atari is timeless

Boy: ten years old. Girl: seven. Stuck at our place for the afternoon and evening.

On my wife’s hunch, I dug out my old Atari 2600 from the closet. “These are the videogames I played when I was your age,” I explained. “Look, you can’t even connect it to the TV with the coaxial jack. You need an adaptor for these metal prongs.”

They twisted the joystick rather than pushed it. They asked what the orange button was for. They had no idea what to do with paddles, and they found it weird to use silver levers to start the game and switch between levels.

million muslim march

She didn’t seem to get it. The president of a national Islamic organization appeared on CNN on Friday 22 Sep 06 to discuss the recent Pope versus Islam brouhaha. She spoke calmly, eloquently, and at length about why the Pope’s comments were perceived as hurtful and insulting by Muslims around the world.

“But the protests,” the reporter interrupted, “have had violent overtones. Are the threats credible? Is it possible that the Pope could be killed in his upcoming visit to Turkey?”

It was possible, she said, but what we needed to understand was that violent, lawless individuals exist in every country. An attack against the Pope was as likely in Turkey as it was in any other country, including America. World politicians are always targeted and must be protected against radical individuals.

world cup: china vs. america

They’d finally persuaded me out onto the soccer field. They were older than me, my Chinese students, but not by much — most in this group were in their mid- to late twenties — and they all wanted to see their American teacher play soccer because Americans were supposed to be strong. Americans were also notoriously ambivalent about the sport worshipped by all other nations, so I’m sure they secretly wondered if they could whip up on me.