Many people throughout Philadelphia, PA felt the effects of SEPTA's strike. Many of the SEPTA buses were not running and the commuter trains were rarely on-time. I experienced this first-hand several times over the weekend when I commuted back and forth between Bryn Mawr and Center City for a Model United Nations conference. The first night I ended up running to catch the train, thinking it would be on-time, but when I got there, I found out it would be 25 minutes late arriving to the station.

I don't know about you, but I love the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I've gone about two and a half months without watching it on TV, but occassionally I'm able to catch a few clips on the internet.

Tennessee seems to be the place for scandals these days.

Last August in Memphis, Tennessee, seemingly out of the blue, a group of people began to protest three public parks in the city. The cause for the huge debate that ensued was not the location of the parks but rather the names of the parks. These three parks in Memphis carry names that are tied to the old Confederacy: Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, Jefferson Davis Park, and Confederate Park.

Nathan Bedford Forrest Park is the park in which most of the controversy is focused on. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife are both buried in the park and there was talk of moving their graves to the Confederate plot at Elmwood Cemetery. The fact that Forrest was a high-ranking officer in the Confederate Army and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan rightfully unnerved the group, which was headed by the NAACP, that began the movement to change the names of the parks. Many felt that the names of the parks were offensive and could possibly promote a resurgence of negative feelings toward African-Americans.

Over the past week, I've found that Americans are becoming more and more influenced by the Japanese when it comes to what we do for entertainment. This past Thursday after a toga-themed dinner at Bryn Mawr College, I went to the Haffner Dining Hall to the Japanese Table in which those that are currently studying Japanese or are fluent in Japanese come to converse with one another in Japanese. For about the first half hour or forty-five minutes, we spoke only in Japanese but our minds slowly began to wander and we managed to start discussing Japanese Rock bands (a genre otherwise referred to as "J-Rock"). I found it interesting to see that I not only knew and had listened to some of the same J-Rock bands that the Japanese exchange student that was heading the table had, but that I also really liked some of those J-Rock bands and preferred to listen to them over many English and American bands. I would roll off names like Miyavi, Dir en grey, and L'Arc~en~Ciel and would find that I had found something in common with this exchange student despite never having been to Japan.

While I was in Tennessee's Governor's School for the International Studies, I got to meet some great people from various points on the political spectrum (not to mention different cities in Tennessee). Two of my fellow GSISers blog regularly. I say regularly but it's more of a sporadic thing.

The first guy was actually a residential counselor of mine while I was at GSIS. His blog, entitled The View from Chuckonia is his humorous take on what's going on in the U.S./world today. His first post explains what the Chuckonian Federation is and how it came into being.

Hype as defined by dictionary.com is:

Slang n.
1)Excessive publicity and the ensuing commotion: the hype surrounding the murder trial.
2)Exaggerated or extravagant claims made especially in advertising or promotional material: “It is pure hype, a gigantic PR job” (Saturday Review).
3)An advertising or promotional ploy: “Some restaurant owners in town are cooking up a $75,000 hype to promote New York as ‘Restaurant City, U.S.A.’” (New York).
4)Something deliberately misleading; a deception: “ [He] says that there isn't any energy crisis at all, that it's all a hype, to maintain outrageous profits for the oil companies” (Joel Oppenheimer).

There have been several instances of fraud in the United States within the past few years. Some reached a national level in the news, while others remained local or regional. Upon reading about the case of Kaycee Nicole Swenson, I immediately remembered hearing about a case where a mother faked her daughter's leukemia in order to convince her husband to stay with her. While the stories are both pertain to faking leukemia, there are obvious differences. Kaycee Nicole never existed, while Hannah Milbrandt existed and is still living.

Last year, my senior year of high school, I decided that I finally had enough spare time to devote to one club that I had been itching to be a part of...Model UN. In March, about five of the MUNers (myself included) plus the two sponsors went to the National High School Model United Nations conference in New York, NY. The jokes and conversations held when we weren't in meetings made us feel like a tight-knit group. Who else could say they had a fellow MUNer believe that his sponsor had her feet bound as a child, which justified why her feet were so small and why one was slightly larger than the other?