they never forget...

By jp 03 Jan 2001

this taken from the asahi evening shinbun on my return flight from tokyo:

“GUWAHATI, India — A wild elephant pulled a man down from a tree, trampled him to death and for two weeks has refused to part with the corpse, police in northeast India said Sunday.

The man climed a tree to escape a herd of wild elephants rampaging through his village about 140 kilometers from Guwahti, the largest city in Assam.

One elephant grabbed him, pulled him to the ground and broke his legs.

“The elephant must have got even more irritated as the villagers were trying to free the man,” a forgest ranger said. “It trampled him to death and took the body along with him.”

That was two weeks ago, and the it been carrying the body around ever since, police said.”

wowee.

pikawho?

By jp 01 Jan 2001

some people have a religious experience when they talk to god. I had one the other night. I talked to pikachu. not that silly new nintendo crap, the real deal: it turns out the lady that does the voice for pikachu is the aunt of my current host in tokyo…

so the other night at dinner they whip out the phone and in three minutes Im on the horn with pikachu. she pikas at me for a few minutes, which almost killed me — I was laughing so card I almost peed the carpet, which is a no-no in any culture I think.

anyhow, I still dont understand the appeal of pokemon, but I think Im forever changed.

over and out

By anders pearson 20 Dec 2000

i’m heading back to maine immediately after my last final tomorrow. i’m taking a laptop with me so i should have some internet connectivity over break, but in general, i wouldn’t expect much from me for the next 3 weeks or so.

i’ll see everyone that i’m seeing when i see you.

everybody behave yourselves while i’m gone.

in and out

By jp 18 Dec 2000

So Shu lives again. I like how he finds me the night before I leave for Tokyo.

Hmm… what could he possibly want?

Anyhow. He’s getting fscking married. Everyone who knows him, drop a line. Or at least show up at the wedding (more importantly, the B-party).

coincidance?

By kah 17 Dec 2000

a funny thing happened the other day which most of you here may find interesting..

i have a messageboard, and i posted something about going to Maine this Christmas. this chick posts something the next day about how she’s going to Maine for Christmas as well, with her fiancee. she says he’s from Machias.
i tell her Anthony’s from Gardiner..
she talks to her fiancee and then asks, “is his last name by any chace DiMacro?”

crazy. so anyway, the fiancee is Nick Bergeron. :) i’ve never met him, but i assmue many of you here know/knew him!

tall, dark and...

By anders pearson 17 Dec 2000

i have progressed even further along my path to the dark side. with the help of my friends Julintip and Sheela, i purchased a nice black Kenneth Cole suit today. after seeing my combat boots, i received several threats to the effect of “if you wear those boots with this suit, i will have to kill you”. so i got some nice shoes too.

before you berate my silliness, go watch “American Psycho” and “Falling Down”. suits can be badass too…

and if any of you have any plans to be in midtown manhattan anywhere near the holidays, drop them now! crowds drive me nuts. i almost had to go postal.

wtf?

By anders pearson 14 Dec 2000

it’s 1 am and there is a marching band outside my window playing “living on a prayer”. shoot me now.

swarthmore cuts 3 varsity sports

By anders pearson 12 Dec 2000

dammit. i knew i should have gone to swarthmore. it’s nice to see a school actually place academics ahead of sports for once.

<p>when i was the online editor for the student newspaper at <a href="http://www.bates.edu/">Bates</a>, we came under heavy pressure from the athletics department to put the sports section on the back page (the back page is a desirable location since you don&#8217;t have to open the paper). they were pushing us because they wanted the copies of the paper that were sent to prospective students to show that Bates was really serious about sports. unfortunately, they had a lot of clout with the school and were able to basically give us the ultimatum that sports got the back page or we lost all of our funding. this threat presented three serious problems to the editorial staff: </p>
  1. by allowing outside organizations to dictate our content, our journalistic integrity would be seriously comprimised.
  2. for the entire history of the paper, the only thing which had stayed constant and could be considered a real “tradition” was the “question on the quad” section on the top fold of the back page; we considered it a part of our identity as a paper.
  3. the paper was funded partly by the school and partly by advertising. the advertising spot below the fold on the back page was our largest revenue generator; if it were to be moved to the middle somewhere, we would lose a significant portion of our income. since the paper was barely staying afloat as it was (actually we were $5K in the hole before any of this even started), this was not an attractive option. we were basically put in the position of deciding if we wanted half our funding cut if we stood up to them or a third of our funding cut if we submitted.
<p>we managed to resist for the rest of the year that i worked there (until i, and a few others, got laid off because of the vanishing budget) mostly because we had legally binding contracts with our advertisers that their ads would run on the back page for that entire year. sadly, the next year, the paper was forced to give up and the sports section is now on the back page. so the result is that now bates will appear &#8220;serious about sports&#8221; to the potential students but it no longer has even the most basic online version of its newspaper (for comparison, <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/">columbia</a> has 19 different student publications online).</p>

<p>at around the same time that was going on, Bates finally gave the athletic department the power to recruit and offer athletic scholarships. previously (and this was one of the reasons that i liked bates and chose to go there), the athletic department had a small amount of informal influence over admissions but were not explicitly allowed to recruit athletes. it seems clear to me that Bates is heading downhill now; destined to become just another of the schools which admit non-athlete students merely so they can be sure they have bodies to fill the stands at football games. </p>

<p>i have this fantasy about one day becoming disgustingly rich (we&#8217;re talking bill gates rich) and going back to bates and saying &#8220;i am willing to give you X billion dollars on the sole condition that you cut all sports and burn down the gymnasium.&#8221; just to see what they&#8217;d do.</p>

<p>i was eating dinner the other night and on the radio i heard them announce some essay contest aimed at high school students asking them to write an essay about how sports had changed their lives for the better. i missed the details on how to submit but i seriously considered, as a protest, sending in my own essay on how sports had taught me a valuable lesson about how fucked up our educational system and our priorities as a society really are.</p>

Martin Garbus seminar

By anders pearson 11 Dec 2000

tomorrow (2000-12-12), my employer is sponsoring a seminar by Martin Garbus, the lawyer who defended (and is defending) 2600 magazine in the DeCSS case entitled “Hackers, Napster, Free Speech, and Piracy: How it Will Change the Entire Communications World Including Entertainment and Education.” and, because we’re just so unbelievably /<-31337, we’re broadcasting it live on the internet. so if you happen to be in NYC, you should come check it out in person. otherwise, you should tune in from 16:00 to 17:30 EST.

emile and i saw him at 2600’s press conference during H2K. the man’s definately good at what he does.