got back from my weeklong trip to maine yesterday. it was good to get out of the city for a while. nothing exciting happened but here are some random notes and observations from it:

<p>cj and i made each leg of the trip from alexandria, virginia to dexter, maine (roughly 670 miles) and back in roughly 10.5 hours each way. no speeding tickets. i&#8217;m impressed.</p>

<p>my sister just bought a house in dexter. it&#8217;s old and needs a lot of fixing up but it&#8217;s a fairly nice two-story house with lots of big rooms, a garage, and some land. her mortgage payments are less than a quarter of what i pay for rent for my little one bedroom apartment in manhattan.  and she gets to keep hers when all is said and done.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.dextershoe.com/">dexter shoe</a>, the company that originated in dexter and employs about 500 people from there and surrounding towns (ie, a <em>huge</em> percentage of the local population) announced last week that they&#8217;re closing the dexter factory and moving operations overseas to save on labor costs (i believe they&#8217;re planning china this time). the company <a href="http://www.dextershoe.com/custserv/company_behind_shoes.asp">prides itself</a> on the fine new england craftsmanship. a while back, dexter shoe was bought by <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/">berkshire hathaway, inc</a>, a big investment company run by <a href="http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/08/31/buffett/">warren buffet</a>, who has never even set foot in dexter. they&#8217;ve started factories in puerto rico and mexico before and discovered that the workers they&#8217;re paying 12 cents an hour don&#8217;t produce high enough quality shoes and they&#8217;ve had to send huge shipments back to dexter to get repaired at an overall loss for the company. so it looks like the end result will be that dexter shoe will probably have a better bottom line and happier shareholders at the cost of producing lower quality shoes and decimating the small town that supported and nurtured it for over 40 years. way to go warren.</p>

<p>after not  studying any chinese for two years, i can only still recognize about 200 characters (it was about 1500 or so at my peak). </p>

<p>i think i&#8217;ve become allergic to cats and/or dogs. we always had pets when i was growing up and it never bothered me but going home this time, i found myself sneezing up a storm whenever i was in a house with pets.</p>

<p>interesting graffiti seen in the men&#8217;s room at the vince lombardi rest area on the garden state parkway: &#8220;rednecks are gay and suck dick&#8221;</p>

<p>my dad tells me that <a href="http://www.hgd.com/alison/">alison arngrim</a>, the actress who played the mean character nellie olsen on the little house on the prairie tv series made an appearance in the rosebowl parade during the time the series was running (and she was about 13). she was booed, spit on and had things thrown at her for the entire route because people are too stupid to realize that there is a difference between a fictional character that isn&#8217;t likeable and the little girl who plays her on tv. my dad had heard that she later went on to a career in porn but this doesn&#8217;t appear to be true (on her website it mentions that she&#8217;s now a comedian and does aids awareness education but i can&#8217;t find anything about porn). </p>

<p>lani met me at the train station in virginia with a bag lunch that included a note and stickers. thus reinforcing her sainthood in my book.</p>

<p>a week is too short.</p> 

Take a look at this weeks Onion. It’s a full spread on the attack. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or be angry. What do you think?

They went and boldly made another Star Trek series, staring Scott Bakula. We’re not up to 1071 posts on the THRAXIL, but that’s partly my fault. If any of you are not watching the pilot right now, know that you’re missing it. If you’re a nerd, hang your head in shame – I know I am. A friend had a good idea of making a drinking game to go with the pilot. A Quantum Leap reference in particular would require a substantial amount of drinking.

my friend cj, who drives a zamboni for a living, just bought a new mustang. we’re driving it from virginia to maine tonight. i’ll be in maine for the next week. probably without any net access to speak of.

I thought honesty and pure, unfiltered, raw emotional discourse and uncensored opinion was something that our mogul-based push media enterprise had completely wiped out in the interest of spoon-feeding us controlled content punctuated by our loving sponsor.

<p>Jon Stewart proved me wrong last night. </p>

<p>I was on my way out of <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~npd1">Niles&#8217;</a> house, when I caught the beginning of the daily show, and stuck around to catch a few seconds of it. it was nothing short of incredible. he ditched his script, and recalled to his audience other times of great national loss and crisis, citing <span class="caps">MLK</span>&#8217;s assasination when he was in 5th grade, war news in his later years and whatnot. but the man wasn&#8217;t on a soapbox, he was pulling his soul out, word by word. he was crying. the man who usually is all shits and giggles was crying, and being completely and totally honest. </p>

<p>his message was that a &#8220;with us or against us&#8221; war such as the one proposed by Dubyah last night isn&#8217;t so much the answer. but that was almost besides the point. in an age where people paid to deliver us the truth always give us an almost robotic account of the days happenings, and no matter how obvious it is people never say what&#8217;s really going on (like those poor &#8220;analysts&#8221; who have to try and make Bush sound smart after every appearance, when they know full well he&#8217;s an idiot), this was the first and <i>only</i> time I can recall when a journalist, or at least a media figure has ever dropped his script and given me raw emotion, uncensored reaction, and the simple human perspective on a tragic happening, rather than an overanalyzed version that makes it completely statistical and dehumanizes it completely. </p>

<p>it may or may not be on comedycentral&#8217;s site later. I&#8217;ll post it if it is.</p> 

…Tad

I was talking with a colleague today and mentioning how curious I found it that no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks of 9-11. This person made several comments which have sent me seriously thinking. Granted I am probably the #1 most naive and gullible person on earth, so you all will probably get the implications faster than I…

anomalies: flight manuals in <strong>Arabic</strong>??!! Flight manuals are not printed in Arabic; moreover&#8212; flight manuals left conspicuously on display after the passengers in the car make an issue of getting noticed?; a Muslim, about to embark upon a suicide mission as part of a holy war, spending his last night on earth in a <strong>bar</strong> with lots of exposed female flesh (and then giving out broad, dark hints?)? (Those are the most glaring at the moment; probably others of you can think of more.)

<p>In the law game, one asks, cui bono?  Who profits?  So, who profits, my friends, from setting the military might of an outraged United States against Arabs?  (And why is Sharon of Israel so adamant that Palestine never be included in any coalition that might be mounted against &#8212;- whom?) I can think of a few candidates; but one stands out rather sickeningly&#8230; devious, diabolical and the sort of stuff that Robert Ludlum capitalized on..</p>

<p>However, as the song says, Just because you&#8217;re paranoid, don&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re not after you&#8230;</p> 

i find myself wanting to copy and paste phone numbers into the url field of my web browser.

my god, i actually find myself agreeing with the pope.

Pope John Paul II has offered prayers to America and urged those affected by the terrorist attacks to show restraint and commit themselves to peace.

<p>after this week, the only thing i&#8217;m left feeling is deep sorrow. i&#8217;m sad that so many innocent people were killed in the attacks. i am even more deeply saddened by what i&#8217;ve seen of this country&#8217;s reaction. </p>

<p>this tragedy has triggered a nationalistic bloodlust that makes me want to go crawl under a rock until the world smartens up. the opinions of <a href="http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ucac/20010912/cm/this_is_war_1.html">bigoted raving lunatics</a> unfortunately seems to be shared by the <a href="http://us.news2.yimg.com/f/42/31/7m/dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010913/us/attacks_congress_14.html">current leadership</a> of our country, <a href="http://us.news2.yimg.com/f/42/31/7m/dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010912/us/attacks_editorial_rdp_5.html">the media</a>, and a surprisingly large percentage of the population.</p>

<p>i don&#8217;t understand how anyone could even briefly consider (let alone how it has become the publicly acceptable belief) that the murdering of many innocent people is an appropriate response to <em>anything</em>.</p>

<p>lately i&#8217;ve been having flashbacks to may of 1999 when tuck and i were in china and <span class="caps">NATO</span> bombed the chinese embassy in belgrade. the nationalistic frenzy that the chinese media whipped the people into involved numerous attacks on american citizens (just as we&#8217;re seeing here now with hate crimes against middle eastern and muslim people) and a public cry for retaliation and war. americans love to consider themselves more free and free thinking than the chinese who live under a government which doesn&#8217;t even pretend to be democratic. i think a re-evaluation may be in order.</p>

<p>as Joe <a href="http://goatee.net/2001/09#_11tu">says on goatee.net</a>: &#8220;The desperation of these actions speak of fear and impotency. And I hope America doesn&#8217;t respond in kind.&#8221;</p>

<p>and don&#8217;t even get me started on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28620-2001Sep14.html">Falwell</a>.</p> 

lani mentioned something interesting to me on the phone the other night. she said that her mother had learned during her airline training about terrorism that terrorists tended to (consciously or unconsciously) go after airlines whose names included the name of the country they were targeting. eg, American Airlines or United would be more likely targets than Delta or Northwestern. this makes a certain kind of sense. however, i haven’t been able to find any comprehensive statistics about terrorist attacks as broken down by airline online to verify it for myself.

<p>so far, i&#8217;ve only found this <a href="http://www.state.gov/www/global/terrorism/1999report/1999index.html">1999 report on global terrorism</a> and this <a href="http://www.pyramid.ch/airsafety_fatalairl.htm">collection of statistics on air safety</a> which breaks things down per airline but includes accidental crashes with bombings and doesn&#8217;t include hijackings.</p>

<p>if anyone knows where i can find some good data, i would appreciate a link.</p>