Middle Eastern Debates

So, the beginning of the Middle Eastern Debates were today. I gave a rough-edged, sketchy, and somewhat rushed speech, but I can blame that on the way Chris controlled the television camera to pan away from me. Whatever. I'm optimistic about the next few days of debate. But first, some time off for the weekend. If anyone wants to hang out, call or IM me; I got a relatively full weekend but I can shuffle stuff around easy.

I'm a little worried about Sharif. He says he has something on me (Olmert) in the debate which I apparently don't know about. It involves nuclear weapons...and me giving them to someone. Plus he wrote a 70 page paper to prep. But I can play psychology well enough too. We shall see what happens.

Today, after school, a couple of friends and I walked downtown to the Commons. After grabbing the obligatory coffee, we...no joke, we hacked a sack for I swear like two hours. Something transcendental about it; I definitely improved mad skeeelz today. Granted, we did eventually leave and chill over at Sasha's. And then saw 300. It's my 3rd or 4th time seeing it, but it doesn't get worse, it just becomes more...internalized. Unfortunately, it came at the cost of coming home at around 12:30AM.

It's strange, but I have a sudden urge to listen to Japanese-German techno music. What's it with those two countries, producing the cheesiest shit ever? Maybe it's a post-axis-of-evil syndrome of some sort...perhaps one day, North Korea and Iran will come up with their own versions of disco-house. Oh god, I'm so politically incorrect.

The Last King of Scotland

Charming. Magnetic. Murderous.

When you're fooled into sympathizing with the bad guy, you can't help but question yourself too. When that bad guy is Idi Amin, there's something wrong with you. Except that I think there are few people who wouldn't think, "Oh, wow, this guys actually kind of cool." Until you learn about the shit going on.

I gotta say the one thing I loved best was the way the movie ended with the Entebbe hijacking and the events that led up to Gallagher's escape from Uganda. Oh, and Forest Whitaker is amazing in this film, I should add.

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On Friday, Sasha and I went down to Juna's to grab some coffee and talk like we normally do. That day, we were joined by Lukas who had just gotten out of an internship interview with the Ithaca Journal.

So we covered the basic subjects, and then Sasha had to leave, and Lukas and I went to get some pizza from Neds, when we learned that neither of us had the three dollars we owed Neds for the the pizza.

"I have a debit card," says Lukas.

"No swipe...no swipe thing. I don't have," the rather rude pizza man says.

With no money, and no pin number for the ATM, we don't have a choice. We start looking around for people who have money, yet no one will give us any. I grab my bag and search through the deepest crevasses for loose change. In the end, we come up with $2.50 cents, a full 50 cents short. Problem is, we already ordered.

"You owe me fifty cents, next time," he tells me.

Shit, I think, what is this guy trying to do, jack me out of money later? But what choice do we have? We just spent money we didn't have. So we accept and go eat pizza while laughing about it. In the back of my mind, I know that if I come to him on Monday, he's going to ask for a dollar or two. I'm cool with that, but I'm not cool with letting him play me like that.

But my mom comes in with fifty cents and thus we are rescued.