A brief report on i restaurant. I enjoyed the food a little bit more this time around (we didn't order anything spicy), but I still don't think the food is worth the price. Maybe it would be a nice place to go for a party--there were some teenage girls celebrating a sweet 16. (They didn't look 16, they looked 14, even though some of them were rather tall.) The karaoke machine was going, and they sang some songs in English; one girl attempted to sing a Boa song in English, and another sang a Japanese song (that some HK singer did a cover of, but I can't remember who...).

I forced myself to eat some of the bug (lobster), since to say no after being offered some would have been rude. The honey/black pepper beef steak was ok.

I had fun listening to the seniors talking. There were some interesting comments about the si tau po, too. My mother said that the women often complain about their husbands when they meet--what would Dr. Laura say about that. How much of the complaining is justified? As they are all rather old (and Catholic), I don't think a divorce is likely; do they say anything to their husbands? Is it just a way to release frustration? I'm not sure what to make of it, even though this kind of talk among women (and men too) is rather 'normal.' I'm not a big believer in complaining as a way to get rid of stress or frustration.

But being a charity case isn't great (my mother's friends wanted me to go to dinner), and I was thinking again of going back to the new plan, since I haven't accomplished much in 2 weeks. Working everyday doesn't help, since teaching is tiring, and even though there isn't that much thinking involved, when the day is over, I am not in the shape to think or write.

Korea Times: Sungnyemun to be Rebuilt by 2013.

Cal Catholic Daily: "Blessed over the bones of St. Peter"

The cornerstone for the new chapel at Thomas Aquinas College. Apparently Fr. Cornelius Buckley, S.J. is now a chaplain at the college. "Very good!"

There were some prop. 8 opponents on the corner of De Anza and Stevens Creek, the one next to Le Boulanger. They were out there for a while, during rainy conditions, but by the time I left Armadillo Willy's most were gone. I think one of them may have taken one of the Yes on 8 signs that had been there as well.


After watching the last episode of Kitchen Nightmares, I don't think the hamburgers at AW are worth getting--they're not freshly made from ground beef, just already processed burger patties. I did enjoy drinking water with lemon though. I should buy lemons, but I'd probably end up not using them frequently enough. Next time I'm at the grocery store, I should see how much lemons are...


I'm going to dinner at i Restaurant @ 6--we'll see if the second time is better. Mrs. Chan liked the restaurant a lot... she couldn't understand my mother's opinion of the restaurant.

Reuters: Queen draws ire over gay marriage comment

Is the Queen of Spain more traditional than her husband? If she were king, would she have done anything different?

Link:
Casa de Su Majestad el Rey de España

Zenit: Holy See on Economic Crisis

"The Real Crisis Does Not Appear to Be Merely Financial"

No statement on usury. But there is this observation:

A third, and perhaps even more basic, observation has to do with the general public and its choice of values and lifestyles. A lifestyle, and even more an economic model, solely based on increased and uncontrolled consumption and not on savings and the creation of productive capital, is economically unsustainable. It also becomes unsustainable from the standpoint of concern for the environment and, above all, of human dignity itself, since the irresponsible consumer renounces his own dignity as a rational creature and also offends the dignity of others.

An explanation of what government is:

Government is the exercise of the virtue of prudence in the enactment of legislative and executive measures capable of directing social activity towards the common good. The principle of subsidiarity requires that governments and large international agencies ensure solidarity on the national and global levels and between generations.

Another Valkyrie trailer (via AICN). Also, Angels and Demons trailer online (also via AICN). More garbage from Ron Howard?

The Unborn trailer @ Apple. If it's any good, maybe I'll take mom...

Quantum of Solace stills

Lew Rockwell interviews Naomi Wolf. Via LRC blog.

Edit: I was thinking of Naomi Klein when I typed the above. I've made the correction....

Gordon Ramsay in South Bend, IN

Catch the latest episode of Kitchen Nightmares. I don't know what to think of the pseudo-confessions in Christ the King Church. Over-dramatic and perhaps disrespectful of the church, and not probably something you would see in the UK BBC version. The editing for the Fox version is really starting to annoy me, and its repetitive--you can predict what will be shown and said for each episode. Chef Ramsay makes plenty of comments for the BBC version, but you don't get that here.

Related links:
J Willy's BBQ House
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay helps revamp South Bend restaurant
South Bend Tribune: j willy's Kitchen Nightmare
HOME OF BBQ: Interviews: Rick Sutton - Kitchen Nightmares & Gordon Ramsay

Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski, Is the Global Economy a Mistake? an Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

Richard Armitage has gotten older

since North and South and it shows, in this promotion still at least... he is now a member of the cast of Spooks.

*Spoiler warning* He replaces Rupert Penry-Jones, as Adam Carter dies in the season 7 premiere. Haven't watched the episode yet. RPJ had already said that this season would be his last on the show--I don't think his fans were expecting him to leave so early in the season.

Related links:
Foolish Passion—a North & South fan site
Richard Armitage Online
thearmitagearmy.co.uk :: Fan Site for the Actor Richard Armitage ...

John Schwenkler, If at first you don’t secede…

Donald Livingston, an Emory University philosopher who has been similarly maligned over his distaste for Lincoln, suggests that the roots of America’s conflicted understandings of secession and states’ rights run deep. According to Livingston, who is at work on a book-length philosophical treatment of secession, present-day Americans are the inheritors of two “incommensurable Americanisms.” On the one hand, there is the Jeffersonian model of political order, which locates sovereignty in the small scale and thus treats secession as “a lawful act of a natural political society.” In contrast, the Lincolnian conception regards America as one nation indivisible—a “perpetual” and “indissoluble union,” in the language of Texas v. White —in which case “secession then would be revolution; it would be incompatible with government as such.” It was the dominance of the Jeffersonian conception that explains the success of the early split-state movements listed by Sale, while the rise of the Lincolnian one led to the crushing of the Confederacy and dearth of later secessionist movement.

The Jeffersonian view, Livingston notes, is similar in many important ways to the theory of human society put forward in Aristotle’s Politics. Aristotle not only holds that man is a “political animal”—that is, a creature suited to life in a polis, or city-state—but also claims that there are natural limits to the extent of a polis: “the best limit of the population of a state,” as he puts it, “is the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view.” And what exactly is this number? Livingston points to Athens, Venice, and Florence, each of which had populations in the tens of thousands, as political communities large enough to have attained the Aristotelian values of “life and high culture.”

The Deliberate Agrarian visits the homes of some of the American "Founding Fathers"--
Visiting Mount Vernon
George Washington The Farmer (Part 1)
George Washington The Farmer (Part 2)
Visiting Madison’s Montpelier & The Big Woods
Visiting Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Part 1)
Visiting Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (Part 2)
The Story of Thomas Jefferson’s Personal Debt
Thomas Jefferson on Government Debt (Then & Now)

Rod Dreher: Wendell Berry's time is now

via Crunchy Con.

Wendell Berry fundraiser for Tree Foundation a huge success

Eunomia: The Duduk Comes For You

I have an old unfinished post on the duduk...

See also his A Voting Menagerie.

Tennant won't be back in 2010

For the next full season of Dr. Who--BBC News (via AICN).

AT: Sweet salaries for Indian 'eye candy'
By Priyanka Bhardwaj

How will catch up with the "First World Nations" first, China or India?

Thursday night: Debate between Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin?

ChuckBaldwinForum

Henry CK Liu: US government throws oil on fire and Killer touch for
market capitalism

Zenit: 2 Jesuits Slain in Moscow

Terrible. Requiescant in pacem.

Julianne off DWTS

for surgery... Julianne Hough leaves “Dancing With the Stars” – for now

Julianne Hough & Cody Linley Dancing with the Stars - samba


DWTS Cody Linley & Julianne Hough Week 6

ET with DWTS Julianne Hough - 10-28-08

The St. Ann Choir's Fall Program:

ALL SAINTS' DAY
Saturday noon, November 1, 12:15 p.m.
Sung Mass in Latin
Josquin Des Prez, Missa Ave Maris Stella
ALL SOULS' DAY
Sunday, November 2, 12:00 noon
Orlando di Lasso, Missa pro Defunctis
THE SOLEMNITY OF CHRIST THE KING
Sunday, November 23, 12:00 noon
Orlando di Lasso, Missa Laudate Dominum
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Monday, December 8 , 8:00 p.m.
Sung Mass in Latin
Tomás Luis de Victoria, Missa O Quam Gloriosum
ADVENT VESPERS
Sunday, December 14, 6:15 p.m.
St. Ann Chapel, Melville at Tasso, Palo Alto
Special Advent Vespers for Gaudete Sunday
Music of Dufay, Lasso, Walter, & Josquin
THE CHRISTMAS SEASON
Masses on Christmas Eve and Day and New Year's Day, and
New Year's Eve Vespers are planned; watch for further details

Plus:

MUSIC ON THE POETRY OF PETRARCH

The Stanford Early Music Singers will present a free concert of Renaissance music-settings of texts of Francesco Petrarch
by Italian and English composers of the sixteenth century:
Festa, Rore, Lasso, Marenzio, Ferrabosco & others.
Wednesday, December 3, 8:00 p.m.,
Stanford Memorial Church.

Coming Events

AICN: 24 s7 trailer

THE COMING ELECTRICITY CRISIS
by Byron W. King

via Daily Reckoning

Earlier this week, I attended a privately sponsored presentation on U.S. energy policy. The main speaker was a senior faculty member from Carnegie Mellon University. This guy has been "doing electricity" for about 40 years or so. He has written reports for the National Academy of Sciences. When the people at the U.S. Department of Energy have a question about electricity, they call this CMU professor.

The news is not good. In 2007, there were about 144 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing boards of the U.S. energy utilities. But, said the professor, "We will probably build none of them." Indeed, "The electric industry in the U.S. is in terrible shape," said the CMU man. So we should expect local and regional brownouts and blackouts to become common occurrences "within five years." But the first isolated instances of brownout and blackout will hit us much sooner than that.

Why is there such a gloomy forecast? Because essentially, the deregulation of the 1990s was botched. According to the CMU electricity expert, botched deregulation "slowed investment, raised prices and led to more and more uncertainty." So now few utilities or their executives want to take political, regulatory, technical or financial risks. Hence, the entire long-range planning cycle has broken down.

It's almost impossible to decide what to build, and at what scale. Costs are exploding, particularly for new construction. It's safe to say that most power plant construction cost projections have doubled within the past 18 months. The prospect of fast-changing environmental regulations also adds to the uncertainty. No one wants to build a power plant and learn in five or 10 years or so that environmental regulations are going to shut it down.

Even the alternative energy industry - with wind, solar and geothermal as the poster children - has formidable challenges. The biggest issue is cost competitiveness. That's because alternative systems provide power at costs that range from slightly higher to much higher than traditional power from, say, coal plants. Then there are issues of reliability, due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar, and the still-novel nature of geothermal power. And other issues include the lack of transmission from the usually remote sites of wind and solar facilities.

Overall, U.S. power producers face the prospect of many different forms of investment uncertainty. What will be the availability of different fuel mixes? Will coal still be useable? Or will natural gas be available at a cost they can afford? Can power producers invest in nuclear systems when there is still no definite program for disposing of the waste stream over the next 50 years? Or should the utility companies go all out for alternative systems?

But the next question is how much can consumers afford to pay? And what rates will the regulators allow? If utilities invest in alternative power systems (like wind or solar) that produce electricity at, say, 20-30 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh), will the regulators set those relatively high costs as the level of reimbursement? And for how long? What if the regulators permit the higher costs for only a few years and then penalize the utilities because some "better" technology comes along? At the end of the day, the base line cost of electricity is set against the cost to produce comparable coal or natural gas-based electricity. And this cost setting occurs even though there is a growing bias against burning carbon in the U.S. political and regulatory culture. One attendee at the discussion commented, "When you're in a 'no-win' situation, guess what? You can't win."

The CMU professor has looked at historical trends for power in the U.S. His best estimate is that over the next decade or so, the price for electricity will about double on average throughout the nation. "This would put the cost of electricity about on par, as a percentage, with where it was back in the 1950s." But that is only if people keep making investments in new power systems and the nation adopts conservation and efficiency measures on a large scale. Absent that? It's lights out.

alt--top link does not appear to be working; it is on the front page of the American Daily Reckoning website, but will undoubtedly be archived tomorrow. Whiskey & Gunpowder.

via EB: Nassim Nicholas Taleb Angry (video) -- also at Youtube.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Home Page
(wiki)
His book, The Black Swan (Google Books)
Time interview on black swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom - Times Online
"The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics"
Interview
IT Conversations (mp3)
His appearance on The Colbert Report.
Wired interview
The Observer profile
Appearance on Charlie Rose.







What is a Black Swan?

Fora.TV