I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while.  As my friends call it, a classic case of “face-hugging”.

The honey badger just doesn’t care…

I’m sitting in the club lounge of the Grand Hyatt Singapore cramming for yet another final for B-school. As it’s between the hours of 6 and 8 PM, the booze is flowing free and plenty. I just witnessed a meaningfully overweight man with a pronounced southern drawl tell one of the lounge’s attendants that he doesn’t often drink red wine because he’s not “a fuckin’ queer”. Ugh.

This is why I’m deathly afraid of cats.  The fun begins around the 0:35 mark.

For those of you who missed Macworld this week…

Adding to my running commentary on the pervasiveness of hypocrisy in our national politics, our friend Jon Stewart served up a doozy on the topic the other night.

I’ve been traveling the past few days in Hong Kong and Singapore, which explains why I’ve been so quiet.  Here I now sit in the Silver Kris Lounge of Singapore’s Changi International Airport, which is hands-down the best airport I’ve ever visited.   A few thoughts I’ve compiled over the past few days:

1. The Mandarin Oriental is now my favorite hotel in Hong Kong.  Centrally located, newly-renovated, great bar and very good food.
2. Why don’t remote controls ever work properly in hotels?
3. The Grand Hyatt in Singapore doesn’t feel near as nice as its higher end counterparts but it has one very important thing going for it – the Straits Kitchen, which is a restaurant that features an awesome breakfast, lunch, dinner buffet.  I’ve had some of the best Indian food of my life at this restaurant.
4. Singapore is a very efficient, very clean city.  I saw a guy eating peanuts yesterday and he would collect the shells in his hand for proper disposal later.  In the U.S., he would’ve just tossed the empty shells onto the sidewalk.   Along with his half empty Starbucks coffee cup.
5. For all the things Singapore gets right, the taxi situation is woeful.  There are designated taxi queues all over the city, mostly at the bottom of popular office towers or hotels.  You are technically not allowed to wave down a taxi from the street, so you have to line up in a more controlled fashion along with everyone else.  What this means is that you need to venture around in search of a taxi stand and then proceed to wait in what could be a very long line before you get a ride.  Very annoying, particularly when you are running between meetings – and its 90 degrees outside with humidity somewhere near 500%.  The flipside is that taxis are very cheap.
6. The Singapore airport is fantastic.  Well-organized, aesthetically pleasing, lots of good restaurants and shopping, and the immigration lines are rarely backed up.  My average wait time at immigration here is probably something like 3-4 minutes.  Of course, there are guys with automatic machine guns there to greet you (the Singaporeans do not take kindly to drug smugglers) but other than that the overall experience is a very pleasant one.
7. I saw a woman in a full burka for the first time this morning.  Singapore has a relatively large Muslim population and I’ve seen plenty of half burkas, but never have I seen the full blown one where you couldn’t see the woman’s face.  She was decked out in all black and all you could see were the slits for the eyes.  The fact that she was at the breakfast buffet at the Grand Hyatt made the sighting all the more surreal.
8. Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by 10 percentage points?!!?!?!?  I just threw up in my mouth.

As is the case about 90% of the time, I find myself in total agreement with Christopher Hitchens. This time our lovefest stems from his take on Hillary Clinton and her absurd penchant for spewing lies and other falsehoods. Watch him here on Fox News letting out his usual silver-tongued vitriol on the topic.

For as much as I enjoy his verbal commentary, it’s even better when he decides to point his pen at someone (or something, like religion). This week’s entry for Slate.com is great. Hitchens not only pokes fun at Hillary’s tendency to fib, but he goes even further to claim that Hillary was staunchly against the U.S. intervention on behalf of the Bosnians in the first place; the reason being that it might take focus away from her doomed healthcare reform initiative.

Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.

Given that I announced my new blog to a broader audience earlier today, I suspect this is the first visit to the new Eddyfication for most of you. Welcome!

I suspect mostof you are wondering why I included the picture above in my header, so allow me a moment’s explanation. The photo is of Tokyo’s Roppongi skyline. Roppongi is an area of Tokyo whose closest Chicago counterpart is probably the Gold Coast. Check out this map to get a better feel for where it sits in Tokyo. Roppongi is home to many expats as well as to the very popular Roppongi Hills complex, which houses (among other things) the Grand Hyatt hotel, a shopping mall, the headquarters for Asahi television, a movie theater, numerous restaurants, two Starbucks, the Japanese headquarters for Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers, and, of course, our apartment. The three buildings to the left of the photo represent the main office building and two residential towers. We are in one of the smaller buildings just to the right of those. Also, my office is located in one of the buildings on the right-hand side of the picture.

It seems the world is awash in various forms of nepotism these days, which doesn’t sit well with me. The fact that Benazir Bhutto’s 19 year old son (and current college student) was handed the reins of the comically-titled People’s Party of Pakistan has got to be considered a travesty for the country’s fledgling democratic movement. Seriously, what the F? Then you’ve got the president of Argentina basically passing the baton to his wife as his term came to an end. And, of course, we’re now bearing witness to the possibility that the American presidency will pass to another Clinton, bringing about the possibility that our nation’s highest seat will be occupied by a member of either of two families for a period of 28 years (assuming Hillary wins re-election). This nasty little tendency of keeping it in the family can also be found in the otherwise untainted (hehe, just kidding) world of sports, where we recently saw Pat Knight be anointed the new coach of Texas Tech basketball, which followed the predictably half-baked and poorly-executed resignation of his father. A recent CNNsi article summed up this little practice nicely.

That has to have been one of the most uninspired presidential bids of all time. Seriously, I’ve never seen anyone say less in a more disinterested way before we were treated to the Thompson presidential charade. And I’ve never seen anyone look more miserable in their job before. Maybe Dick Cheney, but virtually none other. Hell, I’ve seen NYC taxi drivers put on a happier face!

Rolling Stone Magazine had a section entitled “Troubling Times” in their Yearbook 2007 edition that has some interesting commentary worth considering. A few highlights:

- At a gathering of Silicon Valley CEOs in May, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the importance in today’s economy of training skilled workers. See a picture from the speech above and note the apparent need for more proofreaders.

- The U.S. military fired 59 Arabic linguists because they were gay; they were all native English speakers and had learned the language thanks to $7 million in training for a skill the military desperately needs; but, alas, they were gay, so see ya.

- The Bush administration lost the following items during 2007: the military interrogation tape of dirty bomber Jose Padilla; 190,000 assault rifles and pistols issued to Iraq’s security forces; 5,000,000 White House emails; and 150 dossiers of secret evidence used to detain enemy combatants at Guantanomo.

- How the Pentagon supported our troops during 2007: required that soldiers discharged early because of battlefield injuries repay their enlistment bonuses; sent the long-serving National Guard unit home after 729 days of combat in Iraq – one day shy of the 730 that the soldiers needed to qualify for education benefits; omitted 20,000 cases of brain trauma from the official tally of troops injured in Iraq; denied medical benefits to 22,000 veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress by discharging them for having enlisted with “pre-existing personality disorders”.

- With the Southeast undergoing its worst drought in years, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue appeared at the state capitol on November 13th with a major announcement: “It’s time to appeal to him who can and will make a difference. God, we need you. We need rain.” In the weeks since the governor beseeched the Almighty, rainfall in the state has been 72% below normal.

- China announced that Tibetan Buddhists wishing to be reincarnated must first receive official permission. “The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal”, declared Beijing.

- A former love slave of Osama bin Laden claimed that the terrorist leader was so enamored with Whitney Houston that he wanted to kill Bobby Brown and make Houston one of his wives.

- Thomas Katona, who has served as public treasurer of Alcona County (in Michigan) for thirteen years, discovered a new way to invest taxpayer dollars: by responding to an online request to help a desperate Nigerian transfer money out of Africa. Katona not only lost $72,000 of his own money but also threw in more than $1.2 million in county funds.

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After shifting allegiances between various Premiership teams over the years, mainly because my conviction level was dictated by access (first Manchester United because they were always on TV, then Arsenal because I attended a match at Highbury, then Chelsea because I attended a match at Stamford Bridge), I have yet another new team to support – Fulham Football Club, also known as The Cottagers and The Whites. My reasoning is a nationalistic one. With the signing of Eddie Johnson yesterday, the club now has five yanks on its roster: Carlos Bocanegra, Brian McBride, Clint Dempsey, Kasey Keller and Johnson. Of course, the heavy U.S. talent base may have something to do with the fact that the team is currently placed 19th out of 20 teams, but I’m optimistic that these yanks will shine in the end. Go Cottagers!

Today, on my way to Singapore from Hong Kong, I made my usual stop at the airport bookstore where it has become standard practice for me to purchase at least three books, most of which do more to weigh me down than hold my interest. Today, however, can be considered a success judging by the early returns. One of the books I bought was Larry Cunningham’s “The Essays of Warren Buffett”, which, surprisingly, is the first Buffett book that I have ever purchased. A friend turned me on to “Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger”, which I thoroughly enjoyed, so I figured I’d give this a shot. I quite liked “Essays” and there were several quotes that I believe resonate given the current economic environment, where a credit-related meltdown is having massive repercussions on the global financial and economic landscape:

In his 1990 smackdown of junk bonds, Munger wrote:

“…mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks. Most have resulted from a managerial failing that we described last year when discussing the ‘institutional imperative:’ the tendency of executives to mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers, no matter how foolish it may be to do so. In their lending, many bankers played follow-the-leader with lemming-like zeal; now they are experiencing a lemming-like fate.”

While complaining about the tech bubble in 2000, Buffett wrote:

“By shamelessly merchandising birdless bushes, promoters have in recent years moved billions of dollars from the pockets of the public to their own purses (and to those of their friends and associates). The fact is that a bubble market has allowed the creation of bubble companies, entities designed more with an eye to making money off investors rather than for them…the ‘business model’…has been the old-fashioned chain letter, for which many fee-hungry bankers acted as eager postmen. But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street – a community in which quality control is not prized – will sell investors anything they will buy; and second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”

1. Your impression of a place changes dramatically with the weather. HK is much more pleasant when it isn’t so hot and humid.

2. There are bathroom attendants everywhere here. Even in the tiniest little ones that basically have just one urinal and one stall. And they are all surprisingly nice. There’s nothing like having someone thank you for using their restroom.

3. By the way, if you ask for a restroom here, you’ll often be greeted with a blank stare. They are toilets.

4. The whole issue with people walking aimlessly without regard to their neighbor that bugs me so much in Japan is alive and well in HK as well. I’m starting to think this is an Asian thing.

5. Food price inflation is making its presence felt. Rumor has it that you can’t buy fresh beef anywhere in HK.

6. The newly-renovated Mandarin Oriental is a mighty fine hotel. The rooms are great and the location is even better. The Captain’s Bar in the lobby is a great spot for a happy hour beer, where you can sit back with a cold Carlsberg served in one of those old school tin mugs.

Thanks in part to eight years of what some are calling the “anti-science presidency”, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that we are losing our grip as the world leader in scientific innovation. A recent NY Times article highlighted a new report by the National Science Board that confirms such fears.

My favorite part of the article:

Although [evolution and the Big Bang] are organizing principles underlying modern biology and physics, many Americans do not accept them. “These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas,” the report said, “even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas.”

My man Christopher Hitchens unleashed his poisonous pen on Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions with his Slate article this week. Good read. He was backed up by one of his Slate colleagues here as well. I don’t mean to pile on, but it’s tough to argue with their rationale!

…and we should spend ourselves even further into debt by building a big wall along the border.

From MSNBC:

Huckabee’s closing argument to voters here [Michigan] this evening featured a few new stories and two prolonged sections on illegal immigration and Christian values.

These two topics usually feature prominently in Huckabee’s stump speech, but last night he got specific, promising to build a border fence within 18 months if elected and elaborating on his belief that the constitution needs to be amended.

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Huckabee often refers to the need to amend the constitution on these grounds, but he has never so specifically called for the Constitution to be brought within “God’s standards,” which are themselves debated amongst religious scholars. As a closing statement he asked the room of nearly 500 supporters to “pray and then work hard, and in that order,” to help him secure a victory in Tuesday’s GOP primary.