R We D8ting? by Sandra Barron

(... sandra is so carrie bradshaw in the article, she makes me laugh. go on, read it, but only coz it's irresistibly entertaining, in a girly gossipy way haha)

I'd gone through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message.

THE orange message light on my cellphone started blinking as I was getting ready for bed. Barely an hour had passed since our quick kiss goodnight at the subway, and I was surprised to see the screen light up with the initials I'd just entered into my phone. It wasn't voice mail; it was a text message, and it made me smile.

U miss me? ;-)

I'd met him a week before at my usual Wednesday night hangout. He was alone but gregarious, and he seemed to be pals with the female bartender - a tacit vote of confidence. He chatted with my friends and me and then left with a wave from the door, and when my friend Kate and I ordered our next drinks, the bartender said this round was on the guy we'd been talking to.

Surprised, we debated his motivations. I insisted that perfectly normal people sometimes buy strangers drinks just to be nice. Kate thought he was way too aggressive.

When I saw him at the bar the next Wednesday, I thanked him for the drink. He asked if he could take me to dinner sometime; I said I'd think about it. He walked me to the subway and we exchanged numbers, but I thought it would be days before I heard from him, if ever, making this late-night text message all the more unexpected.

I like text messages. They fill an ever-narrowing gap in modern communication tools, combining the immediacy of a phone call with the convenience of an answering machine message and the premeditation of e-mail. And if they happen to be from a crush and pop up late at night, they have the giddy re-readability of a note left on a pillow.

So did I miss him? Certainly not yet. But I was flying from New York to West Virginia in the morning for work; maybe I'd miss him while I was away? I could already hear my friends citing his enthusiasm as evidence he was coming on too strong, but I'd had enough of aloof. I found his boldness refreshing.

Before I turned out the light and snapped the phone into its charger, I allowed myself one more grin at his message and a grimace at his middle-school style ("U"? A winking smiley face?). Then I deleted it.

He called the next afternoon while I was grounded in Pittsburgh between flights. He kept me company while I ambled down moving walkways and wandered through a loop of food courts. We talked about work for the first time; he said he worked intense hours as a freelancer so he could take months off at a time to travel, and he showed he had been paying attention by asking me about things we had discussed at the bar. He asked if we could have dinner when I got back to town, and I said sure.

A few hours later, as the prop plane taxied toward the gate in West Virginia, I turned on my phone and an animated lighthouse beacon indicated that it was searching for a signal. For three days, the light swept the dark cartoon sea in vain. Every time I saw "no signal" on the screen I felt unmoored and isolated. But as soon as the signal bars sprang to life on my trip home on Monday, that orange light flashed on and, sure enough, it was him.

Miss me now?

I'd missed having cellphone service, and my mind had indeed wandered at times to our airport conversation. But that degree of nuance was too much for the 12-button keypad, so I wrote, Hi! Sure. Talk when I get back.

This set off a volley of texts. Where did I live? What day is good? What about tonight? Tomorrow? We decided on dinner that Thursday and I finally signed off, thumb sore and eyes tired.

At the office on Tuesday, as the light blinked on again (Din in SoHo then drinks in the E Vil, and maybe a kiss), I wondered, Just who is this guy?

Google failed me. One time, armed with only a guy's first name and the fact that he sold sneakers, I had found his full details and photos online. But all I had here was a cellphone number and initials, and Friendster, MySpace and Technorati - the entire digital detective squad of the modern dater - were stumped.

I would actually have to learn about him the old-fashioned way, in person. Which is partly why, on a slushy, windy Wednesday afternoon, I liked his next message:

Dinner @ Raoul's 2morrow, I just made reservations 4 7:30.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd gone out with someone who'd made reservations.

Sounds good! I replied.

A message came back as I was leaving the office: Its better than good - u r with me! Maybe I'll stop by the bar 2nite.

So he remembered I usually went on Wednesdays.

On the way over, feet soaked and fingers numb, I knew that I didn't want him to brave the sleet just to see me, especially since it would be awkward trying to get to know him better while hanging out with people he had never met. And after all, we had reservations for the next night.

Don't come out in this weather! I wrote. Can't really hang out anyway, see you tomorrow.

His reply was impossibly swift for its length: I live 45 seconds from there and I would be doing my own thing. I am not leachy. Very independent boy I am. I may or may not, depends where the wind takes me.

Was it just me, or had things just taken a hairpin turn for the hostile? My message was meant to be friendly. Had it come out that way? Or was I reading him wrong? I needed to find a way to respond that was light, in case I was only imagining he was angry, but not flippant, in case he actually was.

I swallowed my distaste for cutesy abbreviations and tried: LOL! As you like, then. :-) I cringed slightly as I hit send; this suddenly seemed like a dangerously clumsy way of communicating.

Minutes later: Would u like me 2 stay away?

Oh, dear. At this point, yes. Wires were crossing that would probably be best untangled in person, the next day.

Entering the bar, I waved to my friends in their booth and, before joining them, whipped off a quick response, attempting to be polite and clear: Yeah, I guess that'd be better; you'd distract me if you were here.

A minute later, after I'd settled in with my friends, the orange light looked like a warning: 2 late, im here.

I looked up. Sure enough, there he was, talking to two girls at the bar. He drifted closer and hovered nearby but didn't make eye contact. By the time he came over and sat down, a full hour had passed.

He'd clearly had a few drinks, and our conversation went downhill as fast as it had on our phone screens. He said that I'd tried to "control" him by saying he shouldn't come to the bar and added that he hadn't come to see me but to see other people. After going on in this vein for a while, he suddenly softened and asked me to "promise one thing": a kiss before the night was over.

I stammered that I couldn't make any promises. He shook his head and stormed off, sloshing the beers on the table and sending a pool cue clattering to the floor.

Before I could process what had happened, he looked over from his perch on a nearby barstool and smiled, winked and waved over his shoulder as if we'd never met. My friends, wide-eyed, asked what was going on. I wasn't sure, but I did know one thing: reservations or not, tomorrow's date was off.

Not so that evil blinking light. Only half an hour later, with both of us still in the bar, no, was it possible? Another message?

What was that all about? he'd written. R we still on 4 2morrow?

I deleted the message and put my phone away, hoping to erase the whole encounter. Soon he seemed to have left, and as long as my phone stayed in the dark recesses of my purse, I believed that he was powerless to bother me.

But suddenly there he was again, standing a few feet from our booth, smiling and crooking his finger at me.

I shook my head.

"I need to talk to you," he said.

I told him we had nothing to talk about.

Turns out I wasn't the only person who found him menacing; within minutes the bartender took the stocky wine glass out of his hand and told him to leave.

I hoped he would be so embarrassed that he wouldn't dream of contacting me again. But the next morning the blinking orange light seemed louder than my bleating alarm clock. Three new messages. Mailbox full.

From 6:30 a.m.: I am done boozing for a while!! ;-)

From 6:38 a.m.: What did I do 2 upset u? Do u not want to have dinner?

At 6:45, as if he had waited long enough for a reply: Anyway, 2 bad, I would have liked 2 have gotten 2 know u.

I liked the finality of that one.

But had he really given up, or was there simply no more room in the inbox? I deleted those three and got on the subway. I emerged to find: Pls forgive me and join me 4 dinner. ;-(

We are not going out, I wrote.

What did I do?

I'm at work and we're not discussing this.

Whatever, he wrote. U don't have 2 b ignorant. Peace.

I turned off the phone, dumbfounded. How had this happened? How had we managed to speed through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message? I'd gone from butterflies to doubt to anger at his name on the screen, before we even knew each other.

That was it, I decided: no more text-message flirtations for me. From now on I'd stick to more old-fashioned ways of getting to know a guy. Like e-mail.

[NYT]

Virtual Trading, by Steve Ellison

(... posted up here because I used to be a fanatic Neopets player, and because it gave me a strange sense of familiarity when I read it in the suffocating blanket of heat and humidity in a US$0.25/hour Internet cafe, more than a thousand miles away from home)

My children, ages 12 and 10, are devoted to interactive online games such as Neopets and Runescape. These games have elaborate imaginary worlds. In Neopets, a player can earn units of an imaginary currency, Neopoints, by playing games. Using Neopoints, players can buy and sell imaginary items within the game. The items may rise or fall in value over time. Interestingly, the trading of items does not always remain virtual. Some items are sold on eBay for real money. As Edward Castronova explains in the Harvard Business Review:

Say one player needs a breastplate, but the game's developer has made this armor difficult to obtain within the virtual world. The player can go to an auction site, find someone selling a breastplate, and send that person a check for $50. Then the two meet online and simply click 'trade'. EBay category 1654, 'Internet Games', comprises thousands of auctions for digital gold pieces, daggers, ray guns, and robots--accounting for $30 million worth of business in the U.S. alone. In Asia, the real-cash virtual-item market exceeds $100 million annually.

Neopets itself was recently sold by its founders for $160 million to Viacom.

[dailyspeculations]

If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

I saw the aftermath of the July 7 London bombings on CNN barely an hour or two after it happened. It was unreal. The injured and the chaos and the unbelief of the witnesses at the horror in the heart of their beloved city; my heart went out to them.

That night I fell asleep with the TV news on. When I woke up, the death tolls and the number of injured were still climbing steadily.

-So now every Muslim living in Western society suddenly becomes suspect after the jihadist-style bombings, and Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations. This could further alienate already alienated Muslim youths and fulfill Osama bin Laden's dream of creating gulf between Muslim world and globalizing West.

It is essential that Muslim world wake up to fact that there is jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim relations with the rest of the world everywhere.-

*

If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution
by Thomas L. Friedman

Yesterday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital. That would be deeply troubling because open societies depend on trust - on trusting that the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway is not wearing dynamite.

The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday.

But maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations.

That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies - particularly the big European societies, which have much larger Muslim populations than America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion, the more internal tensions this creates, and the more alienated their already alienated Muslim youth become. This is exactly what Osama bin Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great gulf between the Muslim world and the globalizing West.

So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy. Why? Because unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target to retaliate against for bombings like those in London. There are no obvious terrorist headquarters and training camps in Afghanistan that we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.

What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. Many people said Palestinian suicide bombing was the spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian youth. But when Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a cease-fire with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough was enough.

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider.

The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst.

[NYT]

The manager girlfriend

During the Wimbledon Cup, the TV camera zoomed in on the girlfriend of one of the tennis players, Federer. The commentator (who was British) introduced her as the gf of Federer who was also Federer’s agent AND manager. He ended off by saying “As such, she manages his pennies.”

There was nothing wrong with this statement. After all, in the UK, currency is measured in pounds and pennies. But his co-host, who was American, must have been thinking of something else when he heard the word ‘pennies’, for I heard a soft laugh before they quickly changed topic.

The pain is fresh

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” John 11:25-26

We love you, Granddad. We miss you so much.

Granddad passed away on Thursday morning. It happened so fast; when the ambulance came, the medic told us that he was brain dead for ten minutes. When I touched him, he was cold. I knelt down by his side. I held his hand and kissed his forehead. I didn’t really know what to do next. He was there, but he was gone.

Everything after passed in a blur. There were so many things to do and settle; by evening, the wake was already set up. I was kept busy. I saw to everything else that my parents and aunts had not done. I kept vigil at nights. I refused to think of anything else other than the things that needed to be done.

But when I was alone, I thought of Granddad and I cried. I hated the tears, because I didn’t cry, and I didn’t want to.

I’m so guilty I didn’t accompany him more often. And now, I miss him so much.