Rainy Friday Nights!

Some of the sickest riding I’ve ever seen.

Is this for real?!

Recently, novelist Haruki Murakami made the trip to Israel to accept a literary prize called the Jerusalem Prize, an award for work which best “expresses the freedom of the individual in society.” Prior to traveling to Israel, he was met with criticism from people who did not agree with Israel’s recent actions in Gaza, and many in Japan threatened to boycott his books should he decide to go.

Well, he went, and delivered an incredibly honest and powerful acceptance speech.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong—and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

via Timid Observer and Jiayo

I’ve been on a documentary kick lately. Here are two films I highly anticipate in ‘09.

We Live in Public

This film received the Grand Jury Price in U.S. Documentary in 2009 Sundance Festival. It chronicles the artistic experiments of Josh Harris who found success in the late 90s as an Internet pioneer. The experiments don’t go so well, but it documents the raw human desire for some to be famous using technology as an enabler.

Encounters at the End of the World

A Werner Herzog film on the people who live and work in Antarctica. The end of the world.

I’ve been on a documentary kick lately. Here are two films I highly anticipate in ‘09.

We Live in Public

This film received the Grand Jury Price in U.S. Documentary in 2009 Sundance Festival. It chronicles the artistic experiments of Josh Harris who found success in the late 90s as an Internet pioneer. The experiments don’t go so well, but it documents the raw human desire for some to be famous using technology as an enabler.

Encounters at the End of the World

A Werner Herzog film on the people who live and work in Antarctica. The end of the world. Update: Apparently, this movie is already out. I’ve queued it up on the ol’ Netflix.

Back in December, some friends and I stopped off at an open-air market in Thailand to scout out the local eats. I shot some footage with the very convenient Mino HD and edited them together into this vingnette.

The NY Times ran a story on a group known as Dating a Banker Anonymous. The story is good, but their blog entries are even better:

Thanks to the recession, I now have a completely devoted BF, which is exactly what I wanted. So I should be happy, right? Wrong. I’m bored and can’t stop thinking about my perpetually unattainable Euro ex-boyfriend who is recession proof courtesy of an offshore trust account. To be honest, I’m only with my BF because I just don’t have the heart to change my facebook status from “in a relationship” to “I ain’t saying I’m a gold digger, but I ain’t messin’ with no broke banker.”

dabagirls.com

This is fascinating and it’s just one of the many documentaries produced the National Film Board of Canada. I wonder what the U.S. equivalent of the NFB is, if one even exists.

(via kottke)

The Mad Men intro sequence interpreted by the Simpsons in their recent Halloween special. (see also: the real deal)

- Bike Snob NYC

FYI, the elephant trunk skid looks like this:

I had the opportunity over the last couple weeks to reacquaint myself with the country in which I was born in and where I spent the first few years of my childhood. Needless to say, many things have changed over the twenty-odd years since my childhood here. Here are just a few things that are noteworthy:

• The famously humid and hot weather here can be pretty uncomfortable. However, at least in October, the evenings are about as comfortable as it gets with an easy breeze.
• It’s hard to go wrong with wide selection of food vendors and restaurants that seem to be everywhere. One simply can’t get the egg pancakes, tasty herb-based chicken soups or stinky tofu the way they do it here. Despite what some may say, I think night markets are just fine for non-local stomachs (of course, some sound judgment such as avoiding the few unsanitary stalls required).
• It is not uncommon for someone to jump back and forth between Mandarin and Taiwanese in mid-conversation, mid-sentence. And how you mix it up, or not, can be a tell for your political affiliation (perhaps not unlike stereotyped southern drawls for Republicans in the U.S.).
• Politicians speak in a sing-songy way when delivering speeches. A favorite trick of theirs is to say a positive statement and immediately ask the audience “hao bu haaaaaoooooo?” (roughly translating to: isn’t that right?). The last syllable is dramatically drawn out as the crowd roars in applause.
• Indie rock, Converse All-Stars, and trucker hats have found their way to Taiwanese youth culture. Along these lines, young artists and entrepreneurs have set up shop in now hip areas like ximending, selling handcrafted goods, t-shirts, and other off-the-radar items. Hip, hip.
• Taipei’s subway system is one of the best I’ve experienced. Clean, easy to navigate, and reliable. Kaohsuing’s (the major port city in Southern Taipei) metro system recently opened, but ridership is sadly sparse.
• Cycling has become all the rage. Though most people still use mopeds as their main mode of transportation, mountain bikes, folding bikes, and accompanying lycra gear have become popular. Road bikes, though, are still reserved to a select few. Side note: GIANT bicycles, the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer, is one of the few well-known international consumer brands I can think of that is based in Taiwan.

That’s it for this edition of Observations.

Warren Buffet

”... All the news-stands and book shops – what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well-dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigour of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking…” – The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux (1979)

Feel good video of the day.

- Charles M. Schwab

Mr. Cho accused Mr. Lee and his aides of committing a “grave crime” but said that he decided not to arrest them partly because they admitted to the wrongdoing and because their arrests would seriously disrupt the management of Samsung, which accounts for one-fifth of the country’s total exports, and endanger the national economy.

via NYTimes

Danny, It is my understanding that you are changing the world to drive product development and innovation. If so, I have written a book for people just like you. [...]