Bookends

I made a video to commemorate my leaving Japan. Its a little late but better late then never. *sigh* Makes me want to cry.

Tacos

Today I went with a group from church down to Tecate, Mexico to the Rancho San Juan Bosco boys orphanage where a team goes down once a month to help out and bring supplies. Right now we are building a new dormitory for the boys and today we finished adding the roof. I got the fun job of screwing in the plywood roof to the metal frame. It was a little frustrating for a while because the drills and screws weren't exactly perfect but eventually we figured it out and it worked well.
It was hot and a good days work but still a lot of fun. I even got a nice tan which means that summer id almost officially here. I have to go to the beach once and the pool once and then summer will officially be here no matter what people say. Its summer all year long in Escondido so we don't go by weather, more like experience because summer is all about the experience.
Anyway, back to Tecate... I made a little video of some pictures and video I took but none of the actual orphanage seeing that I was working on the roof the whole time so the theme of the video is tacos. Hope its at least slightly entertaining. The songs are as follows: Taco Song by Never Heard of It found on YouTube and Lean Like a Cholo by Down aka Kilo given to me by my sister who when I asked what song would fit with tacos suggested it. I think they both work pretty well.


What a great picture they picked...

Don Imus Doesn't Listen to Hip-Hop

This is a post I started working on about three weeks ago and never finished. I added a few concluding sentences just now so hopefully it somewhat resembles something that kind of makes sense.

Last night my mom and I had dinner together (gyoza and miso soup that was yummy) and she mentioned Don Imus and his "lovely" comment that got him fired by CBS and MSNBC. Being in Japan for the past seven months or so I didn't know anything about the issue and she proceeded to inform me of the situation. From what I understand, Don Imus who is, excuse me was, a shock radio host made a comment about the mostly African-American women's basketball team from Rutgers University calling them "nappy-headed-hos". According to my mother there was a huge uproar over this egregious statement that lead the investors of CBS like American Express and Ford to release any ties with Imus. This, of course lead to CBS and MSNBC to break all ties with him as well.
Now the tables have been turned and the blame is being placed on hip-hop. Apparently the explicit lyrics containing mass amounts of profanity along with racial and sexual epithets caused Don Imus to believe that all black women from the hood are in fact "nappy-headed-hos".
I beg to differ.
Don Imus is a sixty-six year old man. He is not the target audience of hip-hop and I think it is safe to say that Don has not been listening to 50 Cent and Eminem enough to be able to decipher their explicit lyrics. Much less come to the conclusion that these basketball players were in fact a stereotype of the aforementioned explicative.
In a nut shell, now that this is all over with, who really cares? It was one ignorant man trying to get a rise out of people and apparently it worked.

A's

Heck yes! I checked my grades today and I received A's in every one of my classes. Two were A-'s so my GPA for the semester is a 3.86 but thats okay. I got a an A in my Greek Mythology class which was my hardest class, making me one happy scholar. More semesters need to be like that.

First Post!

I decided to make a new blog since I'm not in Japan anymore. So here you have it, Steph Part 二. The Japanese character at the end there is the kanji for 2 making the English translation Steph Part 2. I know, so amazingly creative, what can I say? This blog will hopefully be a good mix of text and pictures and videos. I would like to be a little more journalist and comment on current national and world issues seeing that I'm looking at becoming a journalist. Here goes nothin'!