Francis Hwang's site

Arch that back

2009-07-02T03:43:37Z

I don’t know what you’d do with business cards carved from meat, but I can’t stop giggling at these Frank Frazetta recreation photos:

(h/t JWZ)

Opus & Michael

2009-06-27T15:36:59Z

In August and September of 1984, Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Bloom County ran a series of strips in which the fretful penguin Opus ends up befriending Michael Jackson and then trades places with him to let him live a normal life for a short time. This was a couple of years after the release of Thriller, around the time when the strangeness of Jackson’s life was becoming apparent to the world. Maybe I’m reading too much into the strips, but in retrospect I think they expressed a common yearning to make sure that he would be okay. It only seemed fair that someone who had delivered such joyful pop music to the world could be somehow saved from the emotional costs of exceptional parental pressure and superstardom at a young age. Of course, Opus was a fictional character, and whatever help Jackson might have needed, he never got it.

Here are the strips, click on one for the lightbox:

Crabcore? Screamo? Uh.

2009-06-24T22:27:46Z

Wow, where to start. Nu-metal autotune? Headbanging keyboardist? This is either the biggest joke song ever, or the most influential band of the next ten years. I’m appalled and thrilled and scared all at the same time.

Attack Attack! |MTV Music

Death in Tehran

2009-06-22T15:04:02Z

The web makes it easier to publish media that would be considered too graphic to appear on CNN or in the New York Times. Andrew Sullivan ran a lot of photos of people tortured to death by American hands over the past year, and now on YouTube, we have tremendously upsetting footage of an Iranian girl, shot by a member of the Basij, apparently dying on video:

I’m inclined to say that this is a good thing. Horrible things happen in the world and it’s useful to be reminded of them. But being reminded of them certainly isn’t easy.

If you’re interested in more, less graphic information about the girl, Neda Soltani, is being collected on Wikipedia.

Turning back the police

2009-06-21T17:43:42Z

Via Andrew Sullivan, again: BBC Persian has footage of a pitched battle between a crowd and Iranian police, which ends with the police turning and running away. Inspiring stuff.

More on Iran

2009-06-16T12:29:08Z

So the Yahoo Pipe I made is turning out to be a bit of a bust, at least for me since I was hoping to use its RSS feed. Nothing for hours and then 300 new entries at once. I’ve ended up just using my Twitter account to follow this reduced set of Iranian Twitterers.

A few people on Twitter are now talking about a protest in solidarity at Washington Square Park today, 5:30 p.m. Hopefully that’ll happen. I don’t have anything green to wear, though.

RSS feed of English-language Twitterers in Iran

2009-06-15T12:14:59Z

As an experiment, I made a quick Yahoo! Pipe that collects the Twitter accounts listed here. The pipe is here, and it has an RSS feed too. Not sure about how quickly Yahoo! is aggregating these feeds, most likely not any faster than you’d get if you signed up with Twitter and followed all those accounts, but maybe this’ll come in handy if, like me, you’re not much of a Twitter user.

Another porn conference brouhaha, this time in the Flash world

2009-06-12T17:51:33Z

Seriously, what the fuck.

He opens his keynote with one of those “Ignite”-esque presentations — where you have 5-minutes and 20 slides to tell a story — and the first and last are a close-up of a woman’s lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say “drink me,” with Hoss’s Photoshopped, upward-looking face placed below it.

Time Geithner can't sell his own house for a price he'd like

2009-06-09T21:47:28Z

I wonder if this might be Geithner’s problem in a nutshell:

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is renting his home in Westchester County, New York, for $7,500 a month after failing to find a buyer …
The inventory of similar homes for sale in the area may have affected the property’s prospects, said Debbie Meiliken, a broker at Keller Williams Realty New York.
“There was a lot of competition,” Meiliken said. “Sometimes people will put the house for rent if they’re not prepared to sell it and take a loss.”

Does Geithner think his own house price has been artificially depressed by a temporary liquidity crisis? I wonder if he realizes that asset prices will have to come down eventually and someone, somewhere, will have to bear that loss.

Abortion stories

2009-06-03T13:25:34Z

fhwang.net: Reading Andrew Sullivan’s 200 posts a day, so you don’t have to.

In the wake of George Tiller’s assassination, Sullivan has been collecting a number of personal stories about abortion. I found this one, from the husband of a Tiller patient, the most moving:

... I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said “Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!” or something similar. Turns out it comemmorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party.
The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking – obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.

And there’s this, from a Catholic mother:

At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.

A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery.

He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

Our priest came away from that experience feeling that this world-renowned children’s hospital was basically experimenting on babies. He saw their futile suffering and likened it to being crucified. The family he had gone there to support later told him that if they had only known what their baby would be forced to go through before dying, they would never have chosen surgery. Our priest told us that he believed we were not choosing our son’s death, only choosing the timing of his death in order to spare him a great deal of suffering. Something he said that brought us great comfort was “God knows what is in your hearts.” God knows our choice was based on mercy and compassion. Who would better understand our hearts than God, who made the choice for His own Son to die?

Many more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.