WHAT IF

Obama wins Iowa.
Clinton wins New Hampsz.
Edwards wins South Carolinuh.

OMGZ the primaries are as crazy as NCAA football!

end of an era

End of Semester processing for FALL2006-SUMMER2007

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date Dec 5, 2007 11:19 PM
subject End of Semester processing for FALL2006-SUMMER2007
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Dear student account holder:

Our records indicate that you either graduated more than six months ago or are not currently enrolled in fall 2007 or spring 2008 classes. As a result, access to your email.usc.edu and UNIX Student Computing Facility (SCF) accounts will be disabled on the evening of Wednesday, December 19, 2007. Access to USC central services, including myUSC Portal and Virtual Private
Network (VPN), will also be disabled, as will access to many departmental services.

Though your email (email.usc.edu) access will be disabled, email forwarding will continue to work for a limited time. Instructions on how to forward your USC email to another address are available at the following site:

http://www.usc.edu/its/email/help/forwarding.html/.

If you are not currently registered and have not yet taken steps to save the data in your email and UNIX accounts, please do so by noon, December 19th. After that date, you will be charged to have your email files restored. For more information about file restorals of disabled and expired accounts, please see Section 5 of the following website:

http://www.usc.edu/its/policies/procedures/index.html/.

If you are registered for spring 2008 classes and have received this message in error, please contact the ITS accounts office at accounts@usc.edu.

If you are a staff member who took a class in spring or summer 2007, the disabling of your student account will not affect your staff email account or your staff UNIX account and related central services.

because I'm a good soldier of Troy

November 29, 2007

The Honorable Antonio R. Villaraigosa
Mayor
City of Los Angeles City Hall
200 North Spring Street, Room 303
Los Angeles, California 90012
Fax: (213) 847-0680

Dear Mr. Mayor,

I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude for your support of the University of Southern California remaining a tenant of the Memorial Coliseum.

As a recent graduate of USC I was very upset to hear that the Coliseum Commission might not renew our lease and allow us to make very necessary renovations to the building. As I understand it, the school is offering $100 million to make upgrades to return the Coliseum to world-class status. I also think that allowing USC more say in our now 80-year residency at the venue is not too much to ask. The contributions that USC has made and will continue to make to the area and the city as a whole far outweigh any notions of an elusive NFL stadium.

I am a Trojan, my mother is a Trojan and I hope someday my grandkids will be Trojans too. The Coliseum lease is not only important to us in the practical sense of having a place to hold events, but also in terms of our historical presence at the stadium. Trojan traditions are extremely important to us. We are grounded in this storied 127-year history, and this gives us the strength and passion to excel at what we do. I recently returned to campus for homecoming celebrations, as many of us alums do, and I cannot fathom the loss of community that would occur if our home games were moved to the Rose Bowl.

I was saddened to read Commissioner Bill Chadwick’s comments in the LA Times this morning. He said, "I think it would be great if they played at the Rose Bowl for two years. At the end of that two years, the leverage we would have in negotiations would be spectacular." This Marie Antoinette attitude does not reflect a spirit of friendship or even compromise. I truly hope that your positive influence may change the opinion of the Coliseum Commission members so that my school and the venue that we know and love may return to the bargaining table to reach a fair and fruitful agreement.

I know that you went to UCLA, but fight on, sir!

Sincerely,



Meilee M. Wong
Class of ‘07

pie. pie. pie. pie. pie. pie.

When I went home for T-giving last week, naturally my mother freaked out that we didn't have enough dessert to bring to Auntie Ellen's annual gathering.

So for some reason, my sister started blasting Alicia Keys (as I found out later) at 8 a.m. and I had nothing better to do than get up and bake up a storm! What did I choose? PIE.

I don't particularly believe that "baking is an exact science" (sorry Alton), so I poked around online to find general proportions for things and went to town. My first pie adventure: Pumpkin Pie.

First, I set about making crust. I "cut" a stick of (cold) butter into some flour and baking powder (I tossed in some salt because I thought it needed it) with my fingertips, until I got that "coarse cornmeal" that everyone talks about. Moistened it up with one egg, and froze my dough ball for about 1/2 hr.

I carefully sprinkled my work surface (which happens to be my parents' large glass cutting board) with flour, and plopped my dough ball in the center. I carefully floured my rolling pin, and rolled out from the center, going around in a circle until I had a somewhat pie-shaped, 1/4 inch thick round of pie crust dough. Excited about my accomplishment, I lifted up one edge of the pie crust to fold it over for easy transfer to my glass pie dish. Crumble. I bristled at my crust. No matter. I pushed the rips back together, retrieved a large plastic pancake spatula and attempted to lift up the edge again. Crumble crumble. Undeterred, I worked my spatula around the entire 360º outer edge of my crust. EVENT OF MASSIVE CRUMBLE. Little bits of pie dough were molded to the board, and my crust was in a shambles.

Result: FAIL

Lesson: Freeze dough ball longer.

While my hastily re-formed dough ball was re-freezing, I set about making my pie filling. One can of pumpkin puree, check. (Thank you, Barefoot Contessa, for erasing my shame.) One egg, check. Brown sugar, check. Nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, check. Condensed milk...condensed milk...uh oh.

Result: SUBSTITUTE COCONUT MILK.

Lesson: Coconut Pumpkin Pie?

I whisked everything together until I got the consistency of a melted milkshake. Then I covered with saran wrap and returned the whole thing to the fridge so as to allow my dough to finish freezing.

In the meantime, my father had decided that we needed to bake an apple pie "because that's what The People want." If by "The People" he means some kind of Wong Proletariat...no matter. Anyway, during the pumpkin madness I had sent him to the store for reinforcements so by the time I'd whisked my pumpkin to soupy happiness, we were off and running on the apples.

Peeling done with a vegetable peeler, coring done with one of those semi-useless "apple cutters" that look like sinister covered-wagon spokes, last minute corrections to remove seeds and cores done with a paring knife. (Thanks Dad.) I tossed the apples with sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and let them rest. Simple!

Time for crust #2. The apple pie recipe called for twice as much flour, the same amount of butter/baking powder, and one egg. I threw in a dash of salt because I thought it needed it. The difference here? Spooning one tablespoonful of ice water in at a time, slowly, until the dough came together. I liked this better than the first crust...I didn't have to rely on my one egg for all my moisture, I could tailor it to what I needed. And I ended up with a larger quantity of crust in the end. Enough so I could cookie-cutter a duck for my final project...

Bored with waiting for the dough to freeze, I poked around in cabinets until I found...Ghirardelli Cocoa Powder. I wonder what this would taste like in pumpkin pie...so, I retrieved my pumpkin filling and whisked in a couple tablespoons. No visible color change, but what about the taste?

Once the dough balls had re-frozen, my pies came together like the last 5 pieces of a massive puzzle. Pre-baking the pumpkin pie crust using dried beans to keep its shape, I poured in my filling. For the apple, I rolled out half the dough, poured in the apples, and rolled out the other half on top. Cutting vents and trimming excess dough. With a little extra, I cut out a duck and plopped it on top of my pumpkin pie.

An hour and a little bit later, this is what we got:

Coconut Chocolate Pumpkin Pie

Homemade Apple Pie

Well, how did I do? Well, in competition with three other pies (all store-bought) of pecan, mincemeat and plain pumpkin, there was one slice of my apple left and two slices of my pumpkin at the end of the night. Not bad for my first foray into pie-making.

Things to remember:

• Chocolate makes pumpkin filling taste burnt, even if it's not.
• A half tablespoon of nutmeg is far too much, no matter what the recipe says.
• Fuji apples are much sweeter than Granny Smith. Add lemon juice or other appropriate acid.
  
• No one understands ducks. Avoid.

Other than that, I think this was a fantastic learning experience. All I gotta say is, watch out for Baker Wong at Christmas!

squirrelly republicans

Soo...I visited my old office yesterday, and apparently the second floor of Cannon just recruited its latest member:

Supposedly, Issa's office put out nuts for it. Don't squirrels have rabies?

www.music.ME

With the advent of customization, people are looking for personalized services when they come online into the internet music community. Services such as music.com and myspace music allow aritsts and bands to have a centrally located homepage which is also part of a larger social networking system.

Music.com is primarily an online store where artists can hawk their wares. Artists can set whatever price per song or album they choose, and there is a set fee or percentage that the website charges per transaction. Like iTunes, songs are 99 cents and a user can pick and choose individual songs if they don't wish to purchase the entire album.

Myspace music, on the other hand, is primarily a social networking tool that has a music feature integrated into it. It is extremely useful for small or local bands in that they have a place to post pictures, show dates, blogs and most importantly, their songs. Along with having a host for their songs, bands can become "friends" with other bands or individuals on the website, and thus keep their fan base apprised of their latest updates and records.

Myspace recognized the popularity of this service, and jumped on the opportunity to create its own record label, Myspace Records. It may seem like a strange idea to merge a social networking site with a record label, but really it makes a lot of sense. The record company has a built-in talent pool - the bands using their myspace.com capability - along with a built-in customer base. The people who are already "friends" with the band on myspace would probably support them when it came time to purchase a new album, and the opportunities for direct marketing are endless. This was a brilliant move on the part of Myspace, which was formerly relegated to the back seat as a creepy version of Facebook.

Alternative Spring Break

For Spring Break this year I did a service project instead of going on vacation, to a place where my family had been imprisoned for 4 years during World War II. The project required a lot of physical labor, outside in the sun, and I took this time to do a lot of personal reflecting and to get to know my groupmates a little better. What struck me was that even though we were working in spaces often smaller than 10 X 10, some of them whipped out their iPods and plugged themselves in as we were working. At first I was slightly irked by it, but then I realized that these kids have never known life without some sort of iPod-like device. After four years of music school, I still don't have an iPod, but this device is completely impacting generations of kids and how they interact socially.

Instead of plugging in, I took some time to think and wrote this after the trip:

When I felt the sun burning into my skin, the dryness of the air squeezing the moisture out of me, and the wind and sand whipping into my body I sort of began to understand what happened to my family. There's this weight around your heart and your soul when there's nothing but desolate stretches of wasteland and emptiness as far as you can see. It feels like hopelessness and desperation and an intense loneliness - like your neighbors and your state and your country have turned their backs and abandoned you in this horribly Godforsaken place. That your freedom, something so sacred to Americans, could be taken away for an interminable amount of time. I wanted to cry but everything was so dry that I couldn't.

I wanted for nothing more in the world than for my Grandma to still be alive so I could call her and tell her what I was doing. I wanted to ask her so badly where my family's barracks were, if she had visited the gardens that I shoveled out from under many feet of overgrowth and windblown sand, where the fire station where my grandpa volunteered was, and where my aunts and uncle had gone to school. Who the man was in the story she told me years ago, that was playing catch with his grandson and wandered too close to the perimeter to retrieve a ball and was shot by the military police because he only spoke Japanese and didn't understand when they told him to move away. But mostly I wanted to tell her that people were coming to Manzanar every day, and looking at the museum and that there were park rangers here from all over the U.S. who cared so deeply about protecting the site and its history. That I was doing
something small but important - helping other people to remember what had happened here and the things that are so much more important than differences and fear and hysteria. When I saw my grandparents in the roster of prisoners, and saw a photograph of my aunt going to
Pilgrimage in the museum there, I knew that what I was doing was important, and I want my kids to do this too. Learn the history of our people but not the anger and hate that I felt for so long.