Yes, you too have an accent

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The South
The Northeast
Philadelphia
North Central
The West
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

However, it is most definitely soda, not pop.

HTM In Review: "Run Lola Run"

OK, so "Run Lola Run" is a 10-year-old movie. Let it be duly noted that HTM in Review has nothing to do with timeliness.

I felt the need to watch this movie again because years ago it tripped me out. Basically, what happens is that Lola has to get 100,000 marks (yes, in the pre-Euro days) to her boyfriend, Manni, in 20 minutes or he will hold up a store at gunpoint. The same 20-minute scene plays three times, with slight variations, and in the end of each one things turn out differently for everybody. Set in Germany in 1998, there is, of course, techno music. And there's running.

The trippiest part of the movie, I think, is that it shows snapshots of the futures of the people Lola runs past. In one scene a guy tries to sell Lola his bike and she declines. You see snapshots of the guy eventually falling off his bike, meeting a woman in the hospital and eventually marrying her. In the second version, Lola declines again, saying the bike is stolen. The guy ends up getting arrested and put in jail.

It's nuts how, a la "The Butterfly Effect" on a smaller scale, every teeny tiny decision you make has the chance to affect everything else around it. Which reminds me of an argument the teacher made (er, adapted from some other philosopher whose name escapes me) in my 10th-grade religion class on the validity of creationism — though as far as I was concerned, it was a perfectly logical argument AGAINST God in the way most Christians believe.

He gave us each an oatmeal cookie, insisting that because the cookie was made up of so many complex ingredients, combined in just the right way, that the cookie couldn't possibly have occurred in nature — it had to have a designer.

Change the cookie to something complex that occurs in nature (like, um, rocks, the food chain, the anatomy of any living organism ...) and it's clear that it's not really an argument for creation at all if you don't believe in creation in the first place. Just because something is complicated doesn't have to mean it didn't evolve that way, as opposed to being created. Similarly, just because life is a mind-blowingly complicated web of interactions and decisions that all affect each other doesn't mean they're all orchestrated by some dude in the sky with nothing better to do than micromanaging the fates of 6 billion people.

But back to Lola. There's one part of the movie that I didn't really think about the first time: in the last scene, she screams at the ball on a betting wheel until it lands on the number that she needs. Maybe God does work in more direct ways sometimes. Or maybe the freakishly red-haired Lola has some divine powers of her own.

Cooking class!

This is me having way too much fun with the food processor.

Yesterday I went to a cooking class. It was put on by a French woman who owns a company called The Wise Cook and runs healthy cooking classes out of her (really nice Upper West Side) apartment.

The class was me, a British woman and her two guy friends and an American guy (above). We made baked herb tilapia with pureed broccoli and carrots, which is a lot yummier than it sounds, because it involves potatoes and bleu cheese. Note to Mom: I don't know how pureed veggies with potatoes and cheese (cream cheese works too) fit into USDA dietary requirements, but I bet the residents would like them.

Oh, and it was pretty too:


All in all, definitely an educational experience. And the best kinds of learning experiences are the ones where you get to eat at the end. These classes run every week, but sadly they cost $45 a pop so I don't think I'll be a regular.

I heart Gail Collins

She is definitely my favorite of the Times' weekly op-ed columnists.

Nicholas Kristof is up there too. His writing leaves you with the impression that he is a genuinely nice man (I've never met him).

For supper tonight I went to McDonalds hoping to get a meal with a Shamrock Shake (That, along with wearing my Dropkick Murphys shirt, was the extent of my St. Paddy's Day celebrating today). But sadly they didn't have them (How many years have they not been doing that without me noticing?), so I went across the street to Yoshinoya and ordered a beef bowl, which was basically fat with pieces of beef attached atop overdone rice. Ick.

Tomorrow I have to teach a class for the new Harlem Live kids about the basics of journalism. That should be interesting. I'm a little scared. Though there will only be, like, five of them, so it shouldn't be too bad ... I hope. Then I'm going to a cooking class, and Wednesday I'm finally getting around to the ritual new-phase-of-my life haircut. Should be an eventful weekend.

Overheard

I was on the subway today when a boy and a girl, about 6 or 7, sat down next to me. Their conversation went something like this:


boy: Do you like to look out the window on the train?

girl: yeah.

boy: Did you have sex with 100 men?

girl: What?

boy: Did you have sex with infinity men?

girl: Six?

boy: sex! Like when you're married.

girl: no.

boy: oh. I saw a rat on the train track. ...

Also, if I were on the Green Bay City Council I'd propose a resolution to ban the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham from the city.

Oh, and I am very glad that we here in New York are finally starting to shut up about eliot spitzer, but this man has a point.

Yet another disaster of the week

Yesterday, a crane collapsed in East Midtown, killing at least 4 people and leveling a bar. This happened right before the Saturday budget meeting at work, so we had a little talk about how one of the effects of working in the news industry is that you're constantly aware of all the crazy things that are happening in the world. And they happen in Manhattan quite often.

There seem to be random disasters almost every other week in this city ... if you count the Eliot Spitzer debacle, we've been on quite a roll lately.

Last year when a steam pipe exploded near Grand Central, someone at work commented how people were abuzz, almost faintly excited, that something big was happening. I think that part of the mystique of post-9/11 New York City is that there is that chance at any given time that you could, just possibly, get blown up, or, more likely, find yourself stranded with millions of other people in a large-scale public services disaster. But it's not in a fearful, orange-alert kind of way, but more of a realization that even if you're careful, these things happen, and you deal with them ... and at least it gives everyone something to talk about.

Update: Spitz Quits!

I'm glad Eliot Spitzer decided to be a grown-up, admit his mistake and get out of office so as not to totally disrupt the state government when he most likely goes to trial for transporting a prostitute across state lines and/or money laundering.

I think a decent number of Democrats will forgive him in the end, after they get over their disappointment. Even if he gets convicted and disbarred, he'll end up writing a book or getting some plush consulting or lobbying job down the line. Also, his lieutenant governor David Paterson is pretty well-respected on all sides, not to mention that he'll become New York's first black governor and the first legally blind governor anywhere. Ultimately, it will all be OK. Except, probably, for Mrs. Spitzer.

That being said, I would enjoy nothing more than to see Bush get busted in a sting on a prostitution ring, preferably a sting that involved wiretapping (oh the irony). Sure, he may be able to reinvent executive privilege, openly support torture and oppose health care for poor children, tell the American people 935 flat-out lies on the subject of the Iraq war alone (none of them under oath, sadly), but you'd best believe that if he got busted Spitzer-style, his ass would be impeached faster than you could say "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."