The Animators' Guild Blog...

...is something i have been turned on to, lately. Today, they wrote that the Simpsons will indeed be renewed for two more seasons. Huzzah! and Caloo Callay!

NO.

Are we ready for flavoured bourbon?

It's backwards day.

100 Days, 100 songs, 100 locations, 100 dances.

SO awesome! thanks to WaDi for this.

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

Shane Battier in NYT Magazine

there was a great cover story in New York Times magazine about Houston Rocket/former Memphis Grizzly SHANE BATTIER. love that guy!

the weak-end

my boss, SteLa, sent me the above image. he's the coolest.


i'm ashamed to say we watched like six straight hours of "Lockup" about the New Mexico penitentiary system. Myspace has banned all links to this blog cos i updated my Myspace blog with a link to THIS. i wish i had attended the Postsecret event at UCR last week...they choose weird venues to visit when they come to Southern CA. i think we're going dancing tonight(!!!) but i'm tired.

Fish paste, i think, is kamaboko.

Via BOING BOING, thanks to JaHe...shrimp, sesame, fish paste and all!

wtf is 'democratic chess'?

many thanks to JaHe for this!! as i was saying to him, the 'democracy' is in that each piece's player's ability to weigh in before the real player makes a move, right? i think i'd move contrary to the ones that heckle my game, just to spite them.

isn't the beauty of chess being able to play one side, or both sides, by oneself? i imagine a couple of different scenarios: 1) all skill/knowledge will be parceled out and weaken a person's game, kinda like what wikipedia has done to all of our generally brilliant friends; or 2) better players will have the pieces that can't see well and will screw up gameplay cos they couldn't see the big picture.

(hey, can someone check the source code to find out when the artist put this page up? i wanna know what how long ago he started this, especially since he mentions "finishing in a couple of weeks"...)

Renee Stephens is just pissed she can't control all the minds on the internets...

i was reading about some backlash against a husband that was awful toward the woman who traded places/families with his own wife, Renee Stephens, on a reality tv show. In turn, Renee Stephens apparently disrespected and used all kinds of condescension on the family she was placed with...to put it nicely.

An Owen Thomas article (on Valleywag ) about the WifeSwap contestant posted the wife's online apologies, in which this woman claimed her husband had only agreed to participate in the show to please her. So, i looked around online to see if this woman was for real.

Renee Stephens' active and poorly designed website is undoubtedly from back in the day when she couldn't afford to send her kids to a $40k a year private school.

She puts a lot of worth on one's education, and seems to insult people without advanced degrees. Although her current blog containing the apology was taken offline, there is a blog entry from 2007 on ourhypnospace.com in which she states "I'm entering a doctoral program in Psychology in the Fall at the California Institute of Integral Studies..." and she "holds an MBA from the London Business School, and BA with Distinction from the University of Virginia. She is a Certified Hypnotherapist, Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, Certified Life Coach and Certified Destination Coach".

This woman was only trained and qualified to sell things...which she did, by inventing her own weight-loss method.

So, WTF is 'neuro linguistic programming'?!!! (to find out, see Slate.com, Skeptic's Dictionary and this NLP website) Let alone, a 'certified destination coach'? i still have no idea, except it has something to do with controlling your own brain's function. Then, there's the part about hynotizing yourself and believing you can persuade others through your words. Sounds like a marketing class taken to the self-help level to me...but, maybe it worked on the poor man who fell under the spell and married her.

wtf is she talking about?

politics, change and (cognitive) therapy...

i was listening to the press conference today, and thinking about the huge paradigm shift that has to occur in the 'usual way' things are/have been done in D.C. and how impossible it seems to accomplish in four years, let alone 100 days. i suck at understanding politics and history and 'seeing the big picture' and 'reading between the lines'. still, i am hopeful that my apparent novice outlook isn't simply naïve or idealistic...

all this led me to think about friends who have benefited from the cognitive-behavioural model of psychotherapy, and the reasons why it is considered a best practice in terms of length of treatment in relation to effectiveness, especially in this day and age of short-term non-preventative responses to acute illness.

according to the National Association of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapists:

"Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy... is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do."

sounds pretty obvious...and i still only grasp its application to help individuals at the highest levels of functioning: e.g. people who need a little help in their day-to-day and NOT people who are severely psychotic and have difficulty with reality orientation. this being said, i don't think our political system is completely psychotic, just repairably dysfunctional...and so perhaps the two seemingly diametrically opposed governmental parties have to come to a realisation that they need to change their way of thinking before anything can change, assuming, they feel there is indeed a need for change.

like a person who goes into therapy.

i haven't been in school or in a clinical setting for some time, but i DO remember a few things i learned from working with clients in a mental health setting:

• things get worse before they get better
• practice makes perfect, or at least practice makes it easier to utilise skills in an attempt to move toward better
• practice has to take place in a safe, structured environment with trained professionals
• healing, rehabilitation, recovery or whatever you want to call it requires trust (trust in the doctor, yourself, pharma, therapy etc. etc. etc.)
• nothing is solved or cured overnight or even in a few days/hours

i guess i'm thinking that the country has been removed from its own enabling (i.e. being stuck in the status quo) or self-destructive situation, and thankfully there is a system in place to try and get it better. some approaches work and some approaches fail...but most of the time we have to rely on evidence-based interventions to supply education and tools needed to improve the way one reacts to stressful situations. an inductive method encourages us to look at our thoughts as being hypotheses or guesses that can be questioned and tested...and if the tests fail, we need to find a better solution. if the tests succeed, then it reinforces things for next time.

but in the words of Carl Branananalewski:

"It don't matter. None o' dis matters."

Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit

i know, i know, you heard these already when you listened to the audiobook of Dreams of My Father...but taken out of the context of the book, these are hilarious! i would LOVE to hear the outtakes. (do they ever include them with an audiobook, like a DVD special feature?)

Barack Obama is tired of your motherfucking shit

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i should have thought of these.

These things actually cost $5 for 25!!! i think there should be other styles, like "Thanks a lot, douchebag." and "What a DB you are!"

why i hate Orange County...part 2 (?)

The Obama room is too much for customers of Anaheim's White House Restaurant. And i'm not talking about the price!!

There's a little too much gold décor, but i'd like to eat there, anyway...