Can you believe this guy?

This 16 year old boy took off for Baghdad without telling his parents... Some passionate dude! Link to full article on AP

Example of activity in Montreal:

Switching to travel journaling

Time to check out Planetary Vagrant again... We're leaving tomorrow early morning for Canada so we will start posting on the travel journal again although it might not be as exciting as our trip to Costa Rica since it's going to be mainly visiting family. So don't expect adventures of new seen lands, it's all pretty much known. Still it's beautiful there at this time of the year, and we will make it out to the mountains to go ski, so we promise some good pictures as always! This trip is going to be great, relaxing, hanging out with the family and finding out what my wedding dress is going to look like since my mother and I will get it together to make this dress! Happy new year to everyone, Mike and I truly hope that all our friends reading this will have a magical year coming, full of love and health and good news all around!

Time slip

My Mike found this really cool article which reminds everyone that this year we'll have to count down to New Year as such: 10.. 9.. 8.. 7.. 6.. 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1.. 1 That's right, this year we get one more second added to catch up because our atomic clock still races with the lunar clock! Here are the details: Link to this cool article.

Jewelry District, downtown LA

We found our wedding bands! Yes, today, after picking up Mike's master from the Mastering lab (YEEAAAAH, he owns his own master!!!!! It's a first!), we decided to get it over with and go downtown to pick up our wedding bands so it wouldn't be bothering us at the last minute. The jewelry districs in downtown LA is the best place in the US to get jewelry for cheap. That's where we got my engagement ring. Well today we found some cool wedding bands, WITH a diamond on each ring! woho, huh!? But the thing about that place is that it's about a couple blocks on Broadway that are filled with mall like jewelry gallerie where everybody has their own stand like stores. It ressembles a series of low cubicles with transparent counters full of sparkles. And everywhere you look, there are diamonds and gold. It's quite overwhelming actually! So you get there, and you walk around, look in the glass counters for what you want, get accosted by many people, forcefull and not, and finally you find what you want. Last time we went there for my engagement ring, it tooks us an hour to find anything good, but this time we got lucky and found it within 10 minutes! We only had to wait more than an hour for resizing.... Here's a shot from Broadway... but there are a lot more buildings than this of course...: And we wait... and we wait... and we wait... AAAHHH my eyes!!!!! No showing our bands though, it's a surprise!!! hahahaha

For a change, I'll talk about my day yesterday!

Yes, I know, this blog has turned into a sort of gathering of different sources that mention how bad our administration is, or how horrible some news are. Just in case there is not enough out there or also in case these sources haven't been read enough yet. Well, it's a form of expression for me, it might actually be saving my relationship. not that it was in jeopardy or anything, but I tend to be very passionate about things that piss me off... and ignorance... So today, now that I have posted enough about current communiqués, I will talk about my day yesterday since today wasn't much to talk about. Yesterday then, Mike and I went to the Mastering Lab to have Mike's album mastered by genius Robert Hadley. It was really cool to hear Mike's album come to a very beautiful quality! Finally he's done with the album, all he needs to do now is the art work for the CD cover. Then off to Alan at Al's Records and Tapes (the label we're both on) and we'll see what he can do with it! It's a great album, and I will be posting a track really soon that goes back to our dislike of the current administration... To be continued (on this subject)! We did a bunch of errands after that and then... then my boy cooked for me!!! Yes, that's right, I have DA man at home, he cooks for me!!!! AND he's getting good at it! It was delicious! But just to prove it, I needed to post this picture here: This is official now, Mike can play the drums, the guitar, the bass, the keyboards, and now also the pots and pans but without sounding like Stomp... Isn't my baby such a good bear?!!!! THat's it, that's really the only reason why I wanted to post about my day yesterday! Not because it's the only time he's ever cooked, but it's the first time I got a shot of it, to actually prove that he does it!!! hahahahaha

Ho ho ho... that's good!

Now that's interesting, wouldn't you say??? Bush, April 2004: (movie file link) Transcript: "Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution." http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/bush-caught-on-tape/

Interesting way of making women feel good!

Link to an interactive movie about the amount of retouching on a photo. Way to make women who read it feel good about themselves! It's amazing how this happens. I agree that it's nice to look at something pleasing on a magazine, but to the point of feeding us that kind of model for us to feel like we need to achieve a kind of fake beauty nobody can really have, even skinny models... It's kind of sad, and not that it's news or anything, but this link shows really how much retouching takes place. I thought it was only about reducing celullite and natural skin folds, but now, it goes beyond that, to the point where the perfectly lovely girl in the picture in this example becomes a sad B porno star... Sometimes I feel like this society not only tries to make its people dumb so we don't ask questions, but even more so women! There, I had my little semi feminist rant!

A Time to Impeach

Very interesting article on Alternet: (click here to go there and also read the comments posted following its publication!) President Bush may find himself in deep trouble after ordering and defending illegal wiretaps of U.S. citizens -- a crime for which Richard Nixon was impeached. When the U.S. Senate last Friday refused to renew the liberticidal Patriot Act -- with its provisions for spying on Americans' use of libraries and the Internet, among other Constitution-shredding provisions of that iniquitous law -- it was in part because that morning's New York Times had revealed how Bush and his White House had committed a major crime. By ordering the National Security Agency -- the N.S.A, so secretive that in Washington its initials are said to stand for "No Such Agency" -- to wiretap and eavesdrop on thousands of American citizens without a court order, Bush committed actions specifically forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Passed in 1978 after the Senate's Church Committee documented in detail the Nixon administration's widespread use of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other political dissidents, FISA "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.'", as the director of the Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, told the Washington Post this past weekend. And the FISA statute required authorization of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make such domestic spying legal. Bush and his NSA sought no such authorization before invading American citizens' right to privacy -- a blatant flouting of the law that made both wavering Democrats and libertarian Republicans mad enough to vote against extending the hideous Patriot Act, which thankfully will now expire at the end of the year. Bush not only acknowledged, and defended, this illegal eavesdropping in a Saturday radio address, he went further in a Monday morning press conference, saying he'd "suggested" it. But as Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold -- who, together with conservative Idaho Republican Larry Craig, led the filibuster that defeated the Patriot Act's renewal -- said this weekend, "This is not how our democratic system of government works--the president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow." But Bush had plenty of bipartisan help from Democratic co-conspirators in keeping knowledge of this illegal spying from reaching the American public. It began in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, and -- from the very first briefing for Congressional leaders by Dick Cheney until today -- Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were told about it. Those witting and complicit in hiding the crime included Democratic Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, former chairman and later ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. They knew it was a crime -- Rockefeller, for example, warned the administration against it -- and yet did not make it public. They were frightened by polls showing security hysteria at its height. Worse, the New York Times itself was part of the coverup. When it broke its scoop last Friday, the Times in its article admitted that, "After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted." In other words, the Times sat on its story until after the 2004 presidential elections, when American voters might have been able to stop this criminal conduct by voting out the criminal. Not content with employing Judith Miller as the megaphone for relaying the Bush administration's lies about Saddam's having weapons of mass destruction, the Times again proved its servility to power by not telling its readers it knew of criminal spying on them for an entire year, until the election cycle was long past. Yet this aspect of the Times' story has gone unremarked in the mass media. Bush's excuses for the illegal eavesdropping are indeed risible. The Times didn't mention it, but of 19,000 requests for eavesdropping the Federal Intelligence Security Court has received from the Executive Branch since 1979, only five have ever been refused. Bush claimed again on Monday that this flagrant flouting of the FISA law was necessary because fighting "terrorists" needed to be done "quickly." Yet, as the Times reported, the secret court can grant approval for wiretaps "within hours." And the excuse Bush offered Monday morning that this illegal subversion of FISA was necessary to prevent 9/11-style terrorism is equally laughable. As the ACLU pointed out in a study of FISA two years ago, "Although the Patriot Act was rushed into law just weeks after 9/11, Congress's later investigation into the attacks did not find that the former limits on FISA powers had contributed to the government's failure to prevent the attacks." A Zogby poll released Nov. 4 showed that, when asked if they agreed that, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment," Americans answered yes by 53 percent to 42 percent. It is therefore not simply extremist raving to suggest that impeachment of George Bush should be put on the table. Remember that, in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, Article 2 of the three Articles of Impeachment dealt with illegal wiretapping of Americans. It said that Nixon committed a crime "by directing or authorizing [intelligence] agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office." There was no national security justification for Bush's illegal NSA wiretaps -- which could easily have been instituted by following the FISA law's provisions -- and, instead of being related to "enforcement of laws," Bush's eavesdropping was indisputably in contravention of the law of the land. And when a president commits a crime in violation of his oath of office swearing to uphold the law, it is time to impeach. Doug Ireland writes the blog, Direland.

World Court rules Uganda violated rights in Congo

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The U.N.'s highest court ruled on Monday that Uganda violated the sovereignty of the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and was responsible for human rights abuses there during a 1998-2003 war. The court also found that Ugandan soldiers plundered Congo's natural resources and ordered Kampala to pay reparations. The Congo -- rich in gold, diamonds and timber -- was the battleground for rebels, local factions, tribes and several neighbouring countries, including Uganda, in a 1998-2003 war in which 4 million people died, mainly from hunger and disease. Congo took Uganda to the World Court, also known as the International Court of Justice, in 1999, accusing it of responsibility for human rights abuses and armed aggression and calling for compensation for looting and removal of property. full article on Reuters For more background on the issue, there is a really interesting article in a wikipedia page about the Democratic Republic of Congo and the origins of the conflicts.

Back from Costa Rica

yes... we're back.... we couldn't stay... snif! It was a great trip, we recorded the whole thing on our travel blog/journal, planetary vagrant, and are now trying to adjust back to the fast times of LA. It was a blast, and we made huge progress in Spanish as well so we managed to be productive! That's it, just wanted to write here too for reentry.