Lady Gaga, sort of...

Oh man, this is awesome. A translation of the lyrics are below (and in fairness, you can't say they are any worse than what Lady Gaga wrote originally).



Happy New Year
Good Luck and Great Prosperity
Happy New Year
Good Luck and Great Prosperity
Happy New Year
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity) The spring breeze asked me, I said the spring is already here
In a flash a long year had already gone by
Spring festival is here everybody are all setting off firecrackers
Pi-li-pa-la, pi-li-pa-la [firecracker sound] all so loud

Oh~
(Happy New Year, Happy New Year, ah New Year, year after year)
Oh~
(Happy New Year, Happy New Year, ah New Year, year after year)

New Year is here, New Year is here
Every family and every household are full of joy
(dong dong dong chong, dong dong dong chong) *drum sound*
The God of Wealth is here, the God of Wealth is here
The God of Wealth is handing out red envelopes all around
(Wish you a good fortune, hand over the envelopes)

Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Happy New Year)
Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity)

(Good Luck and Great Prosperity) The spring breeze asked me, I said the spring is already here
In a flash a long year had already gone by
Spring festival is here everybody are all setting off firecrackers
Pi-li-pa-la, pi-li-pa-la [firecracker sound] all so loud

Oh~
(Happy New Year, Happy New Year, ah New Year, year after year)
Oh~
(Happy New Year, Happy New Year, ah New Year, year after year)

New Year is here, New Year is here
Every family and every household are full of joy
(dong dong dong chong, dong dong dong chong) *drum sound*
The God of Wealth is here, the God of Wealth is here
The God of Wealth is handing out red envelopes all around
(Wish you a good fortune, hand over the envelopes)

Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Happy New Year)
Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity)

New Years is here, every family and every household are full of joy
Ah dong dong dong chong, dong dong chong
dong dong chong, dong chong, dong dong chong

The God of Wealth, the Lord of Wealth is handing out red envelopes all around
Wish you a good fortune, hand over the envelopes
Yeah yeah yeah yeah

New Year is here, New Year is here
Every family and every household are full of joy
(dong dong dong chong, dong dong dong chong) *drum sound*
The God of Wealth is here, the God of Wealth is here
The God of Wealth is handing out red envelopes all around
(Wish you a good fortune, hand over the envelopes)

New Year is here, New Year is here
Every family and every household are full of joy
(dong dong dong chong, dong dong dong chong) *drum sound*
The God of Wealth is here, the God of Wealth is here
The God of Wealth is handing out red envelopes all around
(Wish you a good fortune, hand over the envelopes)

Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Happy New Year)
Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity)

Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Happy New Year)
Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity)

Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Happy New Year)
Con-con-con-congratulations, con-con-con-congratulations
(Good Luck and Great Prosperity)

Queen Rania in Paris! (frong page of Demotix)

Queen Rania of Jordan spoke at LeWeb. I happened to be outside chatting with a friend when she left the building, and I happened to have my camera. The results made front page of Demotix! ("Yes," Maile says smugly, "again!")

Anyone else...?

Forgive the crassness, but does anyone else find the recently e-mailed e-holiday card from the Graduate School of Journalism to be rather phallic? (And if you think about it as long as a 14-year-old boy might, you might detect in the image a certain feeling of frustration.) 

Total FAILURE!

I'm sitting here in LeWeb. Jack Dorsey is talking about Twitter and new applications. Cover It Live won't launch. TweetDeck won't tweet. Looks like I'll be blogging and phone tweeting here on in.

Jack Dorsey of Twitter talks at LeWeb in Paris!

I'm at LeWeb, an Internet, digital media conference, in Paris. The event's organizers are Loïc and Géraldine LeMeur. They are introducing the event now, and Dorsey will take the stage in just a moment.

LeWeb coverage!

In just a few moments, I will be covering LeWeb from this site. Tune again soon!

Front page of Demotix!

Last night, Algeria played Egypt for a spot at the World Cup in 2010. (This is soccer, of course.) Before their shaming defeat, Algeria supporters took to the streets, shut down the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station and blocked traffic. And fans of every shape and size came out to join the frenzy: There were young girls draped in Algerian flags, middle-aged men hooting and hollering and women yodelling. Teenage boys with faces smeared with red, green and white paint set off fireworks and every physical surface that was climbable was climbed on, including the newsstand opposite the entrance to the station.

I took some photos of the pre-match celebrations and, not knowing what to do with them, I uploaded them to Demotix. (Demotix is a new news group that offers a platform for citizen journalists to display their work.) I had had a Demotix account for a few months, but never posted anything to it before yesterday. Thus, I was quite pleased to receive a note from their editors letting me know that they selected one of my images for their home page (as pictured above). Pretty neat, huh?

If you'd like to see some of my other pictures, you can look at my page at Demotix.

For my long suffering teacher friends...

**That Maroochydore High School in Australia voted to have this message as its actual phone message has been proven to be false. This does not take away of the message's funniness, however. Enjoy!

Published in the International Herald Tribune!

My photo is the one on the lower left. If you can't make it out, it was published September 26, 2009. Woo hoo!

Photo published in the International Herald Tribune

Damien Walters

For Dad: the video I mentioned in our last conversation.

Scribd

I'm playing with Scribd. Here is my resumé.

Who's a guru?

Something from the wonderful world of TED.

Building Online Communities

Some geeky social media stuff... Pretty interesting.

Tools to Build an Engaged Online Community

View more documents from JD Lasica.

Shit my dad says...

Someone forwarded me a link to this Twitter page today. It's awesome. Everyone should look at it.

It's from a guy called Justin. As described in his mini-bio, he's 28 and lives with his 73-year-old dad. (Sound familiar? Yeah, but my dad is 84.)

Here are some choice bits:

"Here's a strawberry, sorry for farting near you...Hey! Either take the strawberry and stop bitching, or no strawberry, that's the deal."- about 21 hours ago from web

"It's just a fucking june bug, calm down. Jesus Christ, what happens when something bigger than a testicle attacks you?" - 10:12 PM Sep 2nd from web

"You know, sometimes it's nice having you around. But now ain't one of those times. Now gimmie the remote we're not watching this bullshit." - 8:18 PM Aug 28th from web

"How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes." - 10:55 PM Aug 25th from web

"How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes." - 10:55 PM Aug 25th from web

Follow Justin, and the shit his dad says at http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays.

Soros thinks the next boom should be in alternative energy

On a totally random note, here's an interesting clip with George Soros. He says that America's late 90s/early 00s bubble (the one that just exploded) was the result of Americans consuming more than they produced (made possible by very easy-to-get credit). To climb out of that hole, Soros says that America needs to get on top of alternative energy--investing into research, technology, etc.



His ideas are hardly new--you might want to check out what folks like Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman of the New York Times say about green energy and the future of economy--but when a bazillionaire like Soros talks about alternative energy, it's pretty important. (Because it means that doing nice things for the planet isn't just about tree-hugging, recycling, vegetarian hippies anymore...)

Should people go to journalism school?

As you may or may not realize, I'm in Paris now, and I've just begun my SECOND masters program in journalism. (I know, I know...) I'm going to write more about this shortly, but until then, here's a clip from Big Think about journalism schools and whether people should go. (The man interviewed is Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine.)



P.S. If you don't know Big Think, go over and check it out. It's kind of like YouTube for clever people (though perhaps not quite as heady as TED).

My friend, Julianne, goes to Indonesia

My friend, Julianne, is going to Indonesia. She just finished her masters in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Teachers College, Columbia University, and she was selected to be teaching fellow in a U.S. government program. She'll be there an academic year.

I met Julianne in 2002 when we both took a teacher training certificate course in Boston. Julianne had been in Switzerland for more than a year, and she had her sights set on returning. After the course, she found a job in Basel, teaching English to the blind. Then, five years later, she got into Columbia the same year I did--a total coincidence.

Now, she's back on the road, and blogging about it. If you'd like to see what she's up to, go to http://www.julianne-in-indonesia.blogspot.com. (She's only just started writing, though, as she leaves the U.S. tomorrow.)

Catching up and sand animation...

Yes, it's been MONTHS since my last post. No, I have not stopped writing here. I've just been a bit busy.

Since May, this is what I've done: graduated from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University with a M.S. degree (didn't do the cap and gown, though--not my thing), left New York, drove up and down the California coast with a lovely, young Frenchman, got my visa to study in France (not as simple as one might think), saw my sister graduate from her master's program at UC Irvine, went back to Hawaii for four days, flew to China and chaperoned a group of teenagers in and about the country, took a few days for myself in Beijing, flew to Paris via Doha, got an apartment, a bank account, a phone, an internship at the International Herald Tribune, and a folding table for my place. It has been a long couple of months and if I had been able to see one of my best friends get married in New England last week, I would have made it AROUND THE WORLD.

So now I'm settled, mostly. I'm waiting on the last two pieces of French bureaucracy that make me 100 percent legit--my carte de sejour, a kind of a residence permit, and a carte vitale, my health insurace card--and that's it. Then, I will be fully settled-in.

I do want to write about some of the things I've done, but then again I don't want to bore people with long and rambling tales of travel. So, my solution to this is a plan to post a few snippets, with photos, about the things from my journey that I liked best. Then, once I start school and get moving with my internship, I'll post normally again, I think.

In any case, that won't happen today. Maybe I'll start tomorrow. But until then, I wanted to share this. I saw it today and was so so so impressed. It's well worth the entire 8:33 minutes. I promise.

Andrew Revkin and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr. Rajendra Pachauri talk live at Columbia!

Science writer, Andrew Revkin, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, talk about climate change and the environment live at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.