While playing pickup basketball in the gym, I went up for a layup, came down, rolled my ankle, and felt it pop. I’ve rolled my ankle before, but never like this. I went down in pain, and the ankle swelled up immediately (at least I made the layup). After icing and resting it for a couple days, a lot of the swelling had gone down, but the black and purple discoloration had not, and I was still feeling fluid buildup in my foot when I stood up for a period of time. So, primarily for peace of mind, I went to see my family physician (who’s actually a nurse practitioner) about a week after the initial injury, by which time the ankle had already started to heal and I was already able to walk around with relatively little discomfort.

The nurse practitioner examined the ankle and told me it’s likely a sprain, for which she prescribed Ibuprofen and resting, icing, and elevating the ankle. She also told me that the discoloration and fluid buildup were normal, which put my mind greatly at ease. Then, just to be safe, she had me get X-rays. A few hours later, I got a call from her. She said apparently the X-rays showed a tiny fracture on the outer tip of the ankle bone — the technical term for it is avulsion fracture of the tip of the malleolus. She told me that because it’s a fracture, she was going to refer me to an orthopedist at UNC Hospitals. Later, I looked up the injury online, and what I found pretty much told me that such fractures are generally not serious and usually treated like sprains (rest, ice, and elevate). But I figured I’ll just go see what the orthopedist has to say. Doctor knows best, right?

Well, as it turned out, what the doctor knew best about was charging me $425 to basically tell me the same thing the nurse practitioner had told me for $25, plus telling me to do some exercises that I can readily find online with a simple Google search. For the appointment with the orthopedist, I brought the X-rays taken during my family physician appointment — like the nurse practitioner had told me to do — but no one at the hospital even asked to see them even though I mentioned I had brought them. Instead, they had already signed me up for X-rays there.

The resistance band I got from my physical-therapy session, which was, like the rest of the services I got at UNC Hospitals, overpriced.

The orthopedist appointment lasted all of 10 minutes and consisted of him basically giving me the same examination I had received a week earlier from my family physician. He told me exactly what I already knew going in: Yup, it’s an avulsion fracture of the malleolus, and we’ll treat it like a sprain. Rest it, ice it, elevate it. Oh yeah, Ibuprofen is good, too. He then prescribed a stirrup splint from the in-house pharmacy, which he said I only needed to wear if I was walking on uneven surfaces such as when working in the yard. He also signed me up for a physical-therapy session the week after and a follow-up appointment a month later.

The physical therapy session lasted about 30 minutes. The physical therapist took a 30-second look at my ankle, asked me a couple questions about how it felt, and then showed me four exercises to do with a resistance band (all of which, by the way, can be easily found online). Oh, and that stirrup splint the orthopedist had prescribed and which I had worn only a few times over the previous week? The physical therapist told me to wean myself off of it, which was no problem since I never wore it enough to get attached to it in the first place. He then sent me home with a couple of the resistance bands and signed me up for a follow-up session, even though he said I probably won’t need it and could cancel if everything was going fine.

And then came the bills for the orthopedist appointment and the physical-therapy session:

The bills pretty much left me furious and in disbelief. The stirrup splint that I wore basically for five days before being told to take it off was billed at $141?! A quick search on Amazon turns up a bunch of stirrup splints, and none of them even remotely approach triple digits in price. The orthopedist appointment, for which I was charged a $60 copay at the time of the visit, ended up costing almost three times that for the simple fact that it took place in a hospital setting and was therefore classified as outpatient service, which allowed insurance to count it against my annual deductible instead of applying the copay for seeing a specialist. Even more ludicrous is the $163 for the “examination” by the physical therapist, which, again, consisted of a 30-second look at the ankle and a couple questions. If you’re going to charge me $163 for a 60-second “examination”, the least you can do is drag that orthopedist back in here and let him, rather than the physical therapist, examine the ankle.

And you know what? I would be ok with paying $424.76 if it had given me new information I couldn’t get elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, the orthopedist told me nothing in our $251, 10-minute appointment that I didn’t learn from my initial $25, 15-minute appointment with my family physician. The physical therapist didn’t show me anything in the $223 session that I couldn’t have gotten by spending 10 minutes Googling and $10 for a pack of resistance bands. I’m perfectly fine with doctors getting paid big bucks for saving lives, for healing illnesses, or heck, just for popping a separated shoulder back in. But if all you are doing is regurgitating the stuff I just told you that my family physician had told me a week earlier, it’s simply ludicrous to be charging that kind of money for that sort of service, not to mention prescribing something that someone else at your hospital tells me to stop using after just a few days and costs about five or six times the market price. It’s like me charging you $500 an hour regardless of whether I spend that hour building a rocketship or mowing your lawn.

I consider myself fortunate that we 1) have insurance, and 2) are doing well enough financially that we can absorb a $400-plus medical bill without too much pain. However, considering this is for what basically amounted to a bad ankle sprain, I shudder to think what it’d cost if it was actually something more serious (then again, maybe then the doctor might’ve actually earned his $251 instead of leaving me feeling like someone had just swiped my wallet). If I had merely stopped after getting the $25 care instead of unknowingly getting looped into the $450 care, it would have made little difference in the ultimate patient outcome. In part because of my anger at this whole fiasco, and in greater part because my ankle has recovered very nicely, I canceled both of the follow-up appointments with the orthopedist and the physical therapist.

What makes me even angrier than the ridiculous price tags for the so-called care I received is the fact that no one anywhere along this chain of medical care gave me any information about the cost of the services they were prescribing and what options I might have, so I couldn’t make an informed cost-benefit analysis on the spot. Sure, if it was something serious, I would’ve likely gone along with the prescribed care no matter the cost. But in this case, it was just a sprained ankle (and it was clearly recovering by the time of the doctor’s visits), and you would think that somebody somewhere along the way would have the ethics and/or the conscience to say, “You know what? This is going to cost hundreds of dollars. Maybe you should just follow the simple treatment regiment for a week or so and see how you’re doing before spending so much money on care you likely don’t need.” Oh, and just to make extra sure the patients remain in the dark, most of the line items in the table above were listed as the conveniently vague “Facility Services” on the insurance benefits statements. I had to call the insurance company to figure out what each one was. If that doesn’t smell like underhanded trickery to deceive, confuse, and fleece you, I’m not sure what does.

Lessons I’ve learned from this experience:

• Avoid getting referred to a hospital like the plague.
• If you do get referred, call beforehand to figure out how much the visit will cost. In retrospect, I should’ve done that this time, especially considering I had done it once before and saved myself $600 by canceling a referral for a scan that I didn’t really need because I was already almost fully recovered by the time of the appointment.
• Speak up and take control of your 10 minutes with the doctor. Heck, you’re paying enough for their precious time, so you might as well make them come remotely close to earning it.
• Always ask “How much does that cost?” and “Is there another option?” before saying ok.
• Be ever vigilant and scrutinize every suggestion before going along with it.

It’s sad that I’m made to talk to my doctors with the same vigilance and suspicion with which I talk to a car salesman, but it’s just another sign of how frakked up our health-care system is.

While we were in England last September, we made sure to sample the various British candies that are not commonly found in the United States. One thing we came across was the Kinder Surprise eggs — chocolate eggs with a toy inside. We were intrigued by the premise, and the chocolate tasted pretty good, too. So we brought back a couple for friends and family.

Well, apparently we were dealing in contraband. See this story about a Canadian woman who almost got fined $300 when U.S. custom officials found a Kinder Surprise egg during a random search of her vehicle.

The U.S. takes catching illegal Kinder candy seriously, judging by the number of them they’ve confiscated in the last year. Officials said they’ve seized more than 25,000 of the treats in 2,000 separate seizures.

“They have been determined to present … a choking hazard to young children,” said Mike Milne, a spokesman for the U.S. department of customs and border protection. Milne said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration supports the Kinder Surprise ban.

Of course, as you can see in the photo above, the toy is placed in a plastic capsule that’s almost as big as the egg, which is about the size of a regular egg — in other words, too big to be swallowed whole. And believe me, that capsule isn’t made of break-in-your-mouth plastic that you can chew through. I’m all for keeping choking hazards away from children, but this seems overzealous. Yes, there have been a few instances of kids choking to death on the eggs, but seriously, how about just not giving these things to kids too young to know any better? The thing does have a warning label, after all.

Strong Durham Schools is a project begun by members of Durham Allies for Responsive Education, a community group formed to support and strengthen the Durham public schools. Since DPS schools are often disparaged in the press and by the general public, one of our first areas of concern was to set the record straight. Many students are thriving in Durham Public Schools and go on to achieve great things academically and in life as a result of their education. Are there challenges within Durham Public Schools? Of course. There are challenges in ALL schools. We are here to say that your child can get a fantastic education in a Durham public school. Ours are.

As someone who grew up in Durham; attended Bethesda, Lowe’s Grove, and Jordan; is currently living in Durham; and is planning to switch in the near future from a starter home to a family home where I will presumably live for the next 20 years and raise a family, I have good reasons to be interested in a new Web site about the school system that my yet-to-be-conceived children might go to. So I checked out the site and clicked through a dozen or so testimonials from parents and students. In brief, every entry can be summed as, “My school is so great!”

Now, I’m ok with positive reviews of Durham Public Schools. Despite the system’s negative image, I did not feel like attending its schools put me at a disadvantage. I definitely felt like I received a solid/good education, and I was able to get into the college of my choice — UNC-Chapel Hill. Plenty of my classmates have gone on to great schools and great careers as doctors, lawyers, and engineers, just to name a few. So yes, I believe you can get a good education in Durham schools (of course, I also firmly believe that the quality of an education is as much up to the student as it is about the schools). However, here’s the part about Strong Durham Schools that I take issue with. On its About Us page, it says:

We decided early on to reject stories that do little more than feed the already negative stereotypes that so many in our area have about Durham Public Schools. To date, only two stories have been rejected on those grounds. There are plenty of other places to hear negative stories. We wanted to provide a place where community members could hear about the schools directly from the people involved, and not from “my hairdresser’s neighbor’s sister.”

To me, this policy robs the site of any credibility as a tool for parents trying to decide whether to send their kids to a Durham school. Imagine if you knew that a manufacturer’s online store only allowed positive customer reviews of its products. How much faith would you put in the evaluation of the products on that site? That’s the problem here. I didn’t see a single negative word uttered about the schools, even though the site’s administrators admit the school system has a negative image. The site has no credibility not because it has positive reviews about Durham schools, but because it refuses to show complaints about the schools (and that “there are challenges in ALL schools” bit sounds mighty defensive as well).

The “no negative comments” policy makes even less sense because the site’s administrators already admitted that 1) Durham schools has its share of challenges, and 2) there are many places where one can read about those problems. In the face of that, what good does it do to ban negative comments on your site? The way to make your site valuable to parents is to give them what they need to make an informed decision about where to send their kids. That means showing them the good and the bad, telling them, “Here’s what we do well; here’s what we don’t do well and why; and here’s what we’re doing to fix the problems.” As it stands now, the site comes off as blatantly and purely promotional, and its feel-good message quickly falls apart when one does a little research and goes to another Web site such as ncreportccards.org. I’d argue that no amount of positive personal stories will have as much swaying power on a parent as a simple statistical comparison, such as this end-of-course test scores comparison between a Durham high school that shall remain nameless and Chapel Hill High, a member of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro system:

Unnamed Durham high school

Chapel Hill High

The challenges for Strong Durham Schools are that 1) this information is not just negative stereotype or bad press; it’s straight-forward fact, and 2) such information is out there and easily obtainable. So if all you are doing on your site is telling people how great your schools are — even with these facts in front of you — it just makes you look like a liar, especially when you refuse to show any negative comments. Withholding information no longer works in this age of plentiful and easily accessible information. A better approach, I think, would be to allow both positive and negative comments and use the site to help explain why these numbers are what they are and what is being done to improve them. No parent expects a school system to be perfect, but no one appreciates being lied to either, especially when it comes to something that plays such a vital role in their children’s future.

Bill Gates’ recent prediction about the Internet becoming the best single source of education in five years and that the university education will be five times less important touched on something I’ve been thinking about: How technology will and will not change higher education in the near future.

I started thinking about this because of my experience in journalism and seeing how technology has affected newspapers. What struck me as kind of interesting is that if you take away the difference in the two industry’s financial situation, higher education resembles newspapers in many ways. For instance, like newspapers, higher ed

• Is a big industry.
• Has a reputation for not providing satisfactory service to a significant portion of its users (just think about how often someone says that they learned more on the job than they ever did in college, or that they never use most of what they learn).
• Is often out of touch with the people it serves (students).
• Lags behind in terms of truly embracing new technology to connect with its users.
• Is hesitant to embrace social media.
• Uses information systems that are big, cumbersome, out of date almost as soon as they go live, and difficult to upgrade.
• Has small pockets of innovation surrounded by widespread intransigence and resistance to change.
• Recognizes the need to change, yet cannot do so quickly.
• Is hampered by its own outdated performance-evaluation systems that stymie change by giving little incentive and often outright discouragement for employees to experiment with new ways of doing things.

If you think about it, in some ways the only major thing differentiating higher ed from newspapers is that newspapers’ model of scarcity — their hold on the distribution of information — has been shattered while higher ed’s model of scarcity — the universities’ status as the generally accepted and preferred accreditation bodies — remains intact. That is why I think that while technology will undoubtedly affect higher ed in some significant fashion in the near future, I don’t know if I agree with Gates’ assessment that a university education will be five times less important in five years (believe me, if it comes true, I won’t be sorry to be wrong).

Already, a vast amount of information is available online for anyone with the desire to learn, and that’s only going to grow. However, that increase in freely available information isn’t a threat to the financial stability of higher-education institutions as long as they remain the only ones who can give you a piece of paper that employers would accept as evidence that you possess enough basic knowledge and skills to be employable. That’s why universities can afford to put their lectures online for all the world to see.

Let’s say MIT puts all of its lectures and other course material online. Without enrolling at MIT, I can watch every lecture, do every assignments, and even take every test. After four years of going through the exact same curriculum as someone who is actually enrolled at MIT, am I going to be able to walk into a job interview and convince a potential employer that I am just as qualified as an MIT graduate? Most likely not. Right now, if you want an education in the truest sense of the word, you have many options. But if you want to get a certification of your education, there is really only one widely accepted source — colleges and universities. That’s why universities can keep charging — and people will keep paying — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition. The thing that keeps students and tuition dollars rolling in is no longer necessarily the knowledge that higher ed institutions offer or even the faculty who impart that knowledge, but rather the fact that these institutions are the only ones who can hand out certifications that enable their students to get jobs. The significant time and money that people invest in higher education are aimed at — above all else — obtaining that piece of certification.

I personally think that’s a bit of an absurdity, but I also think that model probably isn’t likely to dramatically change in the near future, much less five years. Universities have little incentive for making such drastic fundamental changes unless their model of scarcity is broken or at least seriously threatened. For that to happen, employers must generally reach the conclusion that a diploma from a university is no longer a stamp of employability, or at least no longer the sole stamp. Yet, what incentives do employers have to change that mentality? They still need an efficient and cost-effective way to gauge which among the hundreds of applicants for a job opening are equipped with the knowledge needed for the position. If nothing else, a university degree at least tells you that someone took a number of courses specializing in whatever field they majored in. In essence, the universities are conducting educational background checks and weeding out unqualified candidates for employers, at no cost to the employers. The universities are making oodles of money from this, and employers are saving oodles of money and time from not having to do such background checks on their own. I see few incentives for either to change their mindset any time soon.

To break that model of scarcity, we need to first have sufficient information on the Internet, available for free or relatively low cost, to substitute for the amount of knowledge you will acquire through a college degree program. I think we already have that, and much more, for many fields and I have no doubt the amount of publicly available knowledge for the taking will only increase. However, what we then need — and this is more important — is for someone to organize that gigantic pool of knowledge into curricula focusing on various fields and then devise an effective, less expensive, and more efficient way to certify that someone has digested the contents of a particular curriculum. There are many possibilities for how this could be accomplished (another post for another day), but the bottom line is that whatever solution they come up with has to be at least as cost-effective and efficient for employers as the current do-you-have-a-college-diploma system. If we can pull that off, then we’ll see a sea change in higher education. This involves more than just change in a few sectors or professions. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how a major component of society should function. That, I think, will take significantly more than five years.

We just re-watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade over the last couple days and it really struck me how dated the special-effects sequences in the movie look … and how little that mattered in my enjoyment of the movie, either back then or today, when we’ve seen much, much better special effects. It’s not hard to figure out why: The terrific storytelling and the humorous and witty banter between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery more than make up for whatever shortcomings there were in the effects, and the movie was a showcase for the story and the dialogs rather than for the special effects.

The dated effects were especially obvious during the dogfight scene when Indy and his father were fleeing from the Nazi blimp:

Nice sky in the background, isn’t it?

If you saw something like that in a movie today, you would laugh at how bad the effect looked. And yet, even when I rewatch this movie today, that doesn’t get in the way of my enjoying the film at all. I think it speaks volumes about what Hollywood blockbuster movies focus on these days compared to 20 years ago, and it’s a shame. Give me 10 Last Crusades over the mindless, CGI-laden crapfest that is the Transformers movies, that abomination of a Star Trek film, or the thoroughly mediocre fourth installment in the Indiana Jones series. Compare that last Indiana Jones movie with The Last Crusade, and the difference in the approach to movie-making is stark. For instance, one scene from The Last Crusade had Indiana Jones and Nazi stooge Elsa crawling through the sewers under Venice looking for an ancient coffin. They run into a giant pack of rats and at one point, they’ve got rats all over them.

What is this? Real rats?

Just imagine if they shot that scene today. Would they use real rats? Dream on! They’ll probably just plop the actors in front of a green screen and add in some CGI rats later. And they’ll probably end up looking about as real as that CGI gopher or the ants army from the last Indiana Jones movie.

Now that I think about it, the same holds true for computer games as well — really great story-telling trumps deficiencies in graphics. That’s why those old Monkey Island games are still a joy to play, despite not having voices or super-amazing graphics, and why I still keep an OLD computer around just for the times when I get in the mood to play those games again. Computer graphics have made leaps and bounds since those games came out, but the story-telling aspect of computer/video games haven’t really improved (if anything, they’ve regressed). That’s why I’m very happy to see a company like Telltale Games (the name says it all, doesn’t it?) picking up where those great story-telling games left off.

Now, if only we can get someone in Hollywood to follow suit …

To make the steppingstones, we followed the instructions from this video.

After our first attempt, we realized that because our tiles were all former pots, their curved surfaces were allowing the concrete to seep through, so we hit up the Scrap Exchange in Durham and raided their stash of flat tiles. We used those to make a steppingstone mosaic of my parents’ two cats as a Mother’s Day present for my mom.

Mom, of course, loved it. In fact, she likes it so much that she couldn’t bear to put it out in the garden and expose it to the elements, even though we told her we had put concrete sealant on it to protect it.

I had a lot of fun making these first couple steppingstones, and now I’m itching to make more. It’s so easy and cheap. A $6 bag of quick-dry concrete can make about 10 steppingstones, and it only takes a couple days to dry. We’ve been talking about making some more for the garden, and I’m even contemplating making our own concrete tiles to cover the grounds of the yard in our next house.

This bike rack allegedly exists, but we didn’t see it.

UPDATE: Since durhambikeracks.com does have a listing for this location, I decided to go back after work today to take another look. I walked around the plaza for a little bit and lo and behold, BIKE RACK! It was hidden away in an alleyway between two stores and well-concealed behind a couple rows of hedges. Not exactly easy to find, but it’s there. So I hereby recant everything I said below about the absence of said bike rack. However, I think the sentiments in the last paragraph still hold true — we still have a long way to go before we have the infrastructure in place to make it convenient for people to use alternative modes of transportation. Oh, that and the fact that biking to Adam & Eve is hilarious.

There’s a grocery store about a 20-minute bike ride from our house. It’s in a plaza that sits on the trail where we bike several times a week, and we usually ride out to the edge of the plaza and then turn around. I keep wanting to ride to that grocery store on the weekends. I can get my grocery shopping done, get in my workout in the process, and do a teensy bit to help the planet by using a bike for at least one of my regular errands. I even went online last night to look for a bike basket for holding groceries.

There’s just one problem: There is no bike rack in front of the grocery store or really anywhere near it. The only time my wife and I rode out to the store, I had to stand outside and guard our bikes while she went in to pick up a couple items. That’s just not going to work if we’re to do this on a regular basis. We drove around the plaza yesterday evening trying to find a bike rack and came up empty, even though according to durhambikeracks.com, there is one (did we just miss it? Anybody know?). It really is surprising, considering this is a busy shopping center right off a major bike trail. It sits in front of a big apartment complex, where I can see people’s bikes sitting in their balconies. Yet, no bike racks in the plaza. Not in front of the grocery store. Not in front of the Starbucks. Not in front of any of the restaurants.

Ironically, we did see one bike rack on the distant fringes of the plaza property — in front of an Adam & Eve. So if I wanted to ride my bike to get some groceries, I would have to ride to a sex-toy emporium (“No, really, I’m just here to pick up some spicy Italian sausage for dinner …”). Who would’ve thought that living an Al Gore-approved lifestyle would be so naughty and titillating.

This case just underscores how far your typical American town is from being ready for its residents to leave their cars at home and use greener means of transportation. Whether it be the insufficient number of bus routes or the dearth of sidewalks and bike lanes, the infrastructure just isn’t there yet to make alternative means of transportation practical or convenient for people. Until that changes, you’re going to have a hard time convincing people to give up their cars. I mean, look at my example above. You undertake the costly project of building a major bike trail that conveniently goes by a shopping center, yet you neglect to do the much easier and cheaper thing — putting a bike rack in the shopping center — to make that trail useful as an alternative means of transportation. Without a bike rack, the trail will always only serve a recreational purpose. Lots of people will bike on it every day, but when it comes time for them to get groceries, most of them will still climb into their cars even if they, like me, want to bike there instead. The same holds true for making people walk a mile to get to the nearest bus stop or spend 45 minutes on public transit just to accomplish regular daily tasks.

I found this courtesy of my friend Ryan: Classic Nintendo characters thrown into one Flash re-creation of the original Super Marios Bros. Yes, I can see myself wasting some time with this. I actually still have my old NES at home and we pull it out every now and then for a little trip down memory lane. It’s amazing how much enjoyment we derived from rudimentary graphics and the obscenely simple concepts at the core of these old games.

Mashable has a nice summary of the controversy, including clips from the talk show “The Young Turks”, which took a very strong stance that the ad is racist. After drawing an avalanche of negative reactions from Australians for that opinion, TYT did a follow-up show in which it stuck to its stance. The hosts’ main points were basically:

• We’re not saying Australians are racist, just that the ad is.
• We understand that from the Australian perspective, the ad is not racist; but Australians should understand that from our perspective, it is.
• Despite the different perspectives, the ad is bad because it propagates American stereotypes to other cultures.

I definitely agree with the first two points, but I disagree with TYT that the ad is bad because it’s propagating American stereotypes. Here’s my question: Why should Australia, or any other country, kowtow to American sensitivities? The TYT hosts are correct that from our perspective, the ad is clearly racist, and if it were an ad intended for an American audience, I would be first in line decrying it and wondering out loud how anyone could have thought this was acceptable. But the key phrase  in that statement is “our perspective”, and while the TYT hosts were busy being so concerned about American stereotypes being exported to other cultures, they seemed to have no problem with pushing their own American attitudes — in this case, America’s hypersensitivity to anything remotely pertaining to race, which makes us immediately scan for racial undertones in everything we see — onto other cultures. Instead of West Indies fans, we see black West Indies fans. And instead of cannibals (in another chicken ad that TYT points to in its follow-up show), we see black cannibals.

If the same racial undertones that Americans immediately detect in the ad stand out for Australians as well, then I would agree we have a problem. However, if within their cultural framework the imageries don’t suggest racial stereotypes (that they don’t see it as a commentary on black people), then who the heck are we to demand that they adopt our attitudes toward race? In their follow-up show, the TYT hosts acknowledge the difference in cultural perspectives, yet immediately disregard it and essentially say, “Yes, there’s a difference in the way the two cultures view race, but ours is the right way.” Can there be a clearer display of ethnocentrism? TYT tries to make the argument that KFC is an American company and therefore beholden to American values. That’s a weak argument, however, since in this day and age, the likes of KFC are really international corporations, serving a wide array of markets, each with its own culture and attitudes. For all but the most extreme cases, it would be asinine to demand that all those markets conform to the sensitivities of one culture, and extremely arrogant and ethnocentric to demand that that one culture be ours.

Let’s put ourselves on the flip side of that equation: Imagine how we would react if people in India demanded we pull ads encouraging the consumption of beef from American TV because it’s offensive to Hindu beliefs. Hey, if we demand another country adopt our race-phobia, why shouldn’t another (and one with a much bigger population than the U.S. no less) demand we adopt their food phobias?

Along with the video, Duke University Libraries also have a nice collection of documentary photographs taken by Gamble during his time in China. When we were at the museum, there was a projector on the wall outside the theater cycling through these pictures. I’m not sure how long these and the film are on display, but if you’re going to the Nasher to check out the Picasso exhibit any time soon, be sure to also take a peek at this exhibit. Yes, you can see the YouTube video here, but it’s just a different experience watching it on a huge screen in total darkness. I found myself wondering about the stories behind the faces of the people I was seeing on the screen, wondering how they survived (or if they survived) the traumatic turmoil that was on the horizons, wondering if they had any inkling about what was coming, and wondering where their descendants are now and what they are doing.

The other half of the theater (entrance on the opposite side of the one showing the Gamble film) is showing a collection of old home video footage of various locations around the world, including Russia, China, Thailand, Japan, and the United States.

The video means well, and I definitely think educational institutions need to continually change to better serve their students, but this video really paints today’s students in a poor light. I hope that they’re better than the whiny little brats this video makes them out to seem.

My response to the pieces of paper they hold up in the video:

• My average class size is 115: Umm, yeah, and my class size in elementary school in China was 52. I have little sympathy for Americans — students and parents alike — who complain that their educational experience sucks because they have a “large” class. If you’re serious about knowledge, you seek it out instead of sitting there waiting for someone to spoonfeed it to you and whine that there are too many mouths around you waiting to be spoonfed.
• 18% of my teachers know my name: A legit complaint, depending on the situation. At the same time, my experience has been that teachers know the names of students who take the initiative to seek their help. Any kind of classroom environment where it’s one teacher and many students makes a poor setting to form personal connections.
• I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me: And this is the teacher’s fault, how? Don’t complain about not getting something out of your education if you’re not going to put in the work.
• Only 26% (of the readings) is relevant to my life: Ever heard of learning for the sake of learning? If you’re expecting every line of text you lay eyes on while in college to be directly related to helping you find a job, you’re missing the point of college. It’s not just about picking up job skills, it’s about picking up knowledge of the world around you, which will, hopefully, mold you into a better and wiser person. Dump the tunnel vision.
• I buy hundred dollar text books that I never open: If the way that the class is taught makes opening the text books unnecessary, then yes, this is a problem. But if it’s just because the student is too lazy to open the book, then whose fault is that? And yes, textbooks are overpriced, especially now, when technology has made it possible to produce digital versions at significantly lower costs.
• My neighbor paid for class but never comes: Again, whose fault is that? If you aren’t even going to make the effort to learn, your teacher can’t teach you, no matter if it’s lecturing in a classroom or offering online, face-to-face interaction that you can participate in from your room.
• I will read 8 books this year, 2,300 Web pages, and 1,281 Facebook profiles: Apples and oranges. How many pages are you going to read from a book this year? That’s a better comparison.
• I’ll write 42 pages for this class this semester, and 500 pages of e-mail: Again, another apples and oranges comparison.
• My daily activities add up to 26.5 hours. I’m a multi-tasker. I have to be: Whoop-de-doo. Pat yourself on the back for something that everyone else has to do, too. Let’s look at the breakdowns of those 26.5 hours:
  • 7 hours of sleep
  • 1.5 hours watching TV each night
  • 3.5 hours online
  • 2.5 hours listening to music
  • 2 hours on my cellphone
  • 3 hours in class
  • 2 hours eating
  • 2 hours at work
  • 3 hours studying

  So let’s see: (24 hours in a day) – (7 hours for sleep) – (3 hours for class) – 3 hours for studying) – (2 hours for work) – (2 hours eating) = 7 hours to do whatever you want. That’s called having a lot of free time on your hands.

• I’ll be $20,000 in debt after graduation: Yeah, debt sucks. It’s called a tradeoff: You trade not being in debt for gaining knowledge and qualifications that help you get a better job and make more money.
• I’m one of the lucky ones. Over 1 billion people make less than $1 a day: Since you know this, don’t your complaints seem trivial?
• This laptop costs more than some people in the world make in a year: See above.
• When I graduate, I’ll probably have a job that doesn’t exist today: That’s not a bad thing, and it sure as heck is better than being in a job that won’t exist tomorrow. You’re going into a growth industry instead of a dying one.
• (Holding up a scantron) Filling this out won’t help me get there, or deal with (pointing to bunch of signs with world problems written on them): No, but that’s missing the point. Is your goal in college to ace tests (most of which are not great measurements of learning), or is it to gain knowledge? If it’s the latter, then the effectiveness of the whole testing system is a trivial point — merely an imperfect way for educators to get some sort of gauge on if you are learning what they’re teaching — and what you should be more concerned about is how much you’ve actually absorbed — and that’s something known only to yourself.
• I did not create the problems, but they are my problems: Which generation did not inherit problems of the previous generations? Every generation fixes problems left by their predecessors and create new ones that will outlast them. Young men in the 1860s didn’t create slavery, but they had to fight a war to abolish it. Young people in the 1960s didn’t create segregation, but they had to live with it, fight against it, destroy it, and spend the next 40 years repairing the racial divide it created, to the point where a black man can become president. This is not a new phenomenon.

Don’t take this post as bashing the younger generation. Take it as bashing a video that paints them in such a poor light, fulfilling basically every negative stereotype. And in the end, what you get out of your education is up to you. Those who want knowledge will seek it out. Those who sit on their hands expecting to have it delivered to them will miss the whole point of college.

This kitten was so sweet. He actually jumped into the neighbors’ car just as they were about to leave. After being jettisoned, he hung around our house and meowed non-stop. He was extremely friendly and allowed us to pet him and even pick him up and hold him. He has no collar and hasn’t been neutered, so he’s likely a stray. We didn’t feel comfortable having him roam around the neighborhood, dodging cars and potentially adding to the cat population, so we took him in for the night. As much as we would like to keep him, seeing that we have three cats in our little house already, we can’t take on any more. We’ve contacted the Goathouse Cat Refuge and are hoping the good people there can take him in (they have more than 160 cats, so what’s one more?).

In the mean time, if you live in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area and are interested in adopting this sweet kitten, contact us. He looks like he’s less than a year old and is very affectionate, rubbing against our legs all the time, begging for petting, and even sitting on Courtney’s lap. We’ve got him separated from our cats for the time being and are planning to take him to the vet today or tomorrow to give him a checkup and make sure he’s healthy.

Here’s a short video clip of him. C’mon, you know you want to take him home.

With the new Star Trek movie coming out, Courtney and I were talking recently about how much we would like to see another (good) Star Trek series on TV to wash away the bad taste that “Enterprise” left in our mouths. Alas, one is probably not coming any time soon, if at all. But, in a moment of extreme Trekkieness, we came up with this idea: An all-Star Trek channel, with characters from all the series appearing in various shows. And since we were taking a three-hour drive to the beach, we spent the time in the car hashing out the details. I wish I could say we did it because it was a good creative-writing and design exercise, but let’s be honest here: We did it because we are giant Star Trek nerds; not quite to the degree of the “Trekkies” movies, but big Trek nerds nonetheless.

Anyway, here’s the weekly lineup we came up with. Click on each show for a description. See what they are watching in the 24th century. Enjoy.

A few of my favorites:

To see the whole package, visit the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Web site.

Click here if you have trouble seeing the slideshow above.

Here’s the YouTube version of the slideshow, if you want something embeddable.

The story gives a breakdown of the family’s monthly finances, and frankly, if they consider themselves middle class and just getting by, then I must be in the poor house (which I am not). A look at part of their balance sheet:

• $12,000 monthly income after taxes and deductions (medical, 401K, social security): Nice to know they make in a month what I make in about four or five.
• Tithe $1,300 a month to their church: I won’t criticize someone for giving to their church. That’s good. But when the money you can afford to give away is equal to a lot of people’s two-week (or even monthly) income, you should NOT be struggling to get by.
• $4,000 payment on two mortgages and land purchase: Two mortgages, when many Americans are struggling to keep up with their one.
• $1,200 left each month after all the payments and basics (food, etc.): If you can’t cover your wants with $1,200 a month ($300 a week, or $14,400 a year), maybe you need to check your wants. What do you want? A car? I’m sure you can buy a decent one for $14,000. A trip abroad? Four of us went to China for three weeks this year for a total of about $10,000. If $14,400 a year can’t cover your wants, the YOU ARE JUST TOO DAMN GREEDY.

What’s ludicrous to me is that the idea that you can’t have everything just doesn’t seem to register with these people. They say they want a bigger house than the 2,500-square-foot one they have but can’t afford it, yet they are carrying two mortgages right now. Does the word “tradeoff” mean anything to them? Of course, I could also do the guilt-trip thing and point out that their meager 2,500-square-foot house would be home to three of four families in China, or that I just got done talking to people who went on a relief mission to Honduras, where they saw families with as many as 10 kids living in a one-room shack smaller than a 10-by-12-foot office.

Yes, it’s true that depending on where you live, $250,000 won’t go as far as it sounds. But this particular family lives in Sevierville, Tennessee. I just ran a cost-of-living comparison between Durham, N.C., and Tennessee (using Knoxville, the closest city to Sevierville available on the calculator), and the cost of living is actually lower in Tennessee than in Durham, and I can tell you that $250,000 goes a long way in Durham.

The story says whether someone making six figures is “rich” depends on perspective. It says:

To a family earning $50,000, $250,000 is well off, but for the family earning $250,000, rising college and medical costs and dropping home values make the perception debatable.

Oh right, because the family making $50,000 doesn’t have to worry about rising college and medical costs and dropping home values. To somehow suggest that the issues faced by the wealthy are exclusive to them is simply retarded.

Look, I don’t begrudge anyone for being wealthy. Heck, I hope to be one of them one day. But if and when that happens, you can be certain that you won’t hear me calling myself “middle class” or saying that I’m just “barely getting by” or that $1,200 each month isn’t enough to cover my wants.

The story ends with this quote from the wife of the family making $250,000.

“I’m not after sympathy. We are blessed. What I want is a reality check on what rich means,” Ms. Parnell says.

I really hope she said that with tongue in cheek, but I have a feeling the irony of her remark was lost on her.

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

…

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

…

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Read the entire story here. Needless to say, there are so many things wrong with that remark that an Asian-American would not know which part to be more offended by.

Here’s the thing: Speaking as a Chinese-American, it does make sense in a lot of situations to adopt an American name. My Chinese first name has two X’s, one of the hardest consonants for Westerners to pronounce (there is simply no English equivalent). When I came to America, my elementary school teacher suggested that I consider picking an American name to help me better assimilate into society. In many ways, it has. One of my recurring pleasures in life for the last 20 years has been to watch people I just met stumble left and right trying to pronounce my Chinese name and then bashfully apologize for butchering it. It doesn’t bother me. I always just smile and tell them it’s ok, followed by “I go by ‘John’”. I appreciate the effort they make to try to pronounce my Chinese name, but I’m also thankful, for them and for myself, that they don’t have to try to wrestle with it every time they just want to say hi to me in the hall, as it would serve as a constant reminder that somehow we are different even though it is such a superficial divide.

That said, what leaves me speechless about this particular incident is the utter stupidity and insensitivity the legislator displayed. Yes, I go by an American name to make life easier for myself and others, but I also take great pride in my Chinese name as it is part of my heritage. When I became a U.S. citizen, I had the chance to change my legal name to whatever I wanted, yet I opted to keep it, even if it means having to clarify that I have a different legal name every time I fill out paperwork or having to listen to customer service reps butcher my name every time they pull up my account information. To suggest that Asians adopt American names just because poll workers can’t bother to spend an extra 30 seconds getting a name right is just asking for a spanking in the realm of public opinion.

In fact, this remark is so idiotic that even though I’m not all that offended from a race perspective, I would act enraged just to punish this legislator for being stupid enough to not consider how her comment would be received. I’m no big fan of political correctness, but these are the times we live in, and it’s shocking to see a politician say something like this seemingly without any warning lights going off in the back of her mind.

I’m reminded of a recent exchange with my wife about new restaurants in the area:

Her: Hey look, they’re getting a Cat in the Kettle and a Chinese restaurant.

Me (deadpan): What’s the difference?

(Slight pause … and then we both have a good laugh)

Ok, maybe that was funny, maybe not. But in any case, it was something that would probably elicit pretty different reactions if it were said by a Chinese person vs. a white person. Face it: There are just some things a white person can’t say to or about Asians without coming off as racist in this particular time in human society, and a public official should be aware of that.

By the way, since I have already adopted an American name to make non-Asian Americans’ lives easier, I’m wondering if they can do something to help me with my problem: I can’t tell white people apart. It’s a problem I’ve struggled with ever since I came to the U.S. I try to hide it by smiling politely and nodding acknowledgingly when I’m in the company of white people, acting like I know Ben from Jerry. But after a time, it just wears on you.

——————————————-

On a related note, a lot of people in China are giving themselves English names (presumably to make white American pollworkers’ job easier in case they emigrate to America):

The fair will offer the following for free:

• Blood Pressure Screening
• Blood Glucose Screening
• Bone Density Screening
• Dental Screening
• Vision Screening
• Otoscopy Evaluation/Hearing Screening
• Nutritional Consulting
• Sign up for the Bone Marrow Registry

Here’s the flyer for the event:

• English version
• Chinese version

More information at the Web site for the health fair.

John’s entry is about Chinese history as seen through the eyes of his extended family. I know he will be too modest to grub for votes himself, but, as you see, I have no such scruples. :) If you get the chance, please go check his entry out, and, if you like it, vote for it. Here’s the link:

http://www.nameyourdreamassignment.com/the-ideas/jzheel/seeing-chinas-facelift-through-the-story-of-one-family/