Author: Heather Meadows

All I have to say to that, Tycho, is:

LOL.

;>

Official: Jolie adopts Ethiopian girl

In a posting on People magazine’s Web site, Jolie is quoted as saying the child’s name is Zahara Marley Jolie and that she and Maddox are “very happy to have a new addition to our family.”

[…]

Ethiopia, a country of 70 million, has more than 5 million orphans, their parents lost to famine, disease, war and AIDS — a catastrophe the government has said is “tearing apart the social fabric” of the east African nation.

Caring for the orphans costs $115 million a month in a country whose annual health budget is only $140 million. Because of that, Ethiopia has gone out of its way to make adoption easier.

In 2003, a record 1,400 children were adopted from abroad, more than double the number in the previous year. The number of private adoption agencies in Addis Ababa, the capital, has doubled in the past year to 30.

Ethiopia has strict laws to thwart dubious adoption agents and to ensure that the orphan really exists, that the paperwork is not fraudulent and that no AIDS-infected children are being passed off as healthy.

Agencies charge fees of around $20,000 per child, a relatively inexpensive fee compared to many other countries.

Here’s a story that should sound awfully familiar to Kelly: Man calls ambulance 50 times a year, demands ride home

An unemployed man who often called for an ambulance to take him home after he went drinking has been found guilty of obstruction of duties and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

Judge Hidenaga Manabe at the Takamatsu District Court called the wrongdoing of Satoshi Nakagawa “selfish.”

“He committed a selfish crime by obstructing the highly urgent duties of ambulances,” the judge said when he handed down the ruling on Monday.

At least this guy was prosecuted…

This part of the article is hilarious:

The ambulance, however, headed for the fire station, not his home, which prompted an enraged Nakagawa to poke one of the paramedics in the cheek, slightly injuring him, according to police.

I wonder if it was a bunch of little pokes, or one big one.

Continuing in its tradition of taking care of orphaned and injured children, Japan has invited an 11-year-old Afghan girl to visit and receive an eye operation. Do nonprofits in the US do cool stuff like this?

The girl, Shogoofa, who lost her parents in the civil war in Afghanistan when she was three, had her right eye stabbed with a needle during sewing work at a refugee camp in Pakistan, and almost lost her sight, the Save Afghan Children group said.

And following in the wake of the JR West disaster, JR East has fired a driver for using his cell phone while working.

According to the company, a passenger in the front car spotted the driver using a cell phone just before the train reached Torami Station in the town of Ichinomiya in early May. His dismissal was dated June 7, JR East said. JR East instructs its staff to turn off their cell phones while working.

I am really happy that Global Voices Online has started breaking up its Daily Blog Roundups into separate posts, one for each region. Compartmentalization has always made things easier for me to digest ;>

Today I saw some neat stories.

From the Middle East and North Africa Roundup, here’s a story about a guy who has been walking through Middle Eastern nations for seven years in the name of peace.

Inspired by the ancient Arab travel writer Ibn Batuta, a Tunisian traveller has embarked on a 10-year journey on foot and writes about his experiences.
Nearly 7 years and 40,000 kilometres into his walk across the Middle East, Reda Bin Al Haj Ahmad’s journey continues. Whenever the Tunisian traveller becomes weary, he draws strength from his inspiration — the ancient Arab travel writer Ibn Batuta.

[…]

He has visited 18 countries: Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Yemen, Oman and the UAE.

He has been beaten four times, robbed of his money and detained by police four times during his journey.

The idea of traveling all over and writing about it sounds so appealing…except, of course, for that last bit. And I’m not sure I would want to walk the whole way, either :> But what this guy is doing really cool. It’s too bad he’s not blogging it every night!

The Sub-Saharan Africa Roundup links to a blog post that links to this piece, which is a copy-and-paste of a Reuters article by Rebecca Harrison. (Ah, Google.)

“I check the prices for the day on my phone and when it’s a good price I sell,” he [Daniel Mashva] told Reuters from his village in the remote northeast of South Africa. “I can even try to ask for a higher price if I see there are lots of buyers.”

Mashva is one of around 100 farmers in Makuleke testing cell phone technology that gives small rural farmers access to national markets via the Internet, putting them on a footing with bigger players and boosting profits by at least 30 percent.

“Mainstream farmers have access to market information so they can negotiate better prices. This cell phone enables poor rural farmers to get that same information,” said Mthobi Tyamzashe, head of communications at South African cell phone operator Vodacom, which is sponsoring the project.

[…]

Like almost half of Africans, neither Chauke nor Mashva had made a phone call let alone surfed the web before receiving their new phones. But both are now hooked and deftly manoeuvre their hi-tech handsets with pride.

Cell phone use has rocketed 100 percent in the world’s poorest continent since 2000, and the Makuleke scheme is one of many ways the technology is being used to tackle poverty.

Experts say wireless technology is also the best way to bring the Internet to the poor, mainly because inhospitable and sparsely-populated African landscapes mean rolling out landline infrastructure is not commercially viable.

I think this is absolutely fantastic. I hope the project is sustainable!

Out of New York, Paris, London, Moscow and Madrid, I’m glad London won. Britain is our ally, and London is just a cool city.

I can see why New York would want to host the Olympics, why it would be meaningful and impactful and all that, but if you think about it, 2012 is eleven years after 9/11–and in terms of Olympic history, the US just hosted it (1996 in Atlanta, and, for that matter, 1984 in Los Angeles). It wouldn’t really be fair to give it to us again.

Click here for a list of the locations of the modern Olympic games.

Today I decided to watch all the dubbed episodes on my Kyo Kara Maoh! DVD 1.

Poor Sean. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from the horror.

Yes, it was pretty bad. Dubs suck as a rule, but this one was patently horrible. I could at times see where they were coming from with their voice actor selections: Cheri-sama/Celi/whatever had a decently sexy voice, Yuuri had relatively decent “WTF?” range (though his emotional stuff and Maou stuff needs serious work), the girl doing Wolfram matched the original Japanese actress relatively well, and Yozak/Josak was actually pretty funny. Conrad, however, was a disaster, as was Gwendal; the guy doing Gunter only managed to sound like Gunter every now and then, and for the rest of the time he sounded like he was trying to sound like a wuss. Anissina just didn’t fit at all; her voice didn’t stand out. And somehow, the dude doing Murata Ken sounded way too much like Jimmy Flinders. (Ridiculously deep voice, too…) In general, I think the voice actors were chosen for how closely they could get their voices to resemble the original actors; it doesn’t seem like much emphasis was placed on using proper, realistic intonation.

The opening scene of episode 1, with Conrad and Yuuri’s mother in the cab, was the best, hilarity-wise. Conrad sounded absofuckinglutely gay. It was so bad, I can’t think of it without bursting into laughter! Because of that, I was looking forward to the intentionally gay scene in episode 5 where Conrad’s putting in Yuuri’s contact lenses…but unfortunately that fell flat on all counts. Conrad was too stiff, Yuuri didn’t sound vulnerable enough, and Wolfram’s response was hardly filled with shock and outrage.

Oh, well.

My main reason for watching the dub (other than boredom) was to check out the voice acting, but my secondary reason was to see how much the English dub translation differed from the subtitles. There were some interesting changes; for example, in episode 5, when Yuuri asks Conrad if he’d cry for him if he died, Conrad’s line changes to something like, “I’d be too busy. I’ll be coming with you.” That’s a little bizarre, and I’m not sure that meaning is what was originally intended…

Some details were changed, too, to make sense to an American audience. In the subtitled version, the Shibuya Yuuri Harajuku Furi joke is halfway explained; in this version, they changed the joke completely, to “Isn’t Yuri short for urine?”

Ha, ha, ha.

They also changed the part where Yuuri compliments Adelbert’s Japanese, so that instead of just looking baffled at Yuuri’s stupidity, Adelbert explains that he gave Yuuri the ability to understand the language. This kind of messes up the later scene where Gunter and Conrad explain to Yuuri that nobody is speaking Japanese…

They changed the line “feudal drama” to something like “civil war reenactment”, which makes sense to an American audience, but is kind of questionable since they leave the fact that Yuuri is Japanese intact. Additionally, they changed Yuuri’s reaction to his mother’s “fantasy-esque” decor; instead of thinking that his mother’s taste is supernatural, Yuuri now just mutters that she likes teddy bears and teacups.

There are also some funny lines in general, like Yuuri’s “Give me the skinny” in episode 1, or the pirate’s abrupt “Shut your hole” in episode 5. These sometimes added realism and helped the flow, and sometimes didn’t. (I mean, at one point, Gunter says, “That’s the way it went down.” And who says “the skinny”?) I did like Wolfram’s swearing, though; I thought that fit fairly well.

All in all, I still recommend this DVD…for the subs. Please, children, watch the subs. Spare yourselves the pain. For a good laugh, just watch that first opening scene. That’s all you need to see.

Well, now I know where that came from.

If you can deal with an extraordinarily long movie with horrible sound quality, you can watch the fireworks I saw last night. You can even hear all the music that I was too far away to hear!

Watch WAGT’s River Blast Fireworks Show Online

(The links for the movie are right beneath the headline. I didn’t spot them at first either ;>)

I was watching Kyou Kara Maou episode 45 the other day with Sean, and at the end I pointed at Conrad and said, “See, he knew! There he is right there! He knew the whole time and didn’t say anything!”

Sean responded cheerfully, “That’s because he’s a dick.”

“But…he’s so hot,” I protested.

“Oh, so that’s it,” Sean mused. “‘Sean’s a dick…but he’s so hot.'”

You know, there may be truth to that…

;>

It’s like this simmering nausea. I felt it last night, too, and last night I was also dizzy and lightheaded.

I wonder if this is due to the new blood pressure medicine I just started taking, or if this is related to my previous lightheadedness, or if this is just because I have a slight cold/allergies…

Tamim Ansary has a great article on MSN Encarta today about the possible future of energy. The last page of the four part piece details a very interesting idea called “distributed generation”:

Let’s say you have a solar generator on your roof and a hydrogen-making mini-plant in your basement. Anytime your solar generator makes more energy than you’re using, the excess flows to your basement and makes hydrogen.

Later, when the sun isn’t shining, your fuel cells kick in and you draw down on your hydrogen supply.

If your hydrogen tanks fill up, the excess energy flows into the grid. When the grid has more power than it can sell, the excess goes to big electrolyzers that store energy as hydrogen on a commercial scale. The massive fuel cells then emit energy as needed to keep the overall supply constant.

In this system, more or less everybody produces energy. They sell to the grid when they have more than enough. They buy back when they’re running a deficit.

In such a world, there is no point in anyone conquering Saudi Arabia, toppling Washington, D.C., or invading the Indonesian Archipelago. No conquest would give any conqueror control over a protoplasmic energy web fed by the entire human race.

This idea must borrow heavily from distributed computing–it even uses a similar name. What a great adaptation! With this model, everyone would be encouraged to have their own power-generating equipment, to save on energy costs in the long run. This would then feed the system for everyone, balancing out over the whole world.

I like it!

I hope that solar power can become more efficient and also come down in price. (I’m not too sure about wind power, because it affects birds and who knows what all else that travels through the air.)

I had a really good time (you thought I was going to say I had a blast, didn’t you?) at RiverBlast.

The main reason I was there, of course, was to see the bellydancing:

I also walked around and looked at the booths and attractions a little. My evening ended with a bang (there you go, there’s a pun) with the fireworks set off over the Savannah River from the train bridge.

After having dinner with Mari and Kelly at Wendy’s, Chris and I headed out to see the fireworks from the North Augusta side of the river. We parked along the street near The River Golf Club, then walked down through the riverfront mansions until we found what seemed to be a public boat dock. Heading down the ramp, we settled ourselves towards the bottom–there was a medium-sized group on the dock itself, so we didn’t intrude. From that angle we had a pretty good view of the fireworks.

While most of my pictures of the fireworks are blurry, a few of them turned out all right, so I uploaded them. I’ve also uploaded pictures of the bellydancing and of the vendor booths. All the RiverBlast pictures can be found here.

Dude.

An eco-car that can travel the world using a fraction of the electricity it takes to power a light bulb, has been unveiled by its British creators.

According to the British gas firm BOC, its hydrogen-powered BOC Ech2o needs just 25 Watts — the equivalent of less than two gallons of petrol — to complete the 25,000-mile global trip, while emitting nothing more hazardous than water.

But with a top speed of 30mph, the journey would take more than a month to complete, even if the car was driven flat out with no pit-stops.

Just get it up to about 50 or 60 mph. That’s really all I need–my current car tops out at 80, and while that would be nice, ultimately the majority of my driving takes place in a more reasonable range. So 50, 60 mph is fine. I would totally buy one.

I’m going downtown in a couple hours to see Brooke and Mari bellydance. It’ll be Brooke’s first public performance, and, for the first time, the beginning class is not doing the Waady choreography. This should be good!

After that, I plan to thoroughly enjoy RiverBlast.

Louisville has something like it for the Derby, but I’ve never seen it. I’m really excited about RiverBlast.

Butler says Monday night’s show is the biggest he’s ever put on in 17 years of running Augusta’s July 4th fireworks.

“It’s the biggest and the best,” he said. “I can assure you of that.”

You know, it occurs to me that the best angle for fireworks pictures might be across the river in North Augusta. That way, maybe the downtown buildings could be a backdrop.

Too bad I don’t own a tripod…

I was reading this article, thinking I’d see something cool straight out of an action movie, when I was floored by the following:

A helicopter crashed Tuesday while bringing reinforcements to the team, killing all 16 service members aboard.

The Pentagon, which believes the helicopter was downed by a rocket-propelled grenade, released the names of the eight soldiers and eight sailors Saturday.

It was the worst single-day death toll for U.S. forces since the Afghan war began nearly four years ago.

(Emphasis mine.)

I think it says a lot about the wealth and power of our country that we can be at war for four years and not have it significantly affect daily life–to the point that we can even forget about it.

I mean, wow. Four years. And we’ve been in Iraq for awhile, too.

It’s pretty sobering.

But it also makes me think that if we put our true potential to work–i.e., drafted everyone who can fight and sent them over there–that we’d be finished instantly.

There’s no way I want that to happen. I’m just saying that given our obvious power, it’s ludicrous that people are still fighting us. A war of attrition is certainly not desirable, but we would absolutely win one. Which is, of course, why terrorism arose–to give those with no chance of winning a regular war the ability to win through fear and coersion.

And so, as I’ve noted before, our victory hinges upon our society’s ability to stomach some losses and setbacks in the name of stamping out terror.