The Swine in Michigan

Barack celebrates 100 years, I mean, err, days in office. It feels like years because he is fixing over a decade of problems. I said over a decade. Yes, I said it! People think the real estate mortgage collapse (which is the catalyst for the current recession) was a product of the Bush era but it started when Greenspan went around deregulating Wall Street in the 80s.

So yeah, leave it to Barack to clean up the dirt. For those who gave him a C or lower grade (ahem, Fox News network) for his performance so far, let's see if you can outdo this man without making all kinds of gaffes like Bush I and Bush II. Why did I not make a Bubba joke? Please, we all love Bubba. And we have to support Ms. Hillary since she did the braver thing twice -- stood by Bubba and stood by Barack.

To celebrate my extremely boring week and fear of catching The Swine, I ventured out of my apartment building today to join a friend for coffee. Along the way, we paid a visit to the Hospital because my friend is his sister's little bitch, I mean, err, his sister's valet and she had a mid-evening Frappuccino craving. Then we went around shaking hands with some of his friends in the Hospital -- nurses, food service people, etc. Yeah, I feared for my life for a good 30 minutes and I pumped the Purell hand sanitizer stuff on two separate occasions.


I suspect Purell must have a $10 million dollar contract with the University of Michigan Health System (including the Hospital) because there was a full-size Purell pump every 10 feet of a corridor and also one in every patient and examination room.

I am praying that The Swine stays at only 2 people in Michigan, though it has been spreading rapidly through the Midwest already, no thanks to the 51 kids in New York. This was supposed to be a Mexico-Texas thing, and America would have gladly allowed Texas to secede from the Union. Now it's global.

Good luck, everyone.

Bad junior fashion in Ypsilanti, MI

I attended a graduation commencement ceremony on Sunday and the weather was blazing hot, so there were a lot of unspeakable fashion mistakes going on everywhere, but I found this little boy to have committed the most grievous of all style sins: the sock-and-sandal.

Yes, that is the boy and his older brother in front of him, with the all-American footwear faux pas. Clearly his parents (especially his mother) are to blame for this display.

Parents, please. Casual is fine but stupid is not okay. If you want the kids to wear socks, then wear shoes. If you want it to be breezy but covered then wear canvas shoes, or (in desperate times, try) Crocs.

Hawt Pink

It's the end of the semester and the kids in the neighbourhood have been partying endlessly, celebrating the last of their exams and the upcoming summer break. Here's a wonderful reminder of some of the craziness that enrolls into college here in Michigan:
My phone's camera is not the greatest but the car is in (in American terms) Pepto Bismol pink, which is a cotton candy pink with a tinge of violet undertones. I've never seen the owner of the car (no prizes for guessing the gender) but s/he parks in a different spot every school day on the street in front of my apartment building.

If I don't see it in Fall when the new school term starts, I will surely miss it.

eLuxury goes bye bye

eLuxury.com, LVMH's comprehensive online luxury shopping website, will be closing all commerce activities by the end of June -- a product of its own retail double-dipping. I will miss it and all the tax-free goods it offers.

A sale is going on now, and I've found below:

1. Best accessory:
Dsquared2
Wooden Necklace
$225.00 SALE PRICE: $135.00 FINAL PRICE NOW $81.00

2. Best sneaker:
Y-3
Checkered Honja High-Top
$290.00 SALE PRICE: $174.00 FINAL PRICE NOW $104.40


3. Ugliest thing you can spend your money on:
Vintage by La Rosa
'50s Corduroy Print Shirt, Red
$595.00 SALE PRICE: $357.00 FINAL PRICE NOW $214.20
Okay, okay. This is supposed to be vintage and super rare. It may be a well-made shirt, but no one should step out of the house with this shirt unless attending a festival / costume party.

Operating system takes up too much space

Happy belated Easter/Passover, everyone.

I've diappeared for a few weeks now, making absolutely no progress in looking for work or securing my scholarship. However, the major thing I've done so far is salvaging my digital data on my hardy old notebook, with many thanks to Mr. O.

The process has taken up most of the last few days (which is, genuinely, a lot of progress since I've abandoned this project for over 6 months; one must wonder how I've ever managed to live without a notebook). Battling "trojanic" malware is like going to war, a fulltime job. Many times I felt like kicking myself for behaving as if I didn't own a technie degree nor any computer usage capabilities at all.

Just a little over 36 months of doing the "lining up numbers" thing has left me incapable of speaking of partitions and installation procedures. I could feel my notebook's humiliation to be owned by me.

I have let my personal techie spirit down.

As of today I have completed my third re-installation. I am now familiar with free antivirus software (AVG) and this aggressive little treasure called Spybot Search and Destroy (it deserves a prize for its name, or at least a movie named after it). I have rediscovered the unnecessary luxury of online shpping, of staring aimessly at stuff I don't need to buy, of vowing to buy all the things I have seen online. I have gotten used to the hunched over posture of my sitting on the couch while simultaneously eyeing Anderson Cooper / Jon Stewart / Stephen Colbert on TV and reading Perez Hilton's latest post and resisting the crazy things Marc Jacobs is trying to peddle at Louis Vuitton.

It feels great to be a netizen again! I was up surfing and installing until 0700 hours, clocked in about three hours of sleep and then woke up to yell at my SA at the Vuitton store (it really does not take two weeks for something to travel from Los Angeles to Detroit, bla bla bla).

Regardless still, I had a decent day today: I indulged and stocked up on imported Asian junk food. The rain left and there was sunshine, the weather hit the high 50s. I had plenty of sushi. And then I decided to be one step ahead of keeping my system safe from the big, bad trojans out there; I attempted to download Service Pack 3 when I was brutally slapped with the fact that my 5GB partition could not house my operating system (OS) and all the updates/service packs Microsoft had created for it.

WHAT? Since when was 5GB not enough for an OS? This is bullshit. Now I have to reallocate my partitions and start over.

Yes, there will be a fourth re-installation after this post. If you don't hear from me for a few days, you will know it is because I am still wrestling around with Windows.

*sigh*

Nice shoes in Ann Arbor, MI

It was April Fool's Day yesterday and I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw these two people walking down the street. While they were not particularly spectacular, their feet gave them away and I suspect that were anything but Midwestern American.

The man on the left had on the slimmest dark wash jeans only Hedi Slimane would approve of, and a pair of deep red (almost cordovan coloured) driving loafers. Trust me, the pictures really do not show how immensely slim his jeans were –- not tight; just very, very slim; like matchsticks. The lady walking with him wore two of Spring's most important items: leggings, and the nude peep-toe platform stiletto pump.

Ah, delightful. Seeing them definitely made my day. I feel a shoe purchase coming on. Oh, no!