No, I did not originally come up with the title. There is a team from Kansas State University Geography Department that mapped the 7 Deadly Sins across America, by plotting per-capita stats on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust).

See where South Dakota is on the map. Are South Dakotan sinners? South Dakotans seem to be saintly in terms of envy and wrath. But look at “lust”, oh my, the western part of SD is so devilish.

Check out the 7 maps below. But first, here is the legend.

1. Greed - Average income compared with number of people living below the poverty line.

At exactly 1 AM, September 29, 2009, the Mediacom Cable TV signal in Brookings, South Dakota was cut off. It has been over an hour already since the interruption and the signal hasn’t been restored yet!

My little brother, Jeffrey, who works in Manila, was among the thousands of people affected by the tropical storm “Ondoy” (international codename: Ketsana) that hit the Philippines this weekend. After my sister (in Illinois) and I heard about the worsening situation in Manila due to flooding caused by the torrential rains, we immediately contacted our brother, but to no avail. His phone, and all his friends’ phones, were unreachable. We posted messages on Facebook hoping other friends and relatives could somehow trace our brother’s whereabouts.

Last night, we finally got a note that my brother and some others were trapped in the second floor of a two-story house. Water on the first floor was about chest-high.

Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, has obtained a copy of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing video tapes through the federal Freedom of Information Act. The video is now posted online.

If you watch the video, something is actually lacking. The video shows events minutes long before the blast and then goes blank before 9:02 a.m., when a truck bomb carrying a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the Oklahoma City federal building. Where are the rest of the video? Why are they missing? There were four cameras monitoring the place at different locations and all of them coincidentally went blank at the same time! Coincidence. Really? Maybe not.

Warning to all those planning to get their family pictures developed in Walmart — Walmart employees are very strict on bath-time photos! Even if the photos are clearly innocent family photos, Walmart employees will look at it as very sexual.

This is what happened to a poor couple who took a memory stick to a Walmart store in Arizona for processing. There were 144 photographs taken mostly during the family’s vacation in San Diego. There were seven to eight bath photos of their three girls partially nude and playing in the bath tub. The ignorant Walmart employee found the family photos offensive, lewd or pornographic and so Walmart turned over the photos to the police.

How could a man sue Bank Of America for an amount that is even bigger than the world’s $60 trillion GDP? Dalton Chiscolm is suing the bank for 1,784 billion trillion dollars. Ask what NYU math Professor Sylvain Cappell have to say about this: “These are the kind of numbers you deal with only on a cosmic scale.”

I think the amount is hilarious and Dalton Chiscolm is a joke! That is why lawsuits are clogging up the legal system because of jokes like this.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech at the UN today. Netanyahu’s address was seen as his response to Pres. Obama speech. The speech brought some good “signs of peace”. He called on his Palestinian neighbors to begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions. He address the wider Arab world to work with him, saying “Let’s make peace. I am willing to meet with you any time any place — in Damascus, Riyadh, Beirut and in Jerusalem.”

Watch the videos below (in 4 parts). It’s worth the time.

Full Netanyahu UN Speech Part 1 of 4

My Collegian column this week.

Roosters here are known as gamecocks in the Philippines. Sundays can be celebrated in so many ways by so many common Filipinos living in faraway towns. It is the day off for most house helpers and they usually enjoy their free time at town plazas. It is the day for the faithful to go and hear mass. It is also the best day for a “sabungero” to exercise his gamecocks. For the locals, the smell of fighting cocks, the sight of tricycles parked in already crowded streets, the sound of people shouting for bets … all tells the same thing: There’s got to be a derby going on.