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WAS to EWR to NRT to HKG to.. ah, I lost track

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After a whirlwind many hours, my traveling companion Ellen and I are in Saigon. And, as luck would have it, leaving tomorrow after two nights here. We made it to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC – same thing as Saigon; Ho Chi Minh is kind of a big deal here) with only two hitches.

1. Our relatively insane flight schedule took us from Washington to Newark to Tokyo to Hong Kong to HCMC. The final three flights – Newark to Ho Chi Minh – were nominally the same flight number on the same airline, though we had to disembark at each stop. Because we booked our tickets late by international travel standards, our seats were originally apart, and after some wrangling we got seated together (Ellen slept for the vast majority of the trip, so this turned out to be a nonfactor anyway). The unintended consequence of this was we only got 1 boarding pass for the double leg of Tokyo to Hong Kong to Saigon. Upon re-boarding our flight in Tokyo, they tore our ticket stub. Continue reading →

Date, Interrupted

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I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. It’s been a long few weeks without a break – tests, tons of work, and a couple of special trips up to my hometown D.C. – one for a date (!), and one for a job interview. So sorry, not sorry, for the delay.

Like this.

The date is the topic of today’s post. It was a nearly-perfect afternoon and evening, but I promise I’m not going to write sappy hogwash about bucolically strolling around the Washington Monument under a backdrop of thousands of kites, although that’s exactly what we did. If you’re looking for that, look for a blog with pink frills and prominent background pictures of roses (or maybe Chelsea Handler and Tucker Max, if that’s your thing). But those of you who know me well know that I am absurdly picky and the mere fact that I even went on a date, much less wanted to write about it, is at least noteworthy.

(Andrea, my date, actually suggested I write about what happened. See? She’s a good one!) Continue reading →

21 Reasons Why 21 Reasons to Become A Vegetarian Stinks

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A while ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article published on a website called “21 Reasons to Become a Vegetarian.” It was oddly posted on an adopt-an-animal website; I tracked down the origin of the article to a doctor named Vernon Coleman, who wrote a vegetarian book “Food For Thought,” as well as other books on politics and, apparently, cricket. He is also an outspoken opponent of vaccinations (hooray, polio!) and “conventional cancer treatment.” Yeah.

My friend, by the way, was a vegetarian and on her way to becoming a full-blown vegan.

Below is the article, with each bullet point from the original article in black answered by my annotation in red. Before you read, you should know that I think vegetarianism is perfectly healthy if done right and not an intrinsic bad. I do take issue with vegetarians trying to convert me, a top-of-the-food-chain steak eater, to vegetarianism. It’s like a Mormon trying to convert dead Jews: a lost cause. Give it up, people. And enjoy the skewering (ha!) of the article below. It starts with a couple of concessions: Continue reading →

My Best Friend is a Duke Fan

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I posted this elsewhere, but since it’s personal, I’ll repost here.

“My best friend is a Duke fan.”

Shudder.

About twice a year (sometimes three), I think these words to myself and physically recoil. How could I be associated with such a being? How could I justify my fandom as a Tar Heel when treason runs so close to home? Continue reading →

Thoughts on Birthright Israel

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Over winter break, I finally took the plunge and went on Birthright. For those of you that don’t know, Birthright (technically called “Taglit Birthright”) is a program that sends American Jews on a ten-day trip to Israel… for free. It sounds too good to be true, but there’s no catch. It really is free, even airfare. All Birthright requires is that you’re Jewish and between 18-26. I returned the day my classes started again here, so I’ve just now beaten the jetlag to write down a few thoughts: Continue reading →

A Brief Open Letter to ESPN

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Dear ESPN:

I appreciate that, as the unquestioned Worldwide Leader in sports news and entertainment, you have to cover the most relevant and interesting sports-related information of the day. Really, I do. I understand the Tim Tebow phenomenon, of blanket coverage for a mediocre rookie quarterback, and I understand the attention given to the NFL Draft, Yankees and Red Sox baseball, and Duke and Lakers basketball.

(I don’t understand the hours of unending coverage of the World Series of Poker, but that’s for another letter.) Continue reading →

A Christmas Story: The Search for the Perfect Tree

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In honor of Christmas, or “Festivus,” as we Jews tend to call it, here’s a post from last year’s expedition to find a Christmas tree in St. Louis. Few of you have seen this before, so consider it new.
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For the first time in my short, Jewish life, I was invited to take place in the time-honored Christian tradition of cutting down the Christmas tree. According to rigorous scientific research, such as authentic-looking blogs and websites with festive backgrounds written in Comic Sans font, the custom of erecting a Christmas tree began in the time of the Romans with the festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia was a celebration of the god Saturn, and was marked by pretty much everyone having sex with everyone else in massive orgies. Whether you were a male or a female was evidently unimportant. Friends and family exchanged gifts, and traditional social norms were relaxed, but really Saturnalia was all about sex. Sex with lots of unknown people, actually.  In a seemingly incongruous ritual, revelers also decorated their homes with bits of evergreen shrubbery. Continue reading →

Musings on Faulkner

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Can you think of a more boring title for a post?

When I was a junior in high school, I took AP English Literature with a teacher I’ll eponymize as Mrs. Carroll. English Lit was a tremendously challenging class – probably the hardest I had in my career – that most students hated, since Carroll made it a habit to seat students in a circle and call people out, Socrates-style, for discussion points.

I have two enduring memories from that year. First, Mrs. Carroll handed me back my first paper, a five-page analysis of Benvolio from Romeo and Juliet, with all but the last page crossed out with giant red “X’s” and a huge “NO” written the first page. The second memory was of a thirty-minute discussion about the meaning behind the literal tearing in half of the queen from Beowulf.

Not actually my paper. Her handwriting was worse.

Continue reading →

Five Fingers = Five Times the Pain

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Yesterday I received my pair of Vibrams “Five Finger” shoes, which you’ve probably seen. They look like gloves for your feet, and the idea is that it forces you to run how people were supposed to run.

I won’t go into depth about Born to Run or any of that crap except to say that I believe the author, Christopher McDougall, when he says that people were never meant to run heel-to-toe, which is what sneakers and running shoes promote. To be very brief, the biomechanics of the human foot appear to suggest that people are designed to generally walk heel-to-toe but run on the pads of our feet, and for extended periods. Since the publication of Born to Run, research into barefoot running has exploded, and the science seems to bear out McDougall’s anecdotal evidence that people who don’t wear shoes tend to walk and run in the manner described.

This made sense to me, because like many runners with an elephant-like stride (not a good thing), I tend to get shin splints, knee pain, and all sorts of random aches cropping up after some weeks of continuous training. But the real impetus for switching to Vibrams, which essentially allows soft-footed children of suburbia like myself to run on pavement without having to develop blisters and callouses, was simply boredom.

Continue reading →