I have created a survey to facilitate research for my undergraduate senior thesis. The survey deals with assessing problematic Internet use amongst a demographic of predominantly college students. Anyone is welcome to fill this out and the more responses I get, the more productive my research will be. The survey is short and should take no more than 10 minutes of your time. Please pass this information on to ANYONE who might be interested!

Click here to access the survey

Fox commentator Glenn Beck has been getting a lot of media attention lately. He’s been pulling around 2 million viewers every night appealing to the populist anger over our current financial woes. I’ve watched a couple of his viral youtube clips, and generally agree with a lot of what he’s been saying lately. But for some reason, I just don’t trust the guy.

On March 3rd, he said something on Fox & Friends that really got my spider-sense tingling. Check out this clip, around the 1:55 mark:

Continue reading this post…

North Korea Threatens War Against Japan Over Missile

North Korea’s government vowed to wage war against Japan if Japanese defense forces try to shoot down a missile that the communist nation says will carry a communications satellite.

“Should Japan dare recklessly to intercept the DPRK’s satellite, its army will consider this as the start of Japan’s war of reinvasion more than six decades after the Second World War,” the official Korean Central News Agency said today in an e-mailed statement. North Korea is also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada ordered his forces on March 27 to shoot down any North Korean object entering his country’s airspace and deployed guided-missile units around Tokyo. Japan, along with the U.S., China, South Korea and Russia want to forestall North Korea’s plans to launch what the government in Pyongyang calls a “peaceful” satellite, and refocus on joint efforts to end its nuclear program.

I forsee a couple of scenarios from this. Ordered from best-case to worse-case:

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Osaka Popstar is a punk super-group of sorts formed in 2006 by New Yorker John Cafiero. Cafiero wanted an outlet to express his music but also incorporate his love for Japanese anime. In 2006, Cafiero teamed up with several well known punk rock artists to create the anime based punk group, Osaka Popstar. They released their debut album/DVD on May 23, 2006. Their lyrics consist of topics such as characters in Japanese anime like Astroboy and Sailor Moon. The first single off the album was a cover of singer/song writer Daniel Johnston, entitled “Wicked World.”

Main lineup

* John Cafiero - Lead Vocals
* Jerry Only (The Misfits) - Bass Guitar
* Dez Cadena (Black Flag, The Misfits) - Lead Guitar
* Ivan Julian (The Voidoids) - Rhythm Guitar
* Marky Ramone (Ramones, The Voidoids, The Misfits) - Drums

I’m a big fan of these guys, and I found out about them because they’re on Misfits Records (Jerry Only’s record label) and looking up stuff on YouTube I came across their music videos. They are very pop-punk, which has caused a lot of die-hard fans of the bands these men were part of to decide that this band is garbage, but I really like what they’ve done because you can tell it’s 5 friends getting together and having a good time playing music that they all enjoy.

Here’s the link to their official site, and their last.fm page.

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I’m in Washington DC for the National Cherry Blossom Festival, a celebration of  the spring season and commemoration of friendship between Tokyo and Washington.  The Japanese cherry blossoms, known as “sakura” in Japan, were first given to the United States in March of 1912.   The annual festival has been held every year when the trees in Potomac Park bloom since 1935, with a brief suspension during the second world war.  Nowadays its a great excuse to eat sushi, drink sake, fly kites, play rugby, sing, dance, and even have a parade.  The weather has been  less than ideal and I’m dragging my sorry ass around with the flu, but I snapped a few pictures of the cherry blossoms to share.  Continue reading this post…

That’s right, stream old-school NES games here.

No need to install software, play it right out of the browser. Enjoy!

Some of you may have heard the news about MTA fare increases.

New Yorkers can say goodbye to the $2 subway ride.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was voting Wednesday on a budget-balancing plan that would raise the cost of a single ride on New York City buses and subways to $2.50, raise bridge tolls and lay off hundreds of transit workers.

The MTA will vote on the fare hikes to close a $1.2 billion gap, unless there is a last-minute bailout from state lawmakers.

Under the plan, a 30-day MetroCard will cost $103, up from $81. Fares on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North would rise an average of 23 percent, and tolls also would go up on the MTA’s bridges and tunnels.
The board also is expected to approve service cuts including the elimination of bus and subway routes. About 1,100 transit workers would be laid off.

-The Associated Press

This bad idea could not have come at a worse time. I thought they were trying to make NYC a more pedestrian friendly place? How are you going to do that when you discourage people from using mass transit?

Continue reading this post…

I had some problems a while ago trying to upload some clips from the Drawback Halloween show. I thought I’d give it a try again, and SUCCESS we have a good clip on YouTube now:

Click on the link above for more clips from that show. This clip is only from the beginning of the set.

You might have missed this as a comment in Khalid’s post, but Nadya Suleman recently admitted that her original plan was to use government programs to help pay for her kids.

If she was a fan of Futurama, she would’ve already known that this plan wouldn’t work.

Plot
[...]
They go to Bender, who is finding that government stipends aren’t a good get-rich-quick scheme (as it costs him more to look after the children every week than the $1200 the government pays every week and the stipend was merely to help raise the children) and is now selling the twelve children.
[...]
Bender, having been arrested by child services for crimes too numerous to list, returns the orphans to the orphanarium (which is subsequently named after him, though later episodes do not reflect this), and the one-eyed Leela goes back to her old oddball life.