So much for drinking no beer for the next month. Just threw up in the kitchen sink. Went to 1-month birthday party for Thao’s friend’s son last night Got caught up in the whole Vietnamese toasting and drinking game. Then we went bowling and I continued to pound San Miguels. Not a good idea. I am too old for this.

Woo-hoo! Just finished marking the last of 219 law midterms. I feel kind of depressed right now. If this is what I’m going to do with my life – teach – for now at least, I sure would like to see my students have a little better comprehension of the material I’m trying to teach them. Not just my students – I graded one question for all 219 students spread among four teachers. It’s frustrating to have to grade that many incorrect answers. I think my average grade for the 219 midterms was about 2.3 out of 5. Which is failing. Which just sucks. I don’t know what it is – bad teaching, material which is just over the students’ heads, lazy students, etc. Probably a combination of all three. I feel like going and drinking a lot of beer right now, but I am not going to because I have promised myself that I am not going to drink any beer between now and when I go to the U.S. on October 5th. My thinking is that I will lose some weight between now and then so people won’t be able to tell how fat I’ve let myself get. It might help if I would get off of my ass and go to the gym once or twice during the next five weeks.

Anyway, good to be finished grading because now I have a 4-day weekend to look forward to. Tuesday is a national holiday here, and I cancelled my two Monday classes because most of my students said they weren’t going to be here anyway – going out of town, etc. I don’t have any plans as of yet – just hang out in Saigon, get to the gym two or three times (we’ll see about that), maybe go out to Long An with Thao (in which case I will not take my camera!), hopefully pick up Tiger Woods 2009 for the Xbox 360, which will come out here today or tomorrow, etc.

Oh, and I’m interested to see whom McCain will pick as his running mate. Most articles seem to be pointing to Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota. I did read one article today saying that those rumors were red herrings and that the real VP candidate was someone else. I think McCain’s VP candidate will be important – maybe more important than usual given McCain’s age, etc. I’m hoping it’s not Mitt Romney. Just not very compelling to me. I’m really hoping it’s a woman. And, like I’ve said before, if he really wants to make it interesting, get Condi Rice on the ticket. Or Colin Powell. Not that he’s a woman. But, like Condi, he would steal some of Obama’s thunder regarding the first black president or vice president. Also, to the extent national security is a factor in this election, how could anyone really do better than Colin Powell? In my book at least. I guess we’ll know soon enough.

I didn’t see Hillary’s speech, Bill’s speech, or Obama’s speech at the DNC. I heard that all three were great, and that Obama’s was particularly good. I printed it out today and will read it this weekend.

Oh, and college football starts this weekend. Don’t have the Slingbox up and running yet, so won’t likely be watching any of it, but will at least be able to check scores and highlights. GA Tech won big in it’s opener against Jacksonville State, I saw, and South Carolina beat the hell out of NC State. UGA plays GA Southern at 12:30EST on Saturday (I think), and Ole Miss plays Memphis at 7:00EST on Saturday (I think). That’s 6:00am Sunday morning for me here, so maybe I’ll get up about halftime and be able to at least watch the ESPN Gamecast for the rest of the game.

I hope everyone has a good weekend!

I’m trying to figure out how to make and post mixtapes on this blog using Mixwit.com. Here’s a test link to someone else’s Wilco mixtape. I can’t get it to work from school – maybe the firewall prevents it from working somehow. Can someone hit play and leave me a comment to let me know if it works?

Thanks!

[mixwit_mixtape wid="80506fe54ca13c21cb79e7db2a2a80fb" pid="2bc0aa9da5af0962c3c6184cfedea608" un="tiagobenagostini" width="426" height="327" center="true"]

About that fake Sylvia Plath poem – “Scar” – in that 1992 letter to Brad, below: It makes sense for me to have referenced that, because sometime during college I got really into Sylvia Plath. (I realize that I may be the only male who has ever written those words, but it’s true.)

I read a couple of her poems in one of my classes, and they freaked me out so badly that I ended up reading her novel, “The Bell Jar,” and then a biography of her. I even read the autobiography or biography – I can’t remember which – of her husband, Ted Hughes. I tend to go off on tangents and read a bunch of stuff about a particular topic – like when I read the complete, two-volume set of the memoirs of Richard Milhous Nixon when I was a senior in high school.

Anyway, here are links to three Sylvia Plath poems that I remember liking in college:

Daddy

Lady Lazarus

Cut

I even like the Ryan Adams song about her:

I saw two things this week in traffic that I wanted to mention:

1. I saw two separate women wearing jackets with text on the back that said: “I dictated the orders, counterorders, and alternative moves for the operation.” (Not sure if that’s 100% but if not it’s pretty close.) Why you would want that phrase on your clothing, I have no idea. I Googled it, and can’t find it online so I have no idea what it means or why someone would think it was a good thing to print on clothing. (I know that it wasn’t me seeing the same woman twice because the jackets were different colors.)

2. I have seen either two separate guys wearing the same t-shirt or the same guy the same t-shirt twice, but the shirt said: “Jaguar Shark: 1; Team Zissou: 0.” Which is pretty funny if you’ve seen the movie “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and completely meaningless if you haven’t.

Cutest b’day invitation ever:

Bummed I will miss the party! Noodle: I’ll see you in about a month on October 5th! Happy Birthday!

My good friend Glenda – yes, she and the “my husband ate a rat in Vietnam Glenda” are one and the same – just emailed me a letter I had written on her behalf back in December 1992. She had received a surprise letter from her lab partner, “Brad,” saying he was in love with her, etc. The feelings were not mutual, and Glenda was unsure how to respond. I told her to let me take a shot at it, and here is the result. It’s funny to me just because my writing style, and sense of humor then are basically the same as they are today. Now whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know, but it’s funny to me. Some of it makes no sense, and I think that was kind of the point.

If that’s not big enough to read above, you should be able to link directly to it here: http://picasaweb.google.com/henrywebb/Bowling/photo#5239414749107773986

You can blame a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” for this ad, or say that Obama is being “swiftboated,” but what it interesting to me is that rather than refuting the ad, the Obama campaign has instead urged the U.S. Department of Justice to criminally prosecute the organization responsible for it for a purported violation of federal election rules.

I don’t see how anyone who is intellectually honest cannot find Obama’s connection to Ayers disturbing. It’s one thing to dislike the Bush administration and to think that America is going in the wrong direction, was wrong about Iraq, etc. It’s another to be friends and colleagues with someone who himself previously bombed the U.S. Capitol and later said that his domestic terrorist organization “didn’t do enough.” Not good.

I didn’t start out being pro-Obama or anti-Obama – I was primarily just anti-Hillary Clinton. But the more I learn about Obama, the less I come to believe that he is the right person to lead this country for the next 4 or 8 years. (Not that John McCain is either, and if you’re just going with the lesser of two evils, I see your argument.) But Obama has shown that he’s no different than any other politician by abandoning virtually every position he took during the democratic primaries, and has apparently abandoned his message of change and outside-the-beltway leadership by selecting a Iraq war-supporting, 36-year veteran of the senate as his running mate. Those things give me even less reason to support him.

I am quickly reverting back to my earlier prediction that when it comes time to actually pulling the lever for Obama or MCain and really giving one of them the reins of power, people are going to have a hard time voting for Obama. We’ll see.

As an aside, I didn’t see Hillary’s convention speech, but all of the analysis I’ve read seems to be saying that the consensus is that either: (a) the democrats chose the wrong nominee; or, at least (b) Obama chose the wrong running mate. Again, I’m happy that she didn’t get either the presidential or vice-presidential nomination because of my personal feelings toward her, but politically, I think Obama probably made a mistake in selecting Biden vs. Clinton.

Bottom line: Go Bob Barr! (Just joking.)

I had my first Vietnamese test today. Co Phuc wanted to give me a test to see where I was as far as knowledge and understanding of the material. It took the whole hour-and-a-half class to take the test. I was able to use a Vietnamese – English dictionary, but that was it.

Warning: Bragging Ahead

I somehow managed to score an 82.5 out of 100 on it. Co Phuc said that she’s only had one student score higher – with an 85 out of 100 – but that student was a Chinese and there’s a lot more commonality between Chinese and Vietnamese than English and Vietnamese. She said most American students score between 50 and 60 percent. So yes, I am bragging, but I am pretty happy with that result.

All of that being said, co Phuc told me in advance that this test was “pretty easy,” and that the test she’d give me after I finish book two would be much more difficult, so I have that to look forward to.

Speaking of co Phuc, Thao and I met co Phuc and another of her students, Kevin, for dinner at a restaurant with a special vegetarian buffet for the lunar month of July (I think). It was $8 for all you could eat and it was awesome. All kinds of different vegetarian food – and all of it (that I had, at least) was great. I’m going to try to go back before it ends.

Today I went over the correct answers to the second midterm questions with my students. They weren’t too optimistic about how they did, but I am sure they did better than they think they did. I hope so, at least. I’ve got to start grading them – all 219 of them – tomorrow. Arrrgh. I really can’t complain. But I will anyway.

The more I think about Obama’s Joe Biden pick, the worse of a pick I think it is. (Sorry Darcie!) And I don’t think I even mentioned the main reason earlier: In 2002, Biden voted to authorize the war in Iraq. Just like Hillary Clinton. I completely don’t understand how Obama could spend the last year or year and a half or whatever excoriating Hillary Clinton for voting “the wrong way” on authorizing the war, saying that she was unfit for the presidency because of her poor judgment on that issue, had already had her “3:00am moment” and had failed, etc., and then turn around and select a vice presidential nominee who also voted to authorize that war. That vote was one of the – if not the main – differentiators between Obama and Clinton, and yet now he’s picked someone who voted exactly the same way as Clinton did as his running mate? (Which also begs the question – if he can get over the war vote issue – as he obviously can – why didn’t he just pick Clinton? Aside from the fact that he hates her guts, of course.)

I may be overestimating the intelligence of the American people, and their ability to follow fine political points, but I think they will realize that it makes no sense at all for Obama to virulently criticize Clinton for her Iraq vote and say that vote renders her unfit for the presidency, and then to select Biden who voted the same way as his vice presidential nominee. Does that vote make someone unfit for the presidency but not for the vice presidency? That can’t be since on of the main qualifications of the vice president is that he be able to step into the shoes of the president.

As much as I dislike her as a person, and as much as I would have absolutely hated to see her as vice president, I think that if Obama would have picked Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee, the democrats would have had a much better chance of winning this election. Yes, he would have been picking someone with a different position on Iraq than Obama, but at least that person is someone who did pick up almost half of the votes in the democratic primaries, has a long of female support, etc. As it stands now, Obama did end up picking someone who had a different position on Iraq than Obama, and someone who garnered less than 1% of the votes in the democratic primaries.

Also, and this may just be me, but there is something a little weird about seeing the 40-something Obama who has a total of four years experience in the U.S. senate as the presidential nominee, and the 65-year-old, white-haired (or white hair-plugged, at least) Biden, who has about 36 years of experience in the U.S. senate as the vice-presidential nominee. It just doesn’t seem right based on their respective ages or levels of experience. Not sure how that will register in the general election, and maybe not at all, but it could be a factor. Especially since on the other side you will have John McCain who, let’s be honest, looks older than dirt, and presumably someone younger and more attractive.

All signs point to Mitt Romney, but I still think that would be a huge mistake. I would push very hard for McCain to select a female, and if I had to pick one female, I would pick Condoleeza Rice. Take away part of Obama’s advantage on the black vote and add in the female support McCain would pick up, and I think those two things would far outweigh the inevitable charges by the democrats that because Rice was such a senior official in the Bush administration, this would clearly be four more years of the same old, same old, etc. Maybe I’m wrong – and maybe this is why I am a teacher in a third-world country instead of a highly-paid political consultant in the U.S. – but I would definitely go female and female and black if at all possible. That would at least make things very interesting.

The polls are apparently showing that Obama picked up no bounce from his announcement of Biden as his running mate, which is not surprising to me. And I think that as the peculiarity of this pick sinks in, Obama’s numbers may actually decline versus rise. (And Obama introducing Biden as “America’s next president” instead of vice president at the Biden introduction doesn’t help things, nor does Biden calling Obama “Barack America” instead of “Barack Obama” at the same introduction.)

My friends Jason and Mindy’s daughter, Aubree, was in the international choir that sang in the Olympics’ closing ceremonies! A screenshot of her – front and center – is above. How cool to be on tv with literally billions of people watching!

Way to go Aubree!