Greetings from Morocco. Im about to head out for the day but wanted to leave a short post. Been to Casablanca before and now in Marrakesh; have had tailless monkeys on my head and chatted with the owner of Ricks Cafe in Casablanca. Tomorrow E and I are off to the famous Cascades DOuzoud waterfalls. Will update much more in the future. Ciao.

Off to Spain, Morocco, and England today. Back on April 9th with hundreds of pictures and no money!

(And it looks like the Columbia housing lottery screwed me over. Ungrateful Ivy League administrators and their "random" lotteries)

Just in case you go to Mt. Holyoke...vote for Layne Hilton for Social Chair. Here's my reason:

Like Van Wilder of National Lampoon fame, Layne Hilton is all about the parties—throwing them, that is. I know, because I’ve had the pleasure of wearing beads and a mask at the Mardi Gras shindig she threw at the University of Edinburgh. While it wasn’t quite up to New Orleans standards of indecency, it was surely one hell of a good time. It also illustrates why I wholeheartedly support Layne for Social Chair (aka Party Animal in Chief) of Mt. Holyoke: she loves to party, but the parties are not about her, they are about other people having a good time. What more could you ask from a hostess? What more, dare I inquire, could you ask from any one woman?

As a brother of the New York Phi chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon at Columbia University, I’ve seen my share of good times to be had, whether they be themed parties, a formal black tie affair, or even an informal BBQ. The key to all these events is an organizer worth his (or in this case her) snuff. Can she work behind the scenes to stage an event everyone will enjoy? Well I’ve had the pleasure to become well acquainted with Layne over many long nights of competitive pool matches, and while her trash talking abilities are quite impressive, even they pale in comparison to her ability to socialize and entertain. Ladies, you can’t find a better candidate for Social Chair than Layne Hilton. It just can’t be done.

Who knows, if she gets elected, I might have to drag our chapter up for a party sometime. Of course, it is kind of hard to fit 45 guys into a car, but hell, if Layne’s throwing the party, someone has to be there to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

Vote for Layne, the third (and only intelligent) Hilton sister

Everyone wants a piece of Terry Schiavo. Some want her alive; some want her dead. What's a woman in a persistent vegetative state to do?

Horribly tasteless humor aside, the Schiavo case, which I have barely been following in the past year, has become unavoidable--even from Scotland--in the past week. Parents v. Husband, Republicans in Congress v. the Courts. A recent leaked Republican memo confirmed what everyone knew, that a belief in the sacredness of life alone isn't motivating the opposition to letting Schiavo die after 15 years of being brain dead, the memo confirmed that even when condemning the woman's poor husband as a murderer, the Republicans are looking to gain political capital. I don't even have to wonder anymore why I no longer want to be a politician.

My thoughts on the issue are conflicted, but I tend to support the court system and Terry's husband on permanently removing her feeding tube (she is unable to eat on her own) for several reasons:
1) Terry told her husband, or so he says, that she wanted to die if she was stuck like this. Republicans claim he is "curiously obsessed" with killing her, but I fail to see how in the world a man could be seen as anything more than a dedicated and loving man for spending 15 years of his life fighting to fulfill what he saw as his wife's wish.
2) The courts have, time and time again, rejected arguments for keeping her alive. Now her parents are trying, again, to become her guardians permanently. But let's think about this. Your parents stop being responsible for you after 18 (or maybe 21, i'm not sure on the legal status); as an adult, the personal you are legally closest to is your spouse. Thus, I see absolutely no legal right backing up her parents' attempts to take her out of the hands of her husband, who does not appear to be incapable of rational decision-making in any way.
3) this decision is not one of precedence--hospitals have pulled the plug on brain-dead patients in the past because of inability to pay costs or just the consensus after years that the patient will never recover. Every argument in this case is highly political--Peggy Noonan wrote in the WSJ that Republicans would be punished by supporters at the polls and in their hearts if they failed to save Schiavo. That kind of argument is what is really motivating men like Senate Maj Leader Bill Frist to venture a guess (as a surgeon, not a neurologist) that Schiavo may not "really" be brain-dead. There is absolutely no basis to that guess, but it makes for one hell of a political soundbite. Democrats are going to be hurt by this controversy over "pro-life" voters regardless, but hopefully they will benefit among those people who respect the nearly unanimous legal opinion siding with Schiavo's husband and who realize that the politicization of this issue makes it all very crass.
4) the whole "right to life" as a universal good is a whole load of baloney. Coming from the only state in the US that allows for doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, I like to believe I have a good (and in my mind, enlightened) sense of the issue. While I can understand the motivation for the debate on abortion, since we do not know what degree of consciousness is present in the womb, I think that it is much different for a human being who has lived and is near death or incapable of living life without agonizing pain to choose to end their suffering. Activists see the right to life as "good", but, and now i'm thinking about Schiavo, what about the individual who is dead but can't die? People live and people die in our society, that is one of the only constants. If the legal guardian of a brain-dead individual wants to keep that person alive, I'm not sure there is much that can be done, if the money is present to pay for the care. But when the legal guardian of a 15 years brain-dead individual has been saying for years that his wife did not want to live this way, I honestly think that is a wish that should be respected. Schiavo's husband is being vilified, but what is a husband? The person a woman (or a man, i'm pro gay-marriage of course) chooses to spend her life with and devote herself to--you can't get any more serious than that. Schiavo's husband is not just a man saying a woman should die--he is Schiavo's soul mate saying she didnt want to live this way. I hope the courts respect that (I also hope, btw, that the Sup. Court finds in favor of Oregon's Right-to-Death law when it hands down its decision, but that's another matter).

The federal judge hearing the case now said in court yesterday that he wasn't sure it was even possible for Schiavo's parents to convince him to reinsert her feeding tube against the wishes of her husband; while the appeals will continue, hopefully the legal sensibilities will continue to win out over a politically-motivated legal decision (if it goes to the Supreme Court, there is no telling what will happen).

This is Schiavo something like 15 or 20 years ago:


This is her more recently:


More later, these are just rough thoughts

My predictions for today's eight games, having not even taken a glance at any of the lines for the games:
(2) Connecticut over (10) NC State by 8
(5) Villanova over (4) Florida by 5
(2) OK State over (7) S. Illinois by 15
(1) North Carolina over (9) Iowa State by 12

(5) Michigan State over (13) Vermont by 8
(5) Georgia Tech over (4) Louisville by 4
(6) Wisconsin over (14) Bucknell by 9
(1) Duke over (9) Mississippi St. by 15

Let's see if I end up with egg all over my face...

The second round of games today brought no surprises, as Washington, Utah, Cincy, and Boston College all won relatively easy (Utah was close, but come on, did any really believe Bogut would go out in the first round?). The third round, in progress now, has great promise. At halftime of each game, all the lower seeds were ahead. Of course, that is now changing as the higher seeds' superiority kicks in (at least for some of them. Despite trailing previously, Wake is now up over UT-Chattanooga by 2; Texas is only 1 behind Nevada; Arizona has jumped 9 ahead of Utah State; and Gonzaga has reasserted itself by 2 over Winthrop. I'm still praying for some tight games and possible upsets though, just so the news is more exciting tomorrow.

Happy St. Paddy's Day to everyone back in the States.

Everyone loves a tournament. Who really enjoys watching people play chess? NO ONE. Yet call a bunch of games a "tournament," and suddenly you have TENSION, ADVERSITY, and HEROES. Take a sport like college basketball, already quite enjoyable, entertaining, and stress-creating, throw 64 teams together complete with numerical rankings to clarify who is "good" good and who is "bad" good, and you've got yourself a sweat-dripping, heart-stopping, friendship-ending mishmash of a competition.

First upset of the tournament. As of a few minutes ago, 12-seed Wisconsin-Milwaukiee had top 5-seed Alabama. That's one, folks.

Follow the fun here

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Off to York, England for the weekend; pictures and tales of glory and fame when I get back.

Cheers!

I want to get into this whole "be a scientist" scam. The NYTimes website today fronts an article in which social scientists claim that decentralized groups like the Yankees tend to be more successful and more immune to outside criticism than close-knit groups like the Red Sox. There even is a hilarious locker room diagram of the Yankess which shows where they all sit and explains the influence they have on each other. The best part, from both the graphic and the article, is this line:

"Like good friends sitting on a porch, Mussina anchors a group of pitchers and support players, who sit in a loose semicircle. They form a small clique."

I didn't realize that baseball was like my high school's hallway during lunchtime.

But read the article, it's fun fluff.

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Ok, I need 8 more people now for fantasy baseball. And whoever is "anonymous," I can't add you to the league if I don't know who are you.

The link is below, if you want to join. In order to join the league, follow the link, then click the "Sign Up Now" or "Get Another Team" button and follow the links to "Join a Custom League". When prompted, enter the League ID# and password below.

League ID#: 174199
Password: Ichiro


Only join if you will keep up with the league through the season.

Cheers!

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I'm starting a Fantasy Baseball league called "Jesus or Johnny Damon?"

Anyone want to join?

I need 11 people total.

I just ate the most delicious sandwich. I bought a roll at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market (where I also had a delicious hog's meat sandwich) and stuffed it with mature cheddar, garlic mayonnaise, fried egg, and grilled pork loin. MMMMMMM.

That is all.

Sometimes you just have to love reading the People's Daily, the major CCP mouthpiece in China:

"China will enforce a 24-hour monitoring over the Internet during the imminent annual meeting of top legislature, or the Third Plenum of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC).

Chatrooms and forums of major Chinese Internet portals will be monitored by "security guards" at these websites. Any messages submitted by Internet users will go through rigid censoring and filtering before appearing on the Internet.

"Some messages on the Internet are sent by those with ulterior motives," acknowledged Qin Rui Monday, deputy director of the Public Information and Internet Security Supervision Bureau under the Ministry of Public Security ...

He said vicious attacks hurled by hackers or computer viruses would still exist in Chinese cyberspace.

Major Internet Service Providers including Beijing Telecom and Beijing Netcom and 14 major Internet portals and four Internet bar chains attended the meeting."

I think I've finally come to terms that for as long as I am in Scotland doing a minimum amount of work, I'm going to be drinking constantly. Call me a fair-weather alcoholic--when I don't have a lot of responsibilities (as I do in NYC), I let myself follow an unguided path, which seems to be leading me towards the bottle on a highly regular basis. A glass of wine here, some brandy there, 3 beers, etc... I know it's not good, but my will power just isn't the same when I don't have anything else fighting for my time. So I figure I'm just going to stop complaining for now (except when I realize how much I'm hitting my wallet) and enjoy life. Now if it was only 75 degrees and I was on a beach--even Jimmy Buffett's music is starting to mock me at this point. It doesn't matter that New York is probably colder--listening to Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, and Donovan Frankenreiter so often has me hooked on the beach. And it doesn't help that Dominique, of New Orleans, won't stop talking about pina coladas and 90 degree weather.

In other news, coming right on the heels of my Facebook article for the Student paper here (read it here : http://www.studentnewspaper.org/view_article.php?article_id=20050228131429), I just banged out a 1300-word feature article about online music downloading (the legal kind) and how the music industry won't stop being greedy. That's running next Tuesday--i'll put the link up then.

Ahh hell, links don't even work on this page well, as far as I can tell. Here is my Facebook article:


Facebooking the future

I’ll admit it, I’m a Facebook slut, but there is one man sluttier than I: Steve Hofstetter, stand-up comedian, radio show host, Columbia University graduate, and Facebook member who shares himself with roughly 70,000 people.


Technically, that makes him a huge slut. Either that, or a whore, as Facebook parlance goes. TheFacebook.com, a website arisen from the bowels of Harvard University, is known among American university students by various appellations, such as ‘a huge waste of time’, ‘a great way to stalk other college students’, or ‘the greatest thing since guy and girl created the one-night stand’

An online community where members can create profiles, join groups based at their universities, and share their interests, Facebook has become a phenomenon over the last year. And with 1.7 million college student members in the United States alone, it has now begun its inexorable spread toward world domination. Universities added to the site recently include Cambridge, Oxford, and LSE, making the University of Edinburgh an inevitable next step. All a student needs to do is request on the website that his university is added, provide university details, and voila, the online stalking can begin!

No one, though, can approach the sheer sluttiness of Hofstetter, who in the past few months has picked up a ridiculous 70,000 friends - 60,000 more than any other member - on his quest for 100,000 online friends. Along the way he’s promoting his new book and stand-up CD, and having a documentary made about him by a college student from Florida.

“Facebook is a great resource,” acknowledges Hofstetter. “It helps you stay organised and keep in touch with old friends. And the ability to download your contact list is great when you need your friends’ numbers, addresses, etc. And it doesn’t take much time to create a profile. He warns, “if they’re looking for a way to make new friends, they should take up a hobby.” It is a wise warning, for Facebook has been acknowledged as the cause of many failed tests and late papers.

The Facebook is known among American university students by various appellations, such as ‘the greatest thing since guy and girl created the one-night stand’


Why? Because the Facebook has done more to help people quantify their importance than anything since existence-justifying Tetris scores. I, an aspiring Facebook slut, have 514 friends at this point, a thought which leaves me with a warm tingle as it proves that I’m loved by hundreds of people I barely remember meeting. Who needs real friends when you have the ability to search for people who have listed whale watching as an interest? Want to find Blazin’ Squad fans? S Club Juniors haters? It’s easy in the Facebook world. Reality falls by the wayside when confronted by the Facebook; it’s not even a fair fight. People love to belong, and Facebook is the largest and most substantial online community, exclusively for university students and alumni, ever created. You even have the ability to search for people who went to the same schools with you previous to your entrance to uni.

The best part about the Facebook, though, lacks any necessary function. It is the random ability to ‘poke’ someone, where a message shows up on their profile saying, ‘Student X has poked you. Do you want to poke back?’ While it may be indicative of the utter inanity of much of our Internet use, poking, like sticking your finger in the Pillsbury Doughboy’s belly button, takes on a whole new dimension of greatness when combined with late-night recreational drinking.

The University of Edinburgh does not yet have its own Facebook identity, but requests can and have been made for the Facebook gods to introduce this poor Scottish outpost to the joys of procrastination via ‘Facebooking.’. Rest assured, the time is near for encountering/being sucked into the greatest American export since the 24-hour grocery store.

By Brian Wagner

Despite my intense unproductivity here in Scotland, I have tried to do more with my time than play Halo and drink. Not much, but a few things. For instance, I have now read 9 novels/short story collections here: Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; and Nightmare Town, Continental Op, Glass Key; and Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett; and DaVinci Code by Dan Brown (entertaining, but overrated).

If you enjoy detective or mystery novels, or even enjoy a fast-paced read, check out Hammett, the original king of the detective murder novel. He also wrote The Maltese Falcon, which I am just starting now.

Additionally, I have started writing feature articles for the student newspaper here. My first, on the spread of Facebook to the world, runs tomorrow. You can find it online tomorrow morning at www.studentnewspaper.org. I am starting work now on my second article, a full-page piece for next week on legal music downloading.

Update: Wait, my article is already online. Ha, click on the link below to read.

Cheers!

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