From the Atlanta Journal and Constitution:



(ATHENS, GEORGIA) - The Georgia Bulldogs football practice was delayed this past Monday morning for nearly two hours at the team's practice facility. One of the players, while on his way to the locker room happened to look down and notice a suspicious looking, unknown white powdery substance on the practice field. Head coach Mark Richt immediately suspended practice while the FBI was called in to investigate.


After a complete field analysis, the FBI determined that the white substance unknown to the players was the goal line. Practice was resumed when FBI Special Agents decided that, while the powder might cause respiratory distress if inhaled, it was highly unlikely that the team would encounter the substance again.

Chinese food in Switzerland

I had real Chinese food last night. Not the take-out store variety last night. But food cooked by our newest Marien Heim resident, Wei Wei. (Wei Wei is a full-time engineer from Alstom, and she normally does nuclear power plant work in China but has been transferred here for some project... Yes, I am associating with a Chinese nuclear engineer, I wonder if the CIA will be in to question me now?).

Anyway, the food was delicious, one potatoe dish and two egg plant dishes. Everything was wonderfully spicy. One of the dishes had a little bit of pork in it, which I politely ate, making my first departure from being a veggie in about 2 months. I definitely think I could reproduce the meal (eggplant is something I rarely cook with, I think I will add it to my list of food to cook with more regularly).

After dinner the six of us just gossiped and shared stories. It was a very funny cultural exchange (our group contained a girl from Equador, China, Spain, Switzerland, America, a boy we snuck into the nunnery who grew up in Indonesia, and Tina who grew up in India but is very American) we talked about holiday rituals and third world conditions and the differences between city and country people in China. I am happy to find out that Santa Claus is fairly nice in America to bad little children, only bringing them a lump of coal. Apparently in other countries, he throws the bad kids in his sack and takes them away (which is not as bad as Iceland, where Santa Claus's mother is an evil troll who EATS bad little boys and girls).

The news bubble

I was also very interested to here about China. I just read a fictional account of the Cultural Revolution (Being Madame Mao was very good, I HIGHLY recommend it). Wei Wei was born the year it ended, and she casually talked about life in her youth compared to the changes that have happened in the last five years. Its very interesting conversation...

I have learned since coming here that in America, we live in a news bubble. Our press is so nationalist that we don't need censorship, because most of the media put such a huge bias into reporting, that we never know what's really happening anyway. I see this by just reading CNN and the NYTimes and then struggling through La Monde (in French) and the London Times. Not to mention what other people tell me about their own lives in all these countries is so different from what you read on the news. I could cite example after example of things that are given low priority in the American press or aren't reported at all that are of HUGE significance. The funny thing is that everyone, including the Canadians, realize that America exists in this "news bubble," but I think as a whole, America is completely unaware of the self-censorship the media has been practicing.

My playright cousin.

Caroline, my awesome cousin (she's about 10 years old), wrote a very funny play that was performed at her school. Apparently, it was selected as a winner of a Philadelphia-wide contest and will be preformed at Temple University (that's a big Uni in Philadelphia, a bunch of Bill Cosby's kids went there giving it some national recognition). Well, I can't do this story justice, so here's the text of my Aunt Mary's email about it:

Also, did I tell you Caroline's play won a city wide playwriting contest? It's being performed at Temple om 12/6 and 12/7. For the last month, the playwriting contest people have sent her a "dramaturg" to work with and together they have worked on the script, added a new act, etc. I'll send you the final version -- it's even funnier now.

Anyway, she went to watch the auditions for her play last friday. The actors are all Temple theatre students. They were told to come out and do monologues and some came out and did monologues from The Vagina Monologues, which is a broadway play about, you guessed it, vaginas. Caroline was stunned and the poor teacher that took her down there to see the auditions was completely bummed out and afraid she would get in trouble with Caroline's parents, etc. The whole thing was pretty funny.