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.)

Ricky Gervais and Elmo

How cool is this video?!

And before I pass this off as my own find, I must confess I ripped this clip off the blog of a Twitterer I just discovered. He's apparently an English journalism student called Alastair Plumb. (Great name, eh?) He's got wicked links. (Might have lifted a few others too...)



Check out Alastair. His site. His Twitter feed.

Russian hairdresser rapist; pissed on while flying and pigeon carriers

My friend Xeb is pretty brilliant. (Though she's not brilliant enough to have permalinks on her blog. I can say that 'cause I've just learned how to put them in.) She's an anthropologist and here is an example of the interesting things she comes up with:

The wonderful thing about doing what I do (socio-cultural anthropology) is that you can take voyeuristic delight in human absurdity and nobody can accuse you of procrastinating and being a flake (well they can, but you have valid counterarguments), because this is precisely what you've been trained to do. So for today, let me chronicle some of the more absurd, err, absurdities I have come across:

The Russian Times reports the fascinating story of a Robber, tuned into a Sex-Slave by a local Hairdresser: According to RT, "A hairdresser from the small Russian town of Meshchovsk subdued a man who tried to rob her shop, and then raped him for three days in the utility room. The incident occurred on Saturday, March 14. The working day was coming to an end at a small hairdressers, when a man armed with a gun rushed in and demanded the day’s earnings. The frightened employees and customers agreed to fulfill his demand, but when the shop’s owner, 28-year-old Olga, was handing the money to the robber, she suddenly knocked him down on the floor and then tied him up with a hairdryer cord. The 32-year-old Viktor couldn’t have known that the woman was a yellow belt in karate. Olga locked the unlucky robber in the utility room and told her colleagues that she was going to call the police – but didn’t do so. When everybody left home, she approached the man and ordered him to ‘take of his underpants’ threatening to hand him over to the police if he refuses to cooperate.After that Olga raped her hostage for three long days. She chained Viktor to the radiator with pink furry handcuffs and fed him Viagra. She eventually let the man go on Monday, March 16, saying: “Get out of my sight!” Viktor went straight to hospital as his genitals were injured, and then to the police. Olga was resentful when she was taken by the police. “What a bastard,” the woman said about Viktor. “Yes, we had sex a couple of times. But I’ve bought him new jeans, gave him food and even gave him 1.000 roubles (around $ 30) when he left.”. After that she wrote a notice to the police claiming the man tried to rob her shop. Both Olga and Viktor may now face prison terms. The woman could be convicted of rape, while the man of robbery".


In other parts of the world the Honolulu Advertiser tells the sad tale of a man who decided to take a bathroom break in an airplane and proceeded to urinate over his 66-year old fellow passenger. Not much of an advertisement for Honolulu as "Federal Court judge Leslie Kobayashi yesterday sentenced a 28-year-old man from Saipan to 21 days in prison for assaulting a fellow passenger on a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu. Jerome Kenneth Kingzio had pleaded guilty. The incident took place on March 21. U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo said court documents show the victim, a 66-year-old woman, was watching the in-flight movie when Kingzio stood next to her and began urinating on her. The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecution was handled by Assistant United States Attorney Marshall H. Silverberg.


If anyone doubts the value-added by resorting to the indigenous over the 'modern' let them consider the inherent genius behind this crime spree in Brazil, reported by Yahoo News. So, the story is that in San Paolo, inmates have devised an innovative way to smuggle in cell phones into a prison farm in Brazil: carrier pigeons. Guards at the Danilio Pinheiro prison near the southeastern city of Sorocaba noticed a pigeon resting on an electric wire with a small cloth bag tied to one of its legs last week. "The guards nabbed the bird after luring it down with some food and discovered components of a small cell phone inside the bag," police investigator Celso Soramiglio said Tuesday. One day later, another pigeon was spotted dragging a similar bag inside the prison's exercise yard. Inside the bag was the cell phone's charger, Soramiglio said. The birds were apparently bred and raised inside the prison, smuggled out, outfitted with the cell phone parts and then released to fly back.

Check out her site at http://xebiliciouss.blogspot.com/.

I think I like ShareThis better...

You'll note that I've removed "Add to Any" and have added "ShareThis" instead. More an aesthetic decision than anything else. Plus, "ShareThis" has a few more options.

A better blog...

I have learned two things today. Neither of them have allowed me to advance on my assignments. However, they are pretty cool and very "new media," so I don't feel totally useless.

The first was to set my blog so that titles appear for each blog post. This allows for the creation of permalinks--dedicated unique addresses (links) assigned to each invidual post (as opposed to just one address for the entire blog). This means I can now send out links to specific posts.

The second thing I learned was how to add "Add to Any" to my blog. After each post, you will now see a little box that says "Share/Save." (It's also what you see in the image above.) This will allow readers to share my blog on Facebook or Twitter, as well as other social Web applications.

While I recognize this is pretty amateurish stuff for hardcore bloggers, I must say I'm pretty chuffed with myself for sorting this out.

So now, dear readers, share away!

I woke up this morning with messages from a from a former student, and his dad, announcing that they have both joined the wonderful world of Twitter.

What?! I have been technologically outdone by a 12-year-old AND his middle-aged father?!

(OK, now I realize, some of you might not even know what Twitter is, which means that you have ALSO been outdone by a 12-year-old and his middle-aged father, but like, BY A LOT. But that's alright. Twitter is kind of like a blog, except all the messages are very short and you send them to your Web page via text messages from your phone.)

So, feeling very unhip and pressured to do what the cool kids are doing, I went an signed myself up for my own Twitter account. You can check it out at http://twitter.com/mailecannon .

However, I also found that Twitter is friendly with Blogger, so anyone using Blogger can add a Twitter box to their side bar. (Yes, go look at the side bar.)

So now, anything I send to Twitter will be instantly sent to my blog here at MonkeyPrints. (Take that 12-year-old boy and middle-aged dad! I see your Twitter and raise you one Blogger widget!)

This means of course that I will be updating my blog more often, but that those posts will be shorter, and probably less well written.

Wicked.

OK. So, I royally destroyed my old template in attempt to remove that annoying AdSense strip (I suppose I put up in the first place thinking I could make a bit of cash, but after more than three years, and at the cost of that huge gap on my blog, all I made was about $5.36) and to remedy that, I had to choose a new layout. What do you think?

I spent far more time than I will admit to trying to recover old links and page elements, and at the same time, I updated a few things, and added a couple of new buttons.

So there you have it. A new and improved (though I miss the ol' skool olive drab) Monkeyprints!

PS - I am generally disappointed with the lack of comments left on my site (does anyone else remember when I used to get a mighty 5 or 6 per entry?!), so it would make me very, very happy if you would participate in the poll on the sidebar. Please.

An uncle of a certain Irishman with whom I am acquainted has turned us on to this blog http://www.mongrel.ie/. Unless you're Irish, it's not going to be the most interesting read, BUT a photo I took in Beijing was just posted on it.

On May 13, it was reported on the blog that readers in China were denied access to the site. Ian, the Irishman previously mentioned, read this on that day, in China, and informed them of the fact that he could do so. To boot, he included a photo, for their gawking pleasure, I took of our friend, Tim, eating sparrows on a skewer. (The photo was taken after a rock festival we all went to during the the May 1 holiday week. [There is no explanation as to why Tim was inspired to eat sparrows, but he did say they were chewy.]) On May 15, the photo, along with their commentary, was published. Go take a look.

http://www.mongrel.ie/blog/index.php/2007/05/15/hot-fuck-china-bans-mongrel-updated/

P.S. - Just to give you an idea of how little people outside of China know about the country, or at least, how little Irish people know about it, read the comment about Jiangsu and Guangdong.

P.P.S. - For those of you who fall into the description of the previous postscript, Guangdong province is the richest, most developed, and modern province in China. That's where Shenzhen, and other Special Economic Zones, are located--the first parts of China to get rich in the 1980s.

I am still at Carden...

Still.

This situation may soon change, however, and then I will write more.

But until then, check out another blog by a guy called Drew. He is a current teacher at Carden, and a very good, very observant and very humorous writer.

http://www.echron.blogspot.com