Awesome.

True story from NPR:

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.

“You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help,” Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”

“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”

Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. “He just had almost a sad face,” Diaz says.

The teen couldn’t answer Diaz — or he didn’t want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill ’cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”

The teen “didn’t even think about it” and returned the wallet, Diaz says. “I gave him $20 … I figure maybe it’ll help him. I don’t know.”

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen’s knife — “and he gave it to me.”

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, “You’re the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch.”

“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”

This! Is!…

Jeopardy!

Tim rocked my world and nabbed some killer free tickets to the final night of the Jeopardy taping at the Kohl Center in Madison. It was the final two tapings of the College Tournament of Champions, episodes that will air May 15 and 16. Here’s what I learned:

- Alex Trebek does question-and-answers during the commercial time. He’s the same persona on screen and off.

- If Alex screws up reading an answer, like mispronouncing a name, they rerecord him reading it during the commercial and replace the flub with the rerecording. The answer that has Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is a rerecording.

- I know who wins the tournament but I won’t tell.

- The final Final Jeopardy we will see on TV was not the original. One of the contestants did something disruptive as Alex revealed the final money totals, so after they finished they rerecorded the revealing of the Final Jeopardy answers. It was madness.

- It was so weird to see Alex do the things I’ve seen him do on TV so many times.

- If what was shown on the big screen as they taped the show is the final product, I will be on TV twice; once each episode. On May 15, I’m in the bottom left corner of the screen for a few seconds. On May 16, I’m  on for much longer, making strange movements and cheering. We were right in front of the UW band, so look for them and you’ll see me. I’m in a gray t-shirt.

- Jeopardy is awesome.

I knew it.

I knew this would happen. I knew that Obama would get punished by the establishment and the media for telling the truth rather than pandering for votes. I’m going to provide fuller quotes rather than snippets because it is the sound-bytes than cause the most confusion and misrepresentation of what candidates say:

Said Obama: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

If you go month, years, decades or more without decent jobs and are forced to live through the poor decisions of two eight-year presidencies, you will become bitter. Even if you’re an optimist, you still have to work. Obama is just pointing out what’s true. People do cling to religion for escape or feel better about themselves. They might also resent the increasing immigrant population that is taking jobs.

So let’s see how Clinton responds: “Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families. If we start acting like Americans and role up our sleeves we can make sure that America’s best years are ahead of us.”

Typical. I wonder how many times she’s said “roll up our sleeves” during this campaign. This remark is just a composite of standard political rhetoric. It may be a nice thing to say, but it misrepresented what Obama said. And no matter what she says, Clinton will be a continuation of Bill’s presidency. In some ways that’s a good thing, but I suspect that no one wants to hear about Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, or any of the bull that came out of that administration.

Then the McCain campaign responded to Obama’s remark: “It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

CNN contributor Jeffery Toobin responded well: “I just think it’s remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single-family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who came from very modest upbringings, somehow he’s the elitist? That’s really a pretty extraordinary sort of contortion of his background.”

Especially when that contortion comes from a Clinton of all people. Someone who made $109 million last year. Someone who’s been a Washington insider for upwards of two decades. Obama responded well to this: “John McCain–it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch?”

Like I said, I knew that because Obama doesn’t pander to every voting bloc with the standard rhetorical bullshit the other candidates speak fluently, he would be punished by the media. The media doesn’t speak in sentences; they only understand sound-bytes. If he wins the nomination, the Republicans will use everything Obama has said to attack him. I just hope it won’t be his downfall, because we don’t need a third term of Clinton or a third term of Bush in McCain. This country has been through enough.

More on the ordeal at the Huffington Post here and here.

It’s about time

From the Onion:

“MATHEMATICS TO RETIRE FAVRE’S NUMBER”

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Mathematicians, statisticians, number theorists, and members of numeral-oriented professions held a press conference at MIT Tuesday to announce plans to honor quarterback Brett Favre’s stellar 17-year career by retiring the number four. “After careful consideration, we came to our conclusion based on the following factors: one, Favre’s passion for the game; two, his unmatched ability to win; three, his resilience and sheer toughness in the face of adversity on and off the field; and five, the fact that he holds every significant passing record,” professor Jeffery Hamilton said. “No person will be permitted to ever use the number again, though it may be necessary to create a new integer to place between three and five.” Favre’s number will be retired sometime during the 2008 NFL season and will join the other numbers retired from mathematics, including 23, 42, and 1,003,256.

The first step…

Bill O’Reilly thinks America is a “noble nation.” In his view, those who think like him are traditionalists. They think America is ultimately good despite its mistakes (‘mistakes’ is an understatement). On the other side of his “culture war” are the secular-progressives. O’Reilly claims the “S-Ps” want to drastically change the country’s ways, which he thinks shouldn’t happen.

Make no mistake: to O’Reilly, the traditionalists are conservatives and the S-Ps are liberals. Anyone who watches his show knows which ideology he loves to hate. But I never bought his argument that S-Ps think America is ultimately bad.

Liberals have often been accused of “America-bashing.” They point out all of the bad stuff about our country–there is plenty to point out–and don’t like to acknowledge anything good America does. While this can be quite evident at times (especially when there is a Republican in the White House who is doing plenty of bad stuff), I realized that the reason of pointing out all the bad stuff is not to bash America. (I haven’t met anyone, Republican or Democrat, who arbitrarily bashes Bush or America overall.) It’s to try to find the wrongs and make them right.

People who say that America’s image is very poor abroad say so because they want it to be better. Some say it just to take another dig at the President, but it’s just true. But many things have caused our image to suffer. I will say that forcefully because it’s true and I want it to change. I want the doubters to acknowledge it. They will say, “You just hate America.” I love America. I want the world to love America. In order for that to happen, we have to all realize that there is a problem that needs fixing.

So, to claim the Iraq War is a failure or that our health care system needs major repair is not to be anti-American. The first step to recovery is admitting we have a problem. We are a deeply flawed, arrogant nation, and our President has not helped to make us better. That’s not America-bashing; that’s just true.

Bond and Bourne

John McClane, Rambo, the Terminator. They are the American Action Hero: muscular, terse, a killing machine. They favor spouting clever catchphrases and blowing stuff up over expressing emotion. To them, women are hors d’oeuvres best enjoyed while they serve cold dishes of revenge to bad guys. In recent years, Hollywood has deconstructed this action hero archetype and rebuilt it into the more complicated and affected man.

Two such characters, Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity (2002) and James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), inhabit the stereotypical macho man role but confront emotional walls typical in males and discover the pain that can come with true vulnerability. These men, however, are not just movie characters. They share the same struggle with identity and masculinity with males in the real world.

The James Bond movie lovers have come to know is a suave, martini-drinking womanizer who effortlessly shoots bad guys and jets around in sports cars. But the Bond in Casino Royale is different. He’s still rough around the edges, an arrogant thug who cannot control his emotions or his actions. When he meets Vesper Lynd, the ravishing femme fatale, she sees through him easily: “You think of women as disposable pleasures, rather than meaningful pursuits,” she says.

After Bond realizes his transparency, he treats Lynd as a meaningful pursuit rather than a disposable pleasure. He begins to trust her. Eventually, he gives in to her. “I have no armor left. You’ve stripped it from me. Whatever is left of me, whatever I am, I’m yours,” says Bond. He finally drops his emotional armor and allows a woman in, becoming vulnerable for the first time.

But his vulnerability did not serve him well. He learns that she was using him all along for money. The one person for whom he opened his heart carves it up, so he closes it again and takes up the armor. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?” asks his boss. “No,” he says. “Then you’ve learned your lesson,” she replies.

Jason Bourne fights a different battle. When we first meet him he floats unconscious on the ocean with bullets in his back and a tracking device in his hip. When he comes to, he doesn’t know who he is or remember anything until that point, but does know several languages and hand-to-hand combat. He slowly learns that he is a killing machine that only functions because it cannot do anything else.

Then he meets a woman. She drives him on his journey to self-discovery, first by payment, then on her own accord. She helps him as he follows his animalistic instincts to find his identity and his purpose. Bourne finds the man who knows the answers and he tells Bourne the truth: “I don’t send you to kill. I send you to be invisible. I send you because you don’t exist.” After a death-defying search, he finds out that he is only a shell of a man, a blunt instrument of death.

Bourne’s confrontation with the mysterious man triggers a flashback to right before he was found floating in the ocean. He was ordered to assassinate a dictator but couldn’t pull the trigger because the target’s children were lying next to him. The one time compassion creeps into his heart, he is shot in the back and left for dead in the open sea. That is quite a lesson to learn.

Bond and Bourne experience the same challenges to their masculinity, yet they end up in different places. Bond starts as an emotionless brute, becomes softened by a woman, then is betrayed by said woman and shuts himself off from emotion again. Bourne goes through the same process, except at the end he remains open to Marie and at peace with his existence.

Through both stories run two constants: women and killing. These constants represent two big fears that men have: that if he opens himself up to a woman, she will rip his heart out; and that if he doesn’t fulfill the male stereotype of being tough and emotionless, he will be thought of as less than a man. Not necessarily by women, but by their fellow man.

These fears, at their full effect, can cripple a man’s masculinity and trust in women. They turn them into chauvinistic playboys, forever caught in a perpetual state of arrested development. They are the reason why so many single women claim that ‘there are no more decent guys’—they’ve been taken captive by the fear of being vulnerable.

James Bond and Jason Bourne may be fictional characters, but they have the same dilemma as real men. Not all men are lost causes, however. In fact, none really are. Modern males have a simple choice: remain shadows of men destined for empty relationships and guarded hearts, or fight the temptation to run from intimacy.