Obama at Wesleyan

Barack Obama spoke at Wesleyan’s commencement! He spoke about his what service has meant to him and what service can do for a country. I found it pretty inspiring, and it was also exciting to see him standing at the familiar podium out in front of Olin Library. The speech made me think about how I want to include service in my life.

He was filling in for Ted Kennedy, who was recently diagnosed with brain cancer, and included a moving tribute to Senator Kennedy in his speech.

Stories, Mourning

This is the kind of story that has been told over and over during the last few days here in China. The link is to the story of a couple that clung together for over a day while waiting to be rescued from the rubble of a building, but there are so many more, and countless remain untold.

Today marks the start of a three-day period of national mourning for the victims of the quake (over 30,000 at this point), and this afternoon at 2:28–exactly one week after the quake struck–there was a three-minute period of national mourning. I was alone in my hotel room in Shenyang. As exactly 2:28 cars outside started honking, and didn’t stop for three minutes. Here are some pictures from around the country.

In the Heights!

In the Heights

Wow! I’m so proud of and happy for Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical In the Heights just received the most Tony Award nominations of any production this year!

Lin wrote and performed the original version of In the Heights during our sophomore year at Wesleyan. He spent a few years after graduation retooling the show, and it was hugely successful off broadway before moving to broadway this year. I’ll never forget opening up the NYTimes webpage a couple of years ago and seeing Lin’s face smiling back at me; I clicked on his face and it led me to a great review of the off-braodway production. If you’re in NY, here are Lin’s suggestions on where to eat.

It’s so much fun to see so many Wesleyan names associated with the show. Thomas Kail, who directs the show, was assistant director of a show that I was in my freshman year. He was a senior at the time, and had discovered in his junior year that he wanted to do theater work. I’m so excited to see him following his dream. Bill Sherman, also in our class, was somehow able to become something of a big band leader on a small liberal arts campus in New England.

I hope I have a chance to see the show when I’m back in the US.

Earthquake in Chengdu

Like so many other people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the earthquake that happened on Monday in Chengdu, and feeling somewhat helpless.

Well, I guess one way to help is to donate money to the rescue and aid efforts, and information about doing so can be found here.

It may seem crass to comment on the media coverage of a disaster, but the media coverage here has been fascinating. This NYTimes article pretty well sums up what’s been going on. It’s heartening to see the media rallying people together to support the rescue efforts, and nice to see the coverage being relatively open. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the coverage focusing almost exclusively on rescue and aid efforts (as the Chinese media is doing) rather than the carnage (as I fear the US media would probably do).

New Beijing, New Olympics

I saw someone wearing a t-shirt (picture) today that read, in English, “Tibet in China, Torch in Heart”. The Chinese, however, read “振兴中华,反对分裂”, which means something like “Revitalize China, Oppose Separatism”.

The Chinese was not presented as a translation of the English, but it’s interesting to think about how the designer of the t-shirt (or the originator of the slogan) thought about how to present the message in different ways to English-speaking and Chinese-speaking audiences. The English message is certainly “fluffier”.

I’m sure there are many examples of similar situations, but the only one that comes to mind right now is one of the Olympic slogans that has been plastered over Beijing for the last few years: New Beijing, Great Olympics. The Chinese version of the slogan (the Chinese and English often appear together) is “新北京,新奥运”, which means “New Beijing, New Olympics”. I’ve always wondered if BOCOG tried and failed to get “New Olympics” approved by the IOC as an English slogan, and whether the IOC approved using “New Olympics” in Chinese. I’m sure there’s an interesting backstory there, but I’ve never seen it written up.

(Update: Apparently, “New Beijing, Great Olympics” is not a slogan but a strategic concept.)

Five Decades of Your Song

(Feel free to make fun of me for this post.)

It’s a well-known fact that YouTube is awesome.

One of the most fun–although maybe not legal(?)–pleasures of YouTube is watching videos of live performances.

For instance, if you’re an Elton John fan like me, you can watch an entire concert of performances over several decades just by using the “Related Videos” feature.

Or, you can watch the evolution of a song like “Your Song”, Elton’s first big hit, over five decades.

The Sixties

This is a demo recording of Your Song from 1969 (there’s actually no video). The melody and vocals are actually quite different from the studio version released in 1970.

The Seventies

This is a live performance from 1970. It’s pretty similar to the studio release.

The Eighties

This is a live recording from a concert in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. You can tell that he’s sung the song thousands and thousands of times, and he gets pretty creative with certain parts of it. His voice is a bit hoarse, I think because he had throat polyps. The album of this concert is one of my favorite live albums.

The Nineties

This is after surgery to correct the throat polyps, and he’s lost a good portion of the lower range of his voice.

The First Decade of the Twenty-First Century (We still don’t have an accepted name for this decade, do we? When will we decide on one? Probably in 2010.)

This is from his 60th birthday party at Madison Square Garden.

How many new cars are there each day in Beijing?

I ran across this article yesterday morning in the New York Times, and was excited by the headline: Beijing Stops Construction for Olympics. Since I live in Beijing, the prospect of construction stopping is rather exciting. I’d sleep better at night and breathe better during the day.

Unfortunately, after actually reading the article, I learned that construction won’t be stopping until June 20th, and even then only some construction will halt. So it seems like a more accurate headline would be, “Beijing Plans to Stop Some Construction for Olympics“. But headlines are limited, so I suppose that this is just a small quibble.

What really surprised me about the article was this sentence:

There are about 3.5 million vehicles choking Beijing’s roadways, with about 1,200 new cars joining the honking parade each week.

I was surprised because 1,200 new cars per week sounds very low. I’ve heard more than 1,000 new cars per day quoted regularly for several years. A quick search online found this from Xinhua:

With 1,300 vehicles coming onto the roads each day, Beijing has seen 120,000 cars added in the first three months of the year, the municipal Traffic Management Bureau said on Wednesday.

That was in early April. I forwarded my findings on to the Times(yes, the first time I’ve done this), and they promptly replied, saying that they would look into it immediately. But as of right now no correction has been appended.

The reason I’m writing this is because I’m curious whether the article is correct or not. Maybe they looked into it and discovered that the 1,200 new cars per week figure is accurate.

But that would imply that there will be 60,000 new cars added to Beijing’s roads this year, a yearly increase of 1.7%. And there’s not much in China that’s growing at 1.7%

Credit Cards and Savings Accounts

I was struck by the following sentence in this article from the New York Times:

A good indicator that things are going in the wrong direction, he said, is if your credit card balance has been rising in the last year but your savings balance has been falling.

Is there ever any reason to not use whatever you have in a savings account to pay off credit card debt? You’re making maybe 5% interest on your savings and paying probably 15% interest on the credit card debt. If you need cash in an emergency, you could get a cash advance from the credit card, but it seems to make sense to me to use whatever money you have to pay off the credit card–then start building savings.

I have to admit that my first thought on reading the sentence was that the New York Times wouldn’t say “just pay of the credit card debt first” because they run ads from the credit card companies. Or maybe my knowledge of personal finance is lacking.

(All of that said, I suppose the sentence is technically true.)

The Difference

I think David Brooks really nails what has happened in the Democratic primaries with this editorial. I don’t agree that it necessarily happened in a “moment” at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, but maybe that evening crystalized it, and what he describes has, I believe, been a key dynamic of the campaign:

Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o’clock in the morning.

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

We’ll see what happens today (I’ll find out when I wake up tomorrow morning).