Please take a look and sign if you can. The petition's intro is quite thorough and describes how I feel pretty accurately:

In recent decades, China's effort in trying to make Chinese easier for both her youth and foreigners resulted in this push of Simplified Chinese.

Simplified Chinese, although convenient, fails to incorporate meaning into its characters. Many words of same phonetic sounds are replaced by a single character that possesses the same sound but lacks in meaning.

UN's action to "unify" the Chinese characters and recognize ONLY Simplified Chinese will have devastating impact upon the Chinese language, culture, history.

The world is already getting stupider and stupider. Can we try to slow things down a little bit here?

Quote of the day:

"He's in-in-incompetent ... I mean, impotent."

Sometimes, the best course of action to take is none at all.

Stalking my brother is fun. My dad and I were looking for streaming Chinese newscasts tonight and suddenly it struck us: "Hey, can we see Howard's work online?" Lo and behold ...

For video: Hurry and click here for a sample of his broadcast. He's a weekend sports anchor, and they've got his Sunday segment up at the moment. If you miss it, catch it next weekend, probably Sunday and Monday.

Just audio: And then, go here and scroll down until you find a podcast with Howard's name by it. His most recent thingy was on 6/06/07. Usually, he just does a 10-minute thingy on fantasy sports, but he actually filled in for one of the guys on the radio show for this episode.

And yes, "thingy" is my technical term for it! :)

Yeah, this is way more Howard than anyone should be subjected to, so apologies from the proud sister in advance. :)

@ Abercrombie & Fitch Nov 2006.

Carrie's back, and so I went over to say hey. Hugh ended up cooking *me* dinner ... not sure how THAT works, but hey, *I* ain't complainin'!

Chef Hugh's AWESOMELY refreshing veggie pasta, including veggies from my parents' garden, tofu, and fresh parsley and black pepper ...

Recent patient hilarity:

[ phone rings, I answer in my usual business-like manner ]
Long-time Patient who Can Predict Weather by Pain in Joints: Caroline! What did I tell you? It rained today! The weather forecast didn't even pick this up!

I couldn't help but laugh. It was true. The weather was great until all of a sudden we had golf-ball-sized hail in some parts of Houston, and it was coming down like a whole stampede of cats and dogs.

ADORABLE Eight-Year-Old Patient at End of First Visit: You're the smartest doctor I've ever met.
Me (stifling urge to laugh): Oh? Why do you say that?
AEYOPEFV: Because you explain stuff better to me.

This is interesting to hear. I don't have many child patients (understandably), but those whose parents do have them try acupuncture have probably tried everything under the sun first, exposing the poor things to more doctors than many adults have seen in their lifetimes.

The bro has left the mom and myself back at the studio while he's taken the dad out posing as his "intern" for a half hour or so, and wasn't able to take all of us. Thought I'd take the opportunity to post a few pics from the past few days:

I broke Crystal's camera and left Howard and Crystal to fix it. :P

Running across a bridge @ Toledo's Botanical Gardens: Mom's shoe got stuck, but what was hilarious was how she stopped and said, "Caroline, I know you want to take a picture of this!"

North of Detroit, Michigan, at the tip of Lake Huron.

Crossing over into Windsor, Ontario: Imitating Rose's imitation of inanimate objects.

On a hill @ Lake Erie: That's meeeeeeeeeeeee!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh (with random kid with afro)

Crunch-time at the studio before the newscast.

Howard demonstrates proper mic-holding technique to Dad before taking him out as his "intern" to some pre-game interviews. Yes, that is a stuffed beaver he's using as a mock microphone.