Don’t have sex with blacks?

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As I walked around Fells Point and Canton this afternoon, seeing the sights and buying sundry items, a green flier stapled to a telephone pole caught my eye, headlined, “PROTECT YOURSELF FROM AIDS!” The list that followed seemed pretty normal: “use condoms, avoid sex with multiple partners,” but item number three took me aback: “Don’t have sex with blacks! They are 14 times more likely to be infected!” A closer look showed that it was a National Alliance flier. White supremacist neo-Nazis.

Singling out and vilifying Africans on the basis of a crude statistical generalization: I can’t even begin to describe how wrong that is on so many levels. And equally troubling is the realization that I myself, a citizen of foreign ethnicity, am just as likely to be a target for this kind of ogrish hate.

I walked a bit further down the street and saw another flier: “Racist Scum, Your Time Will Come.” That didn’t make me feel very much better.

Geppi’s Barber Salon

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I just got a haircut today at Geppi’s Barber Salon in Little Italy, just a few steps from my door. I’d been expecting a plain old barber shop, populated by old men clipping away with their shears.

The word “Salon” should have tipped me off.

It was just a bit like walking into an FHM magazine, and having a supermodel cut my hair. Which certainly wasn’t a bad thing, I assure you. Felicia (I think that was her name) is a great hairdresser, plus, she likes cats. The price was surprisingly cheap — $15 and tip — and I think I look pretty good.

Maybe I should get my hair cut more often. ;)

Smart Pure Text

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I really enjoy text messaging, and SMS-craziness is one of my favorite quirks of modern Filipino culture, but this is ridiculous. A prepaid card should leave the phone’s basic functionality intact, even if reloading only adds text credits. Deactivating the subscriber’s voice calls for the sake of SMS is just too extreme and anti-user, no matter how well-documented the “feature” may be.

Class with Druckrey

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One of our core Digital Art subjects is a class under contemporary media mind Timothy Druckrey. It’s been interesting, if a bit unstructured, with richly varied content, and a fascinatingly expansive overview of media in the context of history and culture. I wonder if blogs are going to come into this as part of the modern media “revolution?”

Let’s Wallow

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Heh heh. Suddenly I’m glad I don’t have a TV in my room yet. (Link via Silflay Hakra, who has a great collection of links to today’s pertinent comics and editorial cartoons.)

Flaggone!

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Whole Foods was giving out free American flags at the cashier, so I got one, brought it home, and taped it to my windowsill, where it proudly waved in the wind. But now the wind has just blown the whole flag away, and I can’t find where it flew off to.

I guess I’ll just have to express my patriotism by eating the stuff I bought at Whole Foods: red salsa, blue corn chips, and white milk.

Year After

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That evening (Manila time), I had just gotten home from work, and was feeding the stray cats outside my door, when my roommate told me that the WTC in New York had been hit by a plane. Like so many others, I initially dismissed it as a freak accident, and played a little more with the cats, until my brother texted me to say that it looked like terrorism.

I joined my roommates in front of the TV, just in time to see the second plane explode. After several minutes numbly watching CNN, I speculated that this was the kind of event that starts world wars.

I was up till 2am reading blogs, gathering quotes, and of course scraping what news I could from whatever sites still had the bandwidth to deliver. As I settled into bed, I admit, with some wry shame, that part of me awaited a pretrib Rapture.

I was not particularly shocked, awed, or amazed at the catastrophe — partly because of natural Filipino jadedness, I suppose, a result of the way our country is incessantly pummeled by manmade and natural disasters; and partly because of distance. It was, after all, happening on the other side of the world.

Today, a year later, I’m here, on this side. It’s a bright and clear day, and the a cool wind blows flags at half staff. I really don’t have any other perspective to offer — but I can point you to The Dane, who puts it in context quite well.