If This Doesn't Make You Smile, You're Not Human..

be sure and stick around for the Farley bit at the end.

Link to Youtube video

Trailer - Borat Movie!

..coming in november. i looked it up because yesterday mike, sarah, and i went to see superman, and there was a 10 foot cutout of borat's head with him holding an american flag in the lobby. there were no words, so i thought it might just be a random funny thing they had at that theatre. luckily, it's actually a movie.. and the trailer just hit. it's directed by larry charles, who has directed and produced curb your enthusiasm. according to the imdb forums, it's just started to test screen, and people are all "OMG, this movie is gonna be HUGE!"

Link to Youtube video

Ayn feels differently

I got this from the Ayn Rand Institute regarding our little warm fuzzies the other day - any thoughts?

Buffett and Gates Ignore the Fundamental Cause of World Poverty

June 27, 2006
IRVINE, CA--Commentators are hailing Warren Buffett’s $30 billion contribution to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation as a historic day for the alleviation of poverty and sickness around the world. They, like Buffett, think that tens of billions of dollars of charity directed by Bill Gates’s brilliant mind will change the world.
But, said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, “While Gates and Buffett are brilliant businessmen, they and other philanthropists ignore the fundamental cause of poverty, including poor health care, around the world: lack of capitalism. Wherever and to whatever extent capitalism exists, the productive ability of individuals is unleashed, enabling them to make their lives progressively better. The West used to be as poor as Africa today; it is capitalism that made us rich.”
“If the tribalist or religious dictatorships of Africa and the Middle East do not renounce their destructive political systems and adopt capitalism, even $100 billion in charitable handouts will make little difference in their lives.”
“Anyone who is truly committed to helping the world’s poor should first and foremost use their charitable dollars and their public platforms for the promotion of capitalism"

NINA AND JEFF'S BIG NEWS

NINA AND JEFF ARE GOING TO BE PARENTS!

WE would like to invite everyone over on Saturday at around 4pm for a BBQ to help us celebrate! Please let us know if you can make it.

Buffet-Gates Orgy

"As for me, I always had the idea that philanthropy was important today, but would be equally important in one year, ten years, 20 years, and the future generally.

And someone who was compounding money at a high rate, I thought, was the better party to be taking care of the philanthropy that was to be done 20 years out, while the people compounding at a lower rate should logically take care of the current philanthropy."

Interview

Basically, I like reading anything about this because I think it's really incredible. And heartwarming. The link is an interview with Buffet, but as I'm pretty sure most of everyone has heard about this...I'm just fishing for comments with links to cool articles / interviews on the subject.

Edit: I just found this link. Get the kleenex out...it's a tear jerker.

Announcing a New Low in Indirectly(?) State-Sponsored Propganda

J T F'n C

mike's playing

mike i hope im not overstepping my bounds here but i wanted to let everyone know youre playing at Kitty Moon on June 26th thats tomorrowwwww!
love,
maria

Pics from the Motherland

I gotta say, Koreans have good taste in food.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

link to youtube video

One not for the Ladies

Everyday when I log out of my hotmail account I get MSN.com headlines staring me in the face. I admit...I read the occasional "Love the Job, Hate the Boss?", "Why can't he dance?", or "How long is too long after a divorce?" for amusement.

Boys, it's a good thing I graze those headlines, otherwise I never would have found this gem...probably the best thing MSN.com will ever produce.

On a related note, I'm moving to South America.

OMG!

Hopefully this didn't go around in an e-mail years ago...but this is the first time I've seen this cool illusion on the net. It is definitely my favorite.

Instructions:

1. Focus on spot in the center for 40 seconds (oval thing in between and beneath the two heart shaped things.
2. Look away at a flat white surface (preferably a wall)
3. What do you see?
4. If you have having trouble making it come into focus try blinking a couple times while staring at the white wall.

This is perhaps the most stupefying and terrifying of my three most recent posts.

Please Enjoy

The hypocrisy alone, by virtue of the nature of this hypocrisy, is enough to blacken the heart with rage.

Oh, those wry Europeans

What would happen if they ran this ad in the U.S.? It would definitely piss someone off, and then they would get a platform to complain from, and it would be labeled "offensive," and all the pundits would be crying bloody murder from the right and left and then they would pull the ad to keep people from being offended. It's abysmally melancholic that we live in a country where the only justification for change is the platform of "it offends me." What the hell kind of a way is that to live? What changes for the right reasons? When was the last time the fucking truth mattered in this country? Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hang myself with the chain of "Pray for our President" bracelets I strung together while watching the chimpanzee porn I was driven to because these stupid humans are so nauseating I can't even stand the sight of them. (contributors to this sight excluded) PEACE

And in WTF News...

This Britney Spears story itself is pretty funny, but the last paragraph is the ULTIMATE WTF?!.

extended tommy z...

you can see the punches from a few different angles

Good thing we didn't order the Zbikowski fight...what a waste of money that would have been.

OMG Nascar Shocker

I don't know how many of you regularly check out Deadspin, but I didn't want you guys to miss this if you didn't see it. I guess someone sent in this photo that he took of Rusty Wallace, a NASCAR veteran. Take a close look at the logo. Where can we get these shirts - Dagan needs one immediately!

Camping this summer?

I have been meaning to organize another camping trip but keep procrastinating. But now I have something bigger to procrastinate, so I'm back to organizing. I'm realizing that the first thing that I need to do is find out a date when everyone can go...

So when is everyone available? I was thinking that later this month would be good, like June 24th weekend through July 15th weekend. Don't know how everyone feels about going over 4th of July - I'm not thinking there will be much room for a last minute reservation, but if everyone likes that date we can try...



As far as where we will go, I've just looked briefly at the Michigan and Indiana Dunes.

Indiana Dunes only has a JellyStone National Park right by there, and I know that they allow alcohol, as I camped with my drunk family there many a summer.

Michigan (Warren) Dunes has a KOA campground nearby, and it sounds like you can actually check your internet from anywhere on the campground, which seems perfect for our crew. It says absolutely nothing about alcohol, which I'm assuming is a good thing...

Both places are pet friendly, but I read in one of the posts that Warren Dunes doesn't allow pets. It wasn't on the official website, but we should probably make sure Chewy can come to both places.

Anyways - getting ahead of myself again! First I need to hear from you guys and see if you want to go in the next few weeks. If not, maybe we should try for fall camping because I know the summer gets really busy and hot and Pat has the MCAT to prepare for. So let me know ASAP so I can see if there's still availability in these places!

Link to KOA Campground Site (St Joseph's / Coloma)

Link to Jellystone National Park

One for the Ladies

And also for guys that are secure enough in their masculinity. I saw this website a while ago during the Barrett punch scandal.. and they did what Will from Deadspin called a "Zapruder like dissection of the event". Anyways, the website is really funny - it's called "Snobs vs. Slobs" and it's a Cubs fan and a Sox fan that regularly post about goings on in Chicago baseball. But the clincher for me, and the reason that I'm posting this is they have this... I don't know, gimmick, I guess... where they select a Handsome Team - a fantasy team with the most handsome men from each field position - and for some reason guys choosing "Handsome" players is the funniest thing in the world to me.. the people they choose and the comments they write are just hilarious. I've been laughing about it for a while now, and I realized I needed to share the joy with the rest of the gang.

Won, Sweat and Meals

It must be something like 5 a.m. in Chicago right now. Elliot and I just got back to Seoul from Mokpo, which is the small seaport town where my dad grew up on the southwestern tip of Korea. The "Shee-gol," or rural country. If any of you are timid at all of sushi, you should've seen what we had for lunch today. Fresh cut octopus, still moving as the waitress brought it to our table... you had to really pull on the wriggling arms to unstick them from the plate. Our two uncles cautioned us to chew hard before swallowing, otherwise the arms could stick to your throat and choke you. They said some guy died that way. The octopus was coupled with a spicy fish stew and a kimchi made out of what looked like garlic, but wasn't, and was better than any other kimchi I've had in my life. My breath probably still reeks (but I don't know it) and my mouth still waters just thinking of the taste.

We've been getting a lot of what you could call "culture", especially over the last two days hanging out with our two uncles (my dad's bro's). We were in Gwangju yesterday, which is like a more crowded and busy Gary, Indiana: dirty, industrial, and always carrying the curious smell of sewers. At night, there's a stretch of alleyways that light up with stores and clubs -- high school kids are out at 10 o'clock on a weeknight just walking around, chatting on their ultra-modern cell phones, and eating. That's one of the things that's going on all the time wherever you go in Korea, eating. Food vendors are everywhere, selling anything from dried out squid to rice cakes to all kinds of sweets. It's a little weird to see those high-tech kids standing next to an old lady selling corn from a rickety wooden cart.

We stayed there one night in what people here call a "love motel", which is like any other motel, but is especially catered for illicit love affairs. The covered parking garage (for anonymity) and selection of video porn in the lobby were evidence of that. Before that we went to see the Buddhist temple in the Gwangju mountians were our grandma's ashes are kept. Tucked away on a forested slope, it was basically a large room with bare straw floors and rows upon rows of sealed wooden cubbies lining the walls. A statue of Buddha sat in the center of the back wall; we lit four incense sticks and bowed to the statue three times, then to our grandma's ashes twice. I can only imagine (with sick pleasure) what my Christian cousins would've done in the situation. Then we went to a stream in the mountains, dipped our feet in ice cold, brisk moving water, and shared some kind of rice wine that was milky with a sweet aftertaste.

Korea is actually a really mountainous country. I didn't realize it before I came. It's probably something like the landscape of the Appalachian Mountains, with rolling, forested hills dotted with large rocks and cliffs. And people love to hike them.

Sorry I got no pictures to show yet. Seoul isn't as wirelessly wired (does that make sense?) as I thought it would be, so I've got nowhere to transfer the pics from my camera. But you'll see them eventually. We're doing some laundry and resting up at the guest house right now, waiting to see what a Friday night in Seoul is like. There are more stories from the past week (one I'm not even sure I want to tell yet) and I'm sure the next week should bring some more. Hope all's well in the beautiful U.S. of A. See you soon.