in the wood sawing field.

Mrs. Butterworth,

A “still boobless” Mrs. Butterworth has sunk to the level of Geico commercials. Sad. One has to wonder, if she had boobs would she be doing this? We’ll never know.

Sweatshop the Game

Does anyone remember the computer game Hot Dog stand in which you buy the hotdog, the buns, etc, and you see if you can make your little hot dog business work?

Well Sim-Sweatshop is kinda like that except instead of selling hot dogs for a profit you make shoes for a loss. Okay, other than they are both less than elementary introductions to economics, they’re nothing alike.

The goal of Sim-Sweatshop is to make three shoes in a day to earn your full day’s worth of pay – $6.05. You do this by dragging the parts of a shoe together. It’s frustrating, which I suppose is the point, because the game constantly interrupts you to eat or join a union or to buy your daughter some shoes. The closest I got to reaching my daily quota was 2 2/3rds pairs of shoes.

Do you think you have the mouse ability to be a successful shoe assembler?

PLAY SIM-SWEATSHOP

Michael Pollan’s call to Action: “Plant a garden!”

Author Michael Pollan (In defense of Food, The Omnivores Dilemma) recently wrote a call to action in the New York Times Magazine, including this little mid-paragraph nugget:

Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.

Mainly, he’s talking about the environment, but his message can be applied universally. As I read, I found myself substituting “clothes” for “food”, and “what we wear” for “what we eat”.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.