Author: Jeff Tabaco

Hello, University of Victoria! Another example of the open-use beauty of Flickr and Creative Commons: UVic staff member Jean Macgregor contacted me last week to let me know that she had put together a poster for their library system’s website redesign survey, and that one of my Flickr photos (most of which are licensed for noncommercial use) was included, along with other photos of people at their laptops. Neat!

Below is the original photo, and the poster (since it’s technically intended for a limited audience, I’ve blurred out some of the details):

» Previously: “WNYC’s New Deal murals.”

Last night’s opening ceremony at the Olympics was okay. I found the first part a bit generic (and what was up with the 1970s and 80s disco-pop during the parade of nations?); I was glad to see the second part be a bit more Italy-focused. Speaking of the parade, I always get a kick out of hearing things announced in multiple languages. Even if it turns out to be the same, just with different accents: “Canada! Canada! Canada!” If you can’t tell, that’s Italian, English, and French, respectively. (By the way, La Scala ballet dancer Roberto Bolle may have looked a little freaky in his avant-garde getup, but I figured it might be worth looking for other photos of him. Mmm, turns out I was right.)

Aside: Torino vs. Turin. As far as I understand it, when the city’s Olympic organizing committee presented their bid years ago, they wanted to retain an Italian identity and insisted the city be referred to in its native form, “Torino.” The International Olympic Committee acquiesced, thus making this the first games in which the official name is not also the English form. NBC went along, as you know, but the Associated Press and most other media outlets use “Turin,” with some even splitting the difference, using “Torino” for the games (like a brand name) and “Turin” for the city itself.

Tangential childhood memory: Back during the 1984 L.A. summer games (I was about seven years old), the neighbor’s kids and I would “play” Olympics. We’d run down the block, carrying a “torch” (probably a stick or play sword of some kind), and hand it off to each other, before triumphantly climbing the steps up to my second-story porch, with the Olympic theme on LP blaring from inside the house. Good times.

Our London vacation starts in just under two weeks (yay!). So it turns out we’ll be on vacation during part of the upcoming Olympics in Torino. Maybe we’ll end up rooting for the UK!

In tomorrow’s New York Times travel section there’s a rundown of the seven cities vying to be candidates to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. (The 2010 games will be in Vancouver.) I don’t know much about any of the applicants, but of course I won’t let that stop me from picking an early leader based on totally superficial criteria, like their official website. I’d have to say Sochi, Russia, has the most solid web presence so far. Salzburg‘s site gets an honorable mention if only for the edelweiss; have they hired Julie Andrews as a spokesperson yet?

Sarah Vowell has a column in today’s Times, where she resumes as a guest columnist during February. It is only available in the newsprint version and TimesSelect (the pay section of nytimes.com), but I didn’t have to search very far to find copies of it floating on the internet. She’s right: the state of the union may be precarious, but at least we have Anderson Cooper’s swell hair.

By the way, Sarah is on tour and coming to D.C. in a couple of weeks. Finally. We’ve had our tickets for months! (Granted, I still haven’t gotten around to reading her latest book, Assassination Vacation.)

The State of the Union: A Citizen’s Rebuttal
By SARAH VOWELL
Guest Columnist
The New York Times

The state of our union is stunned. We democracy spreaders remain shocked, shocked, at the Hamas sweep in the recent Palestinian parliamentary election, never, ever, ever before having experienced a deficit of wisdom on the part of American voters. And that is not only a sarcastic shout-out to the loss of electoral innocence brought on by that time “Dances With Wolves” beat out “Goodfellas” for best picture at the Oscars. No, it is merely a weary barb borne of the ongoing grind that is the current presidency.

Oh Amazing Race, I know I was cold and distant during last season’s lackluster “family edition” fling, but I’m ready to come back to you. Let’s not fight ever again?

The “race around the world” is back in global form, and the new teams have been announced! Ed, on whom I can always rely for all things Amazing Race, has a quick rundown of the teams with “who do they remind you of?” references to previous seasons. The upcoming two-hour season premiere airs Tuesday, Feb. 28, on CBS.

Last month, on the morning of the day that I left for my Christmas vacation, I was getting ready for my trip while listening to NPR and was surprised to hear a story on balikbayan boxes. If you’re a Filipino-American like me, this is a familiar piece of culture, especially around the holidays. Balikbayan (from the Tagalog words for “return” and “country”) boxes refer to the packages of goods that Filipinos abroad send or bring back to their family members in the Philippines. In airport lines for Philippine-bound flights, you see many passengers waiting to check in their large balikbayan boxes; there is also a growing cottage industry of balikbayan cargo companies.

The NPR reporter talked with a woman in California who is sending items to her mother, and the reporter picked up the story a couple of weeks later in Manila as the box arrives at its destination. I got a little teary-eyed listening to it, especially since I had been getting ready for a journey of my own to visit my parents over Christmas, and also because balikbayan boxes are a part of Filipino culture that I nostalgically associate with my childhood, when relatives including my late grandparents would travel with or send boxes packed with clothes, food, and other gifts (pasalubong).

The story (“Gift Boxes Help Migrant Filipinos Keep Ties to Home“) was part of an NPR series called “Global Returns,” on how U.S. immigrants give back to their home countries.

Aside: I just found out that this year the Smithsonian is celebrating 100 years of Filipino immigration to the U.S. with events and exhibits here in D.C. and elsewhere.

Just a quick TV note: The stars of Brokeback Mountain (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway) will be on the Oprah show today. I can’t get to my TiVo in time to set it (nor is it networked), but fellow D.C.-area TV-watchers take note that WJLA Channel 7 re-runs Oprah late the same night, usually around 1 a.m.

Aside: Some of the most frequent search strings that people use to find my website are image searches for “philippine flag,” “andy roddick,” “elijah wood,” and “nate berkus.” (I recently took down the flag image when I realized a bunch of people had hotlinked to it; there are others I should take down or otherwise protect from hotlinking.) But lately an increasingly frequent text search string has been that trademark Brokeback line, “i wish i knew how to quit you.”

Just a bit of Movable Type administrivia, which I’m posting in case anyone else has this problem: ever since I upgraded to the latest version of MT several months ago, I’ve noticed a bug in which MT will sometimes unnecessarily append “_1” to an entry’s basename when I save changes, and given the way my file publishing is set up (using truncated entry titles for filenames), that ends up creating an unwanted additional file. MT usually tacks on these extra numbers to prevent possible overwriting of otherwise identically titled entries, but it has done so even in cases where a conflicting entry doesn’t exist.

After doing a lot of Googling, I finally found an official reference to the problem. Apparently it has to do with the preview function, which I use a lot. The workaround is to avoid saving from the preview screen; instead, click on “re-edit this entry” to return to the editing screen and then save from there. (Six Apart’s explanation can be found in a comment on NSLog; scroll down to the third comment.)