President-elect Barack Obama is truly multicultural. His heritage list has added up during this year's electoral race: Kenyan, Indonesian, Hawaiian, and Kansas'ian? Now it turns out that, like any good American mutt, Obama is Irish, too.

According to a search undertaken by Ancestry.co.uk, Obama's maternal roots can be traced to the village of Monegal in Ireland's County Offaly. Apparently the future President's great-grandfather was a shoemaker from the village who eventually emigrated to New York.

A musical group from the village, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys, has even written a song for the occasion.



The chorus of the song says: O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara / There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama...
and the lyrics go on to suggest that Obama is as Irish bacon and cabbage and call for the President-elect to get his jig on doing Riverdance.

During the recent election hubbub, the villagers of Monegal have claimed Obama as their own and invited him to come and visit the village, with hopes that the President-elect's search for his Irish roots will also boost tourism to the quiet town.

If you're tired of being reduced to earphones to get your iPod groove on while travelling, Apple has come up with a new solution. The iP27 is the newest version of the iHome speaker line, a docking station that plays music directly from your iPod.

The iP27 has a nifty alarm clock functionality that allows you to wake up to your favorite tunes, along with remote volume and play/pause control. The speakers themselves fold down flat and slide into a carrying case, so all in all, the system is really geared for travelers.

The cons to this system are that the speakers lack a lot of bass, compromising the sound quality; and as well, there is no radio function (for those few times you want to catch up on your foreign news?). I've also heard that some older versions of iPod aren't compatible, but the Nanos and iPhones work just fine.

On the upside, the unit has an AA battery option and a downsized AC cord, so it's a bit sleeker and less space-consuming than it's iHome counterpart. Users of the iH27 probably won't notice too many differences in the two units.

Rationally, I can't think of any traveler that would actually use this unit, much less want to carry it around all over the place in their luggage. Definitely a geek-ified piece of equipment, but it will probably find its cult following.

There's been a growing chorus of China watchers who have been saying--for years now--that one day, it won't be annoying Americans overflowing the world's greatest cities, but equally annoying Chinese tourists. But there'll be even more of them, as China's middle class is predicted to explode from something like 6 percent of their 1.3 billion population right now to 45 percent in 2020.

I don't doubt that this will be true one day. The question is, though, will that day be any time soon? Given the recent global meltdown, many have seen a monumental shift in economic power, from America and the west to China and the east (as well as other regions with emerging markets, such as Russia and South America). But the market crashes in a wide swatch of developing countries have really brought this "decoupling" theory--in which emerging markets are no longer linked to the fate of the US economy--into question.

I think to examine this shift in economic power and to answer the bigger question of should we be worried, it may be effective to look at one small part of the puzzle: initial public offerings (IPOs). You remember those from the heady tech-bubble days, right?

Michael Glawogger's "sequel" to Megacities (which I reviewed last week in two installments, part 1 and part 2), Workingman's Death, also documents the plight of workers from around the globe. It is not meant of course, by any means, to be Megacities II.

His style has evolved in the last few years, from a more experimental approach in Megacities, with its exploration of staged shots, unorthodox soundtrack, and a complete lack of structure to a more traditional documentary approach in Workingman's Death.

In Workingman's Death, Glawogger hews a more traditional approach to documentary filmmaking than in Megacities. He rejects reenactments, but he also does not favor the shaky first-person style common to many documentaries. Rather, he crafts his images with close attention to traditional cinematic forms-composition, color, lighting, camera movement-which juxtaposes with the jumbled and often jarring sights within these alien workplaces. Even without reenactments of intimate moments-the dehumanizing striptease scene in Megacities, for example-Glawogger still conveys, through the contrast of time and place, a poignant sense of personal narrative.

Ever wondered what the scene of a runway accident looks like? This might be the closest you'll get: one photographer has captured some interesting shots of crews going through air disaster simulations.

Apparently at JFK, you can actually see the simulation rig they use--"an intimidating black oblong structure situated dangerously close to one of the runways."

The photographer also traveled to the sites of a few actual accidents, which provides for more of a somber mood. Check it all out here.

But remember, flying is still much safer than driving!

I've been on somewhat of a movie spree lately--I think it may have just a little to do with my new Netflix account.

I don't know why I haven't seen Seven Years in Tibet, seeing as Tibet is near the top of my top dream destinations. The movie really exceeded my expectations, I guess it helps the story takes place during the 1940s, an action-packed period with WWII and the birth of modern China. Oh, and the whole annexation of Tibet thing.

What's particularly well-done about the movie is how they played off the political issue. I didn't think it was overly preachy; in fact, it really touched me how director David Thewlis chose to illustrate the oppression of the Tibetans by Communist Chinese. Watch the movie if you want to know more about their history and on-going plight.

And lastly, the landscapes are pretty gorgeous, though most of what you see was technically filmed in Argentina (there's 20 minutes of footage secretly shot from within Tibet). On a lighter note, Brad Pitt was given the dubious honor of third worst accent in a movie for his portrayal of Heinrich Harrer.

Read part 1 of my review.

Megacities in particular features a rather unorthodox audio track that escapes categorization. While Workingman's Death employs a soundtrack composed by the industrialist musician John Zorn, Megacities relies on the "discarded" sounds of the local environments and cultures to fashion a coherent narrative voice. In this way, Glawogger becomes one of the refuse-combers that he films in Mexico City and Mumbai, gleaning what others in a global consumer society have left behind.

He astutely employs sound to highlight the absurdity of everyday situations-the squishing of headless chickens flapping around in a bloody oilcan, the overly-saccharine Latino pop music playing during the striptease, triumphant blares of unseen trumpets during an awkward photo shoot of Mexican soccer players, who happen to be standing next to a trash heap.

If you guys don't know already, New Haven is a wet place. So I was really excited to find a pair of dress shoes made out of Gore-Tex. The Berlin GTX, which retails for about $200, have been an absolute critical part of my wardrobe. In fact, I just wore them to a lunch dinner with Ted Sorenson, one of JFK's closest advisers (I did make the mistake of wearing jeans, but these shoes at least got me through the door).

Best of all, the GTX is really for people on the go. I'm thinking in particular of those long treks through the airport. My old pair really made my soles hurt just from the walk between the security checkpoint and the gate.

And if you somehow do get them wet--I'm thinking the only case this would happen is if you ford a river--the removable Ecco Comfort Fiber System (ok they might have went a little far with the marketing) means you'll have a dry shoe in no time. But again, I can't emphasis enough how clutch the Gore-Tex has been in keeping my feet dry; I think it also helps keeping everything down there aerated.

The only downside is the shoes came with the laces all mistied. I tried relacing, and this may be a sign of my stupidity rather than anything on Gore-Tex's part, but even now, the laces pop out on the inside of the shoes. Again, I think I'm just rather thick-headed.

There's a couple other styles that I've found on the Gore-Tex site.

I've really only bothered with Facebook, but apparently that makes me out of the loop with some 80% of the world. It's a bit curious that certain social networks are popular with specific countries, some that aren't even on the same continent. For instance, Orkut is wildly popular in Brazil and India. In America, MySpace is king, though by far for the 20-something generation, it's Facebook. Take a look, and see what you're suppose to be using.

Think you know New York or Moscow? That you've seen all the sights in Mexico City or even took a tour of the slums of Mumbai? Well, you haven't seen anything until you watch Megacities by Michael Glawogger, one of my favorite documentaries. It'll take you to places and people in these four megacities that you've never seen. Oh, and the cinematography!

"I don't use beauty filters!" says Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, concerning his 1998 documentary, Megacities. "If the place wouldn't have beauty in itself, it's not possible for me to make it look beautiful." Through a mastery of cinema aesthetics-from color and composition to the mixing of the soundtrack and manipulation of the scene transitions-Glawogger infused the apocalyptic urban wastelands he saw, a world populated by blue-dyed men, knife-wielding hustlers, and sagging prostitutes in the nude, with an aura of the surreal.

This film reject standard documentary conventions, such as the use of voiceovers and a strict narrative arc; yet they ultimately offer, through their flipbook storytelling structure, a coherent narrative of a world in flux, buffeted by unseen forces of globalization.