"Michael Jordan tried to steal my date!"

[stolen from brian's blog]

Read the article here. It's pretty funny. I mean, hey, all's fair in love and war, right? -grins-

"trophy husbands"?

really interesting article in Fortune Magazine on the bit of role reversal that is taking place at some of the upper levels of corporate america.

Most Powerful Women in Business: Trophy Husbands

FCC Ruling

this is something i'm really really angry about.

The three largest local phone companies control 83 percent of home telephone lines. The top two long distance carriers control 67 percent of that market. The four biggest cellular phone companies have 64 percent of the wireless market. The five largest cable companies pipe programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide.

This is why Verizon can get away with operating on "suck" mode for the phone service in Westwood. This is why your cable bill is ridiculously high, and you can't get all the channels you want anyway. This is why you can see the same newscasters on Channel 2 and 9 in Los Angeles. This is why your DSL provider can get away with giving you crappy service because there really are no other providers anyway. This is why radio is so terrible. Competition in telecommunications has been nearly eliminated in the rush to deregulation in 1996, and it will be completely eradicated if the FCC gets its way June 2.

The FCC is going to decide next week to raise the cap on media ownership to 35% and allow media companies to own both television stations and newspapers in most markets, effectively enabling one corporation to control all the major information sources in a region. Is this a bad thing? Well, ask yourself why you haven't heard much about it from the standard tv and print outlets. The story is being buried at the expense of the public, and if that isn't enough sign that media conglomerate control is a bad idea, then i don't know what is. FCC chair Michael Powell is quite adamant about pushing this through, and unless there is major public outcry, he will succeed.

so here are some links to a few articles to get you started on the outrage. here, here, and here.

and that's just the beginning. do a search with google news. write your congressman, write your newspapers... corporate domination of media needs to be stopped!! If this continues, can you imagine what can happen next? I'm too scared to. :(

i am MORPHEUS!

You are Morpheus, one of the leaders of the
Resistance. And suffice to say, you are one
bad-ass mofo. You can kick the One's ass, you
can break through walls, and you can somehow
survive truth serum and torture. My hats off
to you! Charismatic and a great leader, you can inspire
your peers to attempt the impossible, and make
it possible. Packing a katana in the sequel, you should be
seeing pleeenty of action!

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you
wake up in your bed and believe whatever you
want to believe. You take the red pill, you
stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the
rabbit hole goes..."


What Character From The Matrix Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

And just as a side note, I thought Matrix:Reloaded was pretty freaking awesome. The Wachowski brothers really took the story onto a whole new level. Bravo!! I liked the twist at the end too. I won't give too much away, but i will say that it makes an interesting point about how the modes of dissent are increasingly coming under the control of those in power...

I can't wait for Matrix:Revolutions. (counts down the days...)

transitioning to movable type

i've finally done it. leave it to the stress of finals to finally drive me to move my blog onto a movable type platform. heh.

what's been done:
- mt configured on pearlescent.org site, linked from pearl.freeshell.org.
- mt templates/stylesheets edited slightly from a default design... maybe more redesign will take place. should i adapt my old design to mt, or do people like this one better? please let comment below!!
- posts from old blogger blog have been imported into mt, and can be accessed through side archive links. boy, i've been blogging for a long time.
- hmm.. the site looks kind of bland. i'll have to come up with a new color scheme eventually.

yay! i've got a new blog to play with!!

so what do you guys think of the new look? feedback, please~!!!!!!!! :D :D :D

return of the blogger

those of you who have been reading my blog in either of its iterations (this blog and the xanga blog) probably have noticed the recent dearth of entries. this is not an accident. Recently, i've been very "blah" about what and how i should be posting. so much of a daily log is about what interesting stuff happened in your day. this is hard to do when you're not having interesting days.

at the same time, i still come across so many weird neat things on the web. I guess you could say the web *is* my day, for better or for worse. so i might as well start posting again. :)

my recent discovery is that of a band called "Fannypack" who has a song out called "Cameltoe." They were recently featured in the NYTimes (think that! a credible publication publishing the word "cameltoe"!!) (well, let's discuss the credibility issues they have later. >_<) I haven't heard the song yet, so i can't say how it is, but it's making its spread from the NY area. I think i'll go download it later today.

anyway, here is a rather disturbing link to a site featuring cameltoes of all makes and models.

... and if you don't know what a cameltoe is... well... ask a friend. ;-)

Happy Memorial Day!

SOOOOOOOO TIRED!!!

SOOOOOOOO FRUSTRATED!!!

My project on blogging is not going well at all. >_<

testing some features...

Google
testing out the bookmarklet feature. :)

gettin' on the movable type boat

i've finally got mt semi-functional now on my new site. hopefully i'll be keeping this domain name for a decent amount of time, but fortune may be unkind and decide i can't afford it. -grins- at any rate, i'll have my site at pearl.freeshell.org. sorry for so much confusion!

anyway, MT took a while for me to set up because i'm stupid, but it's somehow working sort of now. woohoo. there's so much flexibility in this! wow!!!

i go explore MT. :)

no time to update!! busy

no time to update!! busy writing papers! *sob!*

lately i've been: spending too much time with jen jen and sue; eating too much fatburger (mm... fatburger...); not drinking enough water; sneezing a lot cuz allergies seem to be really bad this year; spending far too much time finding all these random cool sites; listening to a lot of blur (see my music blog) and other kinda random crap.

weee back to work. :(

note to self: topics to

note to self: topics to rant on:

- title IX
- the spirit catches you and you fall down (book)
- ethnic essentialism is bad, but asian american activism still matters
- the stupidity of the RIAA, MPAA, etc and how they really could have a huuuge monopoly on music, but screwed up. (too bad!)
- the importance of civic activism
- bush and his top gun moment
- protecting america's border is not exclusively a republican idea. nor is 9/11. nor is patriotism.
- why I love the dixie chicks~!
- ewan mcgregor's unceasing hotness.

the thing about loneliness is

the thing about loneliness is that the deeper you feel it, the less one is inclined to spread that negative sentiment to anyone else.

i was watching a little

i was watching a little bit of the E! Hollywood True Story on the Hilton sisters tonight while i was channel surfing, and i swear, i'm now at least 10 IQ points stupider than i was before. i've never seen anything so vapid on television. the show consisted of a bunch of people who are apparently in the hollywood social circles telling E! what they heard about the Hilton girls, what catfights they heard about, what they thought about an old relationship of Paris Hilton's, and so forth, along with the requisite film footage-and solemn-voiceover technique widely employed in these sorts of entertainment documentaries. soooooo pointless.

i was going to post a mini-rant on celebrity in american culture, but i'll wait till later when my thoughts have settled out a little bit. heh.

on another note, jer and i went and saw X2 and threw our $14 into the pot of the movie's take of $80 million. $80 million!! well, I guess if you bet big, you can win big. this sort of method isn't really fair to the average moviegoer, but that's yet another rant to be delivered some other time.