Month: December 2005

As I reported in an earlier post, the government of Kazakhstan has threatened to sue Sacha Baron Cohen over his portrayal of Borat, a bumbling, racist Kazakhstani reporter.

Long-time erwintang.com reader Sarah K has notified me that Borat has responded to the controversy. In a prepared statement, Borat claimed to have no connection with Baron Cohen and that he fully supports his government in possible legal action against the comedian. Furthermore, Borat added that after reforms in 2003, “women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hat and age of consent has been raised to eight years old”.

You can view a video of the statement on Borat’s own personal web site. Be sure to check out video clips and pictures from his travels around the world. Also included in his video library is a clip from the MTV Europe Music Awards where host Borat told the audience to “prepare for masturbations” as the Pussycat Doll were about to take the stage.

I love naps. A nap is a time when you go to sleep when you’re not supposed to be sleeping, mostly in the daytime. It’s the one rare time when you listen to your fatigued body and let yourself fall asleep, no matter what time it is in the day.

I used to take a lot of naps in grad school. Even ten minutes of napping before I had to TA or go to a class made a huge difference in the day. When I started work, I thought my napping days were over. That was true for a while, but then things changed when I moved my ass out to the boonies.

Having to get up extra early to get to work means I’m pretty tired by the end of the day. Now, when I get on that 160 bus along Burrard in the evening, I’m usually exhausted. The bus is warm and it’s dark. There’s nothing for me to do but sit there. It’s a perfect recipe for falling asleep.

I usually doze after we leave the dowtown eastside. Somewhere along Hastings, Mr. Sandman visits me. I sometimes briefly awake, seeing other people get on the bus. I imagine I must look like an idiot, being half-awake. I’ve never missed my stop. Somehow, I always wake around the time the bus turns onto St. John’s from the Barnet Highway.

Since the bus ride takes about 35 minutes in total, I’m asleep for less than that. When I get off the bus, I feel much better and the cold contrast of the outdoors ensures I’m fully awake for the short walk to the front door. Napping the bus is good.

Ok, your reward for reading about how I like to sleep on the bus is this ridiculously non-user friendly web page that shows you how to make paper airplanes. Good luck trying to fold the paper while watching the animations.

Barely two months ago, I was able to divulge I was working on Shadow-Born, a game for the Nokia N-Gage system. Well, hot on the heels of that news is an admission from Nokia itself. In an interview with a news outlet, a senior VP at Nokia has admitted the N-Gage platform is not a success and that they would be stopping game development on the platform. They call it a pause in the grand scheme of things but I’m not so sure.

Internally, we’ve known about this for weeks but you can imagine how we felt when we found out. After busting our asses for months on the game, we discovered we were doing so on a failed platform.

We’re continuing to work on the game and we will finish it. Why? There’s a very good reason for it which might seem strange since the whole world now knows the N-Gage isn’t viable anymore in the eyes of Nokia. I can’t say more than that.

Read more here.