You have no (YouTube) Friends

I often embed YouTube videos when I post entries here (I’ve started collecting all posts with video into a single category), but from time to time, I post my own videos. While I used to directly upload my own video files, making both QuickTime and Windows Media Player versions available, with the advent and popularity of YouTube, I decided to start moving my videos there, thus creating my own YouTube channel.

Of course, although I don’t actually care about maintaining an active channel worthy of thousands of subscribers and followers, the sad part is that, in a big box, in big letters, the channel displays a list of your YouTube Friends and mine sadly says “You have no Friends.” That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?

Anyway, if you are more than a casual user on YouTube and want to be my friend (I can’t believe I’m actually writing this), please add me as a friend.

But you know, only if you want to.

Sad. So sad.

Blog facelift; Sites to checkout

If you have visited my site recently (as opposed to just reading off my feed), you’ll see that I’ve given the site a facelift– a new theme with some fancy AJAX stuff going on (which I may regret later) and some of my own tweaks for color, etc. I’ve also updated my blogroll to list some of the new blogs I’ve been reading lately:

• Confessions of a College Callgirl. I think the appeal here is self-explanatory, but particularly interesting tidbits lately: Blowjob Tutorial (try comparing notes to what’s in Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man), The Number is Eight, It Happened to Me!, and Workin’ for the Weekend. There usually isn’t art along with the posts that make it obviously NSFW, for tread carefully.
• David Byrne Journal. Aside from the awesomeness of Talking Heads and his continued work as a very talented musician (like being on the composing team that won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1988 for The Last Emperor), he’s a talented and accomplished writer as well. His blog is both interesting and entertaining; the first post I read when I discovered it– Social “Hateworking”, IKEA– got me to subscribe right away.
• Overhead in New York. One of many “Overhead in…” sites (linked to from the NY site), but being a New York-er, this one appeals to and entertains me the most. Overheard in the Office is a pretty good second.
• Stephen Fry. There are so many reasons to love Stephen Fry, including his role as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster (probably the best screen adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories), A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Blackadder (I know there’s an association-with-Hugh Laurie theme here). He’s only been blogging for a few months, but I love the way he writes (reflected well on screen in A Bit of Fry & Laurie) and he’s been blogging regularly since being asked to write a weekly tech column for The Guardian. He knows his tech, among many other things, and both techie and fuzzy can appreciate his posts. Check out his first column post, “Welcome to Dork Talk”, his hilarious review of smartphones, and his very well-written post on botnets.

Check ‘em out. (As if you didn’t already have RSS feeds to get through everyday.)

Mauricio Ricardo

Following along with the theme of sex and art, here’s a video of Brazilian cartoonist Mauricio Ricardo drawing people and animals, but starting with naked naughty bits:

Maybe this is how you get a palace with a phallus.

Bobb’e J. Thompson

I saw this kid on Ellen– he’s got to be one of the five greatest rappers of all time:

Helvetica– it’s not just a font anymore

Someone seriously made an entire documentary on a font. Word?

Okay, so it’s more about typography and graphic design, but still. And of course, I’ll watch it when it comes out on DVD (Tuesday, November 20).

The case of the double eyelid, part 3

Believe it or not, but yes, I have been asked to appear on the Montel Williams Show. Next week, they are taping a show on race and one of the topics they are focusing on is the idea of “erasing race.” One of the guests will be an Asian woman who has had Asian blepharoplasty (double eyelid surgery) to look more “westernized” and the representatives from the show contacted me to see if I (or someone I know) would be interested in appearing on the show as someone of Asian heritage who is against such surgery.

I assume they found me by stumbling on my 2005 blog posts on the topic (part 1 and the very brief part 2), but I’m not quite sure of the path they took to find the posts since, unlike some Google searches, I don’t show up as one of the top results for “double eyelid surgery” or “Asian blepharoplasty.”

In any case, while Montel is one of the more respectable daytime talk shows, it sounds like I would basically be going on the show to tell this woman that I think what she’s already done to herself is wrong. And to be honest, while I am against this desire among some Asian people to try to, as the folks at Montel say, “erase their race” and look more westernized, this desire to deny one’s own heritage, and (for the most part) purely elective plastic surgery in general, at the end of the day, like most things, I don’t feel so strongly about it that I expect other people to replace their own judgement and choices with mine. While I may not make the same choices, your body is yours and, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you are free to do with it as you wish. If you think double eyelid surgery or breast implants or liposuction will make you happy and you really want to do it, you should do it.

So, given all that, one of the things I’m really against is staged conflict (I have enough problems without having to create drama) and that is exactly what most daytime talk shows and going on Montel would be. Sorry America, I won’t be launching my talk show career just yet.

Oh, the places you’ll go (on the Internet): phreequeshow

In this past week, not one, but TWO movies on cable with conjoined twins: Twin Falls Idaho and Brothers of the Head. In reading about conjoined twins on Wikipedia, I was led through the World Wide Web to eventually land on this website:

phreequeshow

Fascinating and, in many ways, inspiring. (You try to dress yourself, eat or any number of things without any arms or legs.)

God, Adam as micromanagers

I’m not sure based on what wishlist it does it, but My Tivo picked up Hedwig and the Angry Inch again:

What kind of God creates Adam in His image and then pulls Eve out of him to keep him company? And then tells him not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge? I mean, He was so micromanaging. And so was Adam. But Eve– Eve just wanted to know shit.

More quotes from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Read a book, okay?

Clever movie promotions and hilarious racial coincidences (or not?)

Earlier this week, 7-Eleven announced that it will convert a dozen of its stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores in The Simpsons universe, and those stores plus most of the other 6,000+ 7-Eleven stores will begin selling items from the television show, all to promote the soon-to-be-released Simpsons Movie. It’s a clever advertising campaign, combining good ol’ brick-and-mortar coverage and the box office draw of a big summer movie release, especially clever when the stores are as well-known as 7-Eleven and the draw is as powerful as that of The Simpsons in general, a franchise that is almost a decade old, that permeates pop culture, and around which there is a cult-like devotion.

For me however, aside from the clever movie promotion, the reason I’m writing about this is not because I’m necessarily a big fan of The Simpsons– I think it’s a funny show and I watched it pretty regularly at some point, but I really don’t get the cult-like devotion (including how everybody would grab their dinner and rush to watch the reruns in the lounge during college) and frenzied anticipation surrounding the movie. Instead, when discussing the news in the office this week (a particular coworker is our in-house Simpsons devotee and expert, often taking any and all opportunities to relate real life situations, work-related or otherwise, to Simpsons episodes), a coworker (not the same one) told a hilarious story that, on his behalf, I just had to blog (hopefully, I’m summarizing relatively accurately):

On Monday, he got a call from “Brooke” from ABC 7; she left a message, asking him to please call her back at 415… So, naturally curious, he called back and she said she was calling about the Kwik-E-Mart promotion. He was obviously confused, but then realized she was trying to call a 7-Eleven in Mountain View when she asked, “Is this the 7-Eleven on Pear Road?” He said, “No, this is a private residence,” and that was that, but the hilarious coincidence– or not– is that he is, in fact, Indian! And he has, in fact, gotten a “wrong number” call at least once before for 7-Eleven!

I did some digging around– online and offline– and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how they thought his phone number was the number for the 7-Eleven on Pear Avenue. Aside from the fact that the numbers aren’t actually similar in any way and the phonebook, online and offline, doesn’t even list the number for that store (which is weird in and of itself– Google simply lists it as (650) 555-5555), the way to find the correct contact info for the store is easy enough: first, the 7-Eleven website lists the new Kwik-E-Mart locations, including the San Francisco/Mountain View store. I don’t know why, but while the address is listed, the phone number isn’t. However, the 7-Eleven website does have, like most retail company sites, a “store locator” feature and if you search for the closest store near Pear Avenue in Mountain View, CA, you get the correct contact info, including phone number.

So, hilarious coincidence or is someone out there picking Indian surnames out of the phonebook in search of Apu?

(And no, my coworker’s name isn’t Apu.)