pushing the envelope

Sacha Baron Cohen, the guy who does Ali G and Borat, is selling out.

First, he has started to appear on talk shows to promote his show, when earlier he would refuse to be seen in public out of character. When this first started to happen, I thought, well, enough people are in on the joke now that it's okay. But I still feel he could have kept his integrity by staying out of the public eye.

Second, he is taking this whole Borat thing a bit too far. Basically his Borat act involves saying horrible things, racist and otherwise, while pretending to be a Kazakhi television reporter. When it started, it was a nuanced and deftly constructed act, in which he would use people's ignorance against them by pretending to be completely out of sync with civil society, and in doing so bring out their own lack of civility. Kazakhstan at the time was just a symbol, representing a place about which most Westerners are completely ignorant, to the point where they could expect anything from someone who was from such a place.

This involved him making fun of many races, but also of Kazakhstan itself. Needless to say, everyone got offended, but none moreso than the Kazakhs themselves, who started having to defend their own traditions and decrying what was being said about them. At this point, Cohen had two options: 1. to ignore the Kazakh response, and 2. to retatliate. Unfortunately, he chose the second. So instead of being a nuanced attack on people's ignorance, it became an all out schoolyard brawl with the Kazakh authorities.

The latest episode in the saga involves him parading outside the Kazakh embassy maintaing that despite what the Kazakh embassy might try to tell you, rape and ping pong ARE in fact the two favorite pastimes of Kazakhstan.

It is childish and mean. It is irresponsible, and it is unnecessary. Media is powerful, and he should know how badly his words can hurt the image of a country. If his idea is to manufacture high-brow comedy then he shouldn't assume everyone will get it. And if they don't he shouldn' lash out at them.

Needless to say, I still think he is a genius, and the new Borat movie will definitely be worth a watch. But the joke is starting to go sour now. Let's hope it doesn't start to stink anytime soon.

ma homeys

So apparently up until 1975, the country we now know as Benin was known as the Kingdom of "DaHomey"! How brilliant is that! I wonder if that's where the word comes from...

nandrolone

So according to Cricinfo, one (admittedly weak) defense for Shoaib failing the drugs test is that he was taking Ventolin inhalers. Apparently Ventolin inhalers contain steroids.

Hmm...

I better not take any drug tests anytime soon.

spelling bee minus

Here's an excerpt of an email I received from Columbia, that they sent out to all prospective students. Basically they are showing off about how hot their visiting speakers are, and how so many of their faculty have recently won big prizes etc. So they say:

Next, two Columbia University Scholars were recently awarded a Nobel Prize. Orphan Pamuk, a Scholar in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures and a Fellow with the University's Committee on Global Thought, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"Orphan Pamuk" indeed. I almost want to rescind my application immediately...

it'd be so empty without me

Dear readers,

My heartfelt apologies for leaving you postless for so many days. Things are heating up with applications et al. Here, however, is a little article I just came across that I had to post about. So here ends my hiatus..

Apparently Canadian troops in Afghanistan are having a hard time getting through "almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet-high marijuana plants."

So they are wondering how to get rid of them.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Hmm.. I wonder what else they tried.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hillier said dryly.

Hahahaha.. downwind indeed. I'll bet they sucked that shit up as far into their lungs as possible.

One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

What a wonderful story.

a post about mush

Well, I had to... He's everywhere these days...

There are two things in particular on which I will comment.

1. His speech to Washington's (expat) "community." -- First of all, he is a tremendous speaker. He kept it colloquial, seamlessly blended Urdu and English, made jokes, and used statistics to try and convince us of the nation's supposed unbounded progress. Of course I took the joviality as well as the accuracy of the stats with a few tablespoons of salt, but still, he spoke with far more tact and flair than on his previous visit.

2. His appearance on the Daily Show. -- Needless to say, I was dreading this, and was utterly prepared to be embarassed. Instead, I was amused and delighted by the way he handled himself. He did not appear overly earnest, and showed himself to be quite upstanding. Only as I watched did I realize the method to his madness. Because he can come on some random BBC show all he wants, but nothing will sink itself more deeply into the hearts and minds of America than a humorous, unstuffy, sincere appearance on the Daily Show.

I am, however, at a loss to figure out whether this is merely self-promotion for his book, a remarkably astute way of utilizing popular media to promote the country's image, or both.

Ergo, I am in a dilemma. As much as I want to read the book, I'm not sure I want to support how it's being promoted... hmm...

hos by any other name

Dog commented on the whole business of name-discrimination based on what are perceived to be black or white names etc. I'd like to follow up with a personal anecdote.

A few months ago, I emailed a guy off Craigslist for tickets to a show. It was 2 pm, the show was at 8, so this guy had 6 hours to sell them. His ad said he had wanted to go but now he couldn't so he was selling at face value. Great. So I emailed him, and included my number in the email. An hour and a half went by without any response.

Just for the heck of it, I asked a friend of mine with a rather more 'pleasant-sounding' name to send another email. Lo and behold, within 10 minutes he received a phone call, and within 45 minutes we had the tickets.

Which means if I had been the only one who contacted him, he would probably still not have sold them to me. He would rather lose 160 bucks than talk to someone with a funny name.

Name discrimination is alive and well.

Asshole.

a milestone

Dear readers,

Today is a momentous day indeed. In addition to being Google's 8th birthday and my mother's 58th, today also officially marks the one-month anniversary of billu.net's first post!

(Fans will notice I am not counting the "test post" that was put up two days earlier.)

So 31 days, 36 posts, and counting...

armchair pakistanis

I was at a yuppie Paki dinner recently.

Which means I have recently been subjected to much discussion about the 'state of the nation,' as it were.

Of course, we, as concerned citizens, using a bird's-eye-view from our perch 7,470 miles away, debated most fervently the topics that affect us least. The rights of women, the state of education, recent news bites, how to eradicate feudalism, fundamentalism, and other deep-rooted problems that we are all so qualified to fix.

For the most part, it was intelligent conversation. Granted, it was not only hypothetical but also hypocritical -- what could be more hypocritical than an expatriate teacher complaining about the lack of good teachers in the country? Yet, as far as such things go, it was of a reasonable calibre. Except the one girl who would offer up her views in neat little platitudes, like "women are treated so badly in Pakistan," or "there is so much violence in Pakistan," without any examples or follow-up comments.

Which brings me to my point. Why do people talk when they have nothing to say? Did she think people were going to respond "Oh, what a wonderful point, I hadn't thought of that?" Did she think that she was saying was particularly groundbreaking? I just don't get it.

Much to my delight, however, she, and we all, were chided by an older member of our party, who proclaimed us to be "Armchair Pakistanis," loaded with empty opinions and devoid of meaningful action.

Of course, in the true tautological manner of an Armchair Pakistani, it makes me sad and concerned that there are so many of us. I'm not, however, planning to do anything about it anytime soon. Surely this makes my country weep.

To illustrate my point, here is an image of my weeping country, straight from my own messed up imagination.

staying abreast of the market

zDog posted a few days ago about the Finnish guy who paid 32,000 bucks for fondling a woman's breasts 10 times. Of course, I have something to say about this.

First, a simple calculation. If we assume, for the sake of underestimation, that he fondled both breasts seven of those ten times, but that the other three times he was too much of an idiot to make full use of his purchase, and only fondled one breast at a time, it works out to:

(32,000 / 10 ) / (7 * 2 + 3) ~ 188 dollars per breast per fondle.

Now, as every economist is taught, you can put a price on most things. However, certain goods are notoriously difficult to quantify. Yet, micro models are constructed that determine the cost of clean air, and actuaries work long hours to put a value on human life. The way prices work in unquantifiable markets has less to do with competition and more to do with the general public's "willingness to pay" for such a good.

This means two things:

1. If he agreed to pay, as he says he did, then the price is not too high. Clearly, this is not a regulated market. A monopoly by definition can set whatever price it wants. Since an unregulated market operates outside the law anyway, it is not subject to anti-trust laws, and thus the consumer is not protected from a monopoly entity. (Which is why a hooker or a drug dealer or a craigslister can rip you off without you being able to do shit about it). So the court basically has no business in this matter, unless it charges her with something akin to prostitution.

2. The court's verdict as far as determining the appropriateness of the price was completely arbirtrary. What amount, for example, would they have considered appropriate? 10 dollars? 175? Is there a threshold at which this is an acceptable transaction? What about other factors, e.g. how hot the woman is? On what basis did they make the deduction?

We here at billu.net believe that a referendum of some sort would have been a far fairer and more democratic method of determining the average person's willingness to pay for a breast fondle. And so, we ask you once again, dear readers, to tell us what you think, in this, our second weekly poll:

(Note: all prices below are in US dollars. For conversion to other currencies, please click here.)

How much is a breast fondle worth?

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51-100
100-150
150-188
188-250
250+

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