An interesting endorsement

According to the spam in one of my email accounts, there's an email titled, 'Obama endorses herbal supplements'. I didn't bother to click through the link, but I wonder if the folks who sent it were audacious enough to Photoshop him into a picture. That'd be a real winner.

Not that funny

Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman have broken up. While it's another celebrity relationship ending, I take issue with the article's description of the now-ex-couple as being 'one of Hollywood's funniest'.

Really? Aside from the Matt Damon/Ben Affleck videos (which, to be fair, are downright hilarious), I never found either of them funny, particularly Silverman. And there's a reason that Kimmel is rarely mentioned in the same breath as his main late-night competitors (Jay Leno and David Letterman).

Maybe it'll taste better now

Anheuser-Busch finally agreed to a deal to be bought out by InBev. I know there was a lot of faux-protectionist sentiment around the deal, namely because the company is America's largest brewer. But given that most European beer tastes a great deal better than American lagers, I don't have a problem with it. And in the end, it's not as though people will stop drinking it at the bars or the tailgate parties because it's foreign-owned.

Working on peace...without America

I haven't been following the peace process in the Middle East closely; ever since the Bush administration decided that invading Iraq was the most important action to take in the region, I've thought that there wouldn't be any serious attempts at working towards peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. That being said, there are currently meetings happening in Paris between the two sides, and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert seems to think there's a good chance of an agreement being struck.

As always, I remain skeptical of any sort of peace agreement being reached until it's actually being implemented, and there are real decreases in violence as a result. Nevertheless, it's telling that this is happening in Europe and is occurring without any tangible U.S. participation. So much for the 'road map' George W. Bush spoke of at the beginning of his administration. Then again, given his record on matters of foreign policy, it's probably a good thing that we aren't playing a major role in shaping the outcome of any accords at this time.

Final thoughts from a town I never really called home

Well, the day's finally here - it's time to say goodbye to White Plains, at least for the time being. I'll be coming back every now and then, and maybe, way down the line, I might end up living here again.

To be honest, for a good deal of my life, I never really felt that White Plains was 'home'. Having moved from Japan to California and finally back here, I always felt as though I were an outsider - a mere visitor who was passing by on my way to other things in the future. It probably affected the way I behaved when I was younger as well...looking back, I can say with fair certainty that I wouldn't have gotten along well with past versions of myself. I wasn't that friendly, and my greatest flaw - perhaps something that still exists, but on a much less personal level and more on bigger issues (e.g. politics) - is that I was far too judgmental. Most of it was without basis or reason, and it's a shame that it colored the way I viewed the people and the environment around me here in Westchester County.

But in the end, I suppose I've mellowed with age. I still think that the area's still too populated with overpriced shopping centers, but it's been a long time since I felt active antipathy towards what I felt was a privileged group of peers who didn't work as hard as I did in school. Who am I to judge others if I don't know them that well? My pastime as a 'dispassionate observer' of what happened around me was really more that of an uninformed person who merely viewed White Plains as a foreign place that was hard to associate with. With age, I've come to realize that the town, more so than either Japan or the deserts of southern California, is what will prominently be home in my mind...no matter where I end up down the road...and that it wasn't half as bad as my half-empty view of everything back then made it seem.