The World Basketball Championships are still going on in Japan. A quick update – Turkey is playing Argentina tomorrow at 3:30am (EST).

If you’re in Lugano, that’s 9:30am – if you like basketball and live somewhere in the world where the game is not on at some crazy time, check it out 🙂

Argentina is a damn good team, and beating them would give Turkey a chance to come in second. (Let’s face it, the US is going to be in first when all is said and done).

If you can’t catch the game, I’ll post the results from the US and Turkish games ASAP tomorrow morning.

I returned from a weekend trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was a really good time, though too short as any vacation is.

To stay awake on the road I decided to not eat for the 8 hour car drive because doing so attempting to do so produces instant drowsiness – and one of my fears is nodding of for a second, looking up and seeing a Chevy Blazer implanted in my skull.

So, as they say, never go to the grocery store on an empty stomach. I’d like to add to that by saying never enter my house if there is BBQ and you haven’t eaten in 12 hours. My roomie made his famous burgers, that I don’t believe are made from cow meat – but are actually small cows compressed to fit on a bun.

In honor of Brazil – X-Tudos. Brazilian hamburgers with egg, olives, and 1/2 inch of munster cheese and potato crisps all under the same bun. Simply brilliant.

I went through 3 of them in less than 30 minutes, and at the moment I can still feel them in my stomach churning away. A cholesterol test I took this morning registered at 637 and my blood pressure was off the scale.

I do not believe I will have to eat for 3 days, but if there is ever a X-Tudo eating competition, I’m there.

…and yes I should have written from there to add South Carolina to the US States map. I am a bad person. A very, very bad person indeed…pictures of the real deal coming soon…

Images from the X-Tudo attack:

A shout out to all of the Pinoy hanging around L’avant Poste. Holla!

In the Philippines, protest organizers are setting up demonstrations on the fly using mass texting. And according to this article, it works.

Once they might have called a demonstration by printing fliers. Now, they do it by mass texting. Palatino had spent days getting the word out, banging out text after text on the keypad of his little Nokia phone.

…All the organizing is done through texting. It’s affordable and instant.

This is happening all over the world too. It always amazes me how in poorer countries I’ve been too, even the garbage men have the sharpest cells. I bet a man sitting in a hut somewhere in Indonesia has got a better cell phone than any of the Americans stopping by L’avant Poste.

Well, guess that beats air conditioning 😉

Those crazy Filipino hippies, protesting against haircuts and clothing.
?

I don’t know if you peoples have been following the Jill Carroll story. She was that journalist kidanpped in Iraq a few months back, held for 80+ days and later released.

She worked for the Christian Science Monitor, and has spread her story over 9 days posting an article per day. It has really captivated me and I’ve been reading each one daily.

Here is something along the lines she keeps bringing up, and I think are a good example of how the social sciences (anthro and history for example) are relevent and should be emphasized as much as stupid “No Child Left Behind” tests.

I’d heard that it was best for hostages to try to make captors see them as human beings, to elicit sympathy, so I tried talking to him…I was open, even friendly. That turned out to be a big mistake.

You can’t be that way with men in such a conservative culture. They often take it the wrong way. He began to get demanding, even assertive. At one point, the pin on my hijab came loose, and I started to pin it back up.

To Westerners this may sound like an innocuous exchange, but in the context of the conservative Middle East, this was a totally inappropriate advance. I needed to shut him down completely. I put my head down, held my hands in my lap, and didn’t move a muscle.

Granted, she was under unimaginable stress – but the point is still valid I think.