In case you hadn’t made up your mind. This might help. The best line is “instead of war we can negotiate.”

My friend Dan drew my attention to a truly morbid yet fascinating blog from a girl who calls herself “90 Day Jane.” The premise of the site is that she will commit suicide in 90 days, and is blogging each day leading up to her supposed death. Like any curious person, I went to the site and read a few of the posts. I was struck by the “About Me” section of the page. Here it is:

I am going to kill myself in 90 days. What else should i say? This blog is not a cry for help or even to get attention. It’s simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I’m not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to? I mean, as an atheist I feel life has no greater purpose. My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying “game over”, why can’t I? Anyway, I hope you enjoy my thoughts as the clock runs out. Also, if blogspot takes this down before i’m gone just go to www.90dayjane.com. Please don’t attempt to “help” me. If you want to truly help, please send me ideas on how to do the deed. thx-Jane

Like any site you hear about from a friend, there are thousands of other “friends” out there telling their friends, and your friend is surely not the first friend to tell their friends. Usually by the time I hear about something, it’s already a hit. Looking at the number of comments on Jane’s posts, her site was a hit. So much so, that three of her last five daily posts touched on the tremendous response her site was getting. On Day 87, the fourth day of the blog, she wrote:

I didn’t expect this kind of response, or really any response at all. To be honest, i’m kind of freaked but I also feel a sense of responsibility to continue the blog. I started it to be a public record of my suicide, but i thought it would be after the fact. I also wanted to use this blog to help answer the question of “why” for anyone who knew me and also for myself. Your comments are certainly helping me do that- many of them in a good way.

In only a week of publishing, Jane received hundreds of comments on each of her posts, the type of response any blogger dreams of. The comments range from concern, doubt, contempt, empathy to outright abuse. My favorite that I read came on the eighth day when one commenter wrote, “Can you make it nine day Jane? Seriously. Attention whore. But either way, before you die, can you post pix of your clam?”

I discussed with Dan whether or not Jane truly intended to commit suicide or whether she was creating some sort of social experiment to see how truly evil people could be on the internet. As in, would people really call a girl who had 83 days to live an “attention whore?” Or ask to see pictures of her “clam”? And if this chick was seriously disturbed and was actually going to kill herself, how could I laugh at any of this? The whole thing was just captivating.

Most of me, however, believed it was a hoax, and late Tuesday night, right before I started writing this post, my suspicions were confirmed, by 90 Day Jane herself. Apparently overwhelmed by the attention paid to her site, Jane posted “Day 0: The Resolve” which let her readers know that she was, in fact, merely testing all of us, had no intentions of committing suicide and that the joke had gone too far. Phew, because I actually did giggle at the “clam” comment.

90 Day Jane cited a conflict between her “massive sense of responsibility to my art” and the readers of the blog. Here is an excerpt from her final post:

My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.
90DayJane was meant to mirror the tragic figure, Christine Chubbuck. Newscaster Christine Chubbuck committed suicide in 1974 by shooting herself in the head live on air. She was very vocal about her depression to those around her and gave every indication of her exact intentions leading up to the event. Sadly, no one reacted or helped Christine and those left behind could only ask “why”.
Her story both inspired and terrified me because I can truly empathize with her rage and even her isolation. I wondered how Christine’s life and subsequent suicide would play out in our time. Would the internet be yet another place of isolation to her or an escape?

Well, it was good while it lasted. And whether or not 90 Day Jane was merely, as Radar put it in a story Tuesday, a “viral marketing scheme for some amateur auteur’s inspiration” or an actual homage to Chubbuck, the experiment did yield a noteworthy result. 90 Day Jane proves that no matter how depressed, disturbed, or downtrodden a girl is, there will always be one, if not many internet commenters ready to pummel her with lewd sex jokes.

A kid at the Greater Mt. Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church in Maryland pulled the ol’ “praise the lord/pass the hell out” 1-2 combo during a speech by Bill Clinton Sunday. Ironically, when the youngster was asked where he learned how to fall asleep so conspicuously in the middle of an important address, he said he watched it from watching Bill himself during a Martin Luther King service a couple weeks back.

                                                                                                                    Washington Post

If you didn’t get a chance to see will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video, it’s okay. It’s not totally necessary to see Scarlett Johansson sing about Barack Obama. Or really to see Scarlett Johansson sing at all. Why does everyone have to sing? The video was the newest in the long line of star-studded all-star recordings for a cause (”We Are the World,” “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” “Voices that Care”), and one that came out ahead of the Super Tuesday election. And since the release of the video and its subsequent YouTube popularity, things haven’t been so bad for O-Bombs. He swept 4 more states this weekend and goes into the “Chesapeake Primaries” as the odds-on favorite. On the Republican side, John McCain seems to be losing ground to Mike Huckabee who carried both Kansas and Louisiana this weekend and continues to be a little Christian thorn in McCain’s grizzled side. What does McCain do to pick up some ground? Make a music video. Here it is:

This week, the NFL and the Christian humanitarian organization World Vision are sending thousands of Super Bowl t-shirts and hats valued at over $10 million to to impoverished areas in Nicaragua. Just days after the Giants’ miraculous Super Bowl victory, children in the poorest and most remote villages in Nicaragua will get to don brand new Reebok-made Super Bowl gear. The Nicaraguans on the receiving end of the donation have never seen an NFL game, much less a television, much less, as the New York Post points out, a new shirt. But when I say “Super Bowl gear,” I don’t mean Giants championship apparel.

As merchandisers often produce items that predict the outcome of a big game before the result of the game has been cemented, often they are left with thousands of shirts emblazoned with slogans commemorating events that never occur, such as “New England Patriots, Champions, 19-0, Perfect Season.” But as the 97 million people who watched the Super Bowl this year know, the Patriots didn’t win the game and thus, didn’t go 19-0, didn’t have a perfect season, and aren’t “champions.” The Giants were the champions of Super Bowl XLII.

That doesn’t change the fact that the NFL printed loads of predictive “Perfect Season” apparel, threads that the NFL considered putting in incinerators or landfills. But in its partnership with World Vision, the NFL need not waste perfectly good clothing. They just have to get it out of the U.S. as soon as possible so it isn’t sold on eBay or even worse, in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot somewhere in Massachusetts. As the Augusta Chronicle reported, since 1994, World Vision has been sending erroneous Super Bowl gear to the Third World, to places like Zambia, Chad, Chile, Bolivia, Congo, El Salvador, Romania and Zimbabwe. As the Chronicle reporter wrote: “there are places in Africa where the locals believe the four-time Super Bowl losing Buffalo Bills are the greatest dynasty in American football.”

Imagining these Third World villages where everyone is wearing discarded Super Bowl gear seems kind of like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Indeed, I can see Nicaraguan boys kicking a soccer ball down the street decked out head to toe in Patriots championship gear. One boy kicks the ball off to the side and the ball rolls to the feet of Rod Serling standing in the barrio smoking a cigarette. “Imagine if you will,” he begins, “a secluded road in a distant town in a remote country. Here there exists a fifth dimension, one which cannot distinguish the line between perfect and imperfect, 19-0 and 18-1, a dimension that blurs all preconceived notions of reality and fantasy, science and supposition, absoluteness and expectation. Here, young boys exalt a man named Brady for achieving perfection and wonder why Mama, Papa, Abuela and all the kids at school wear the exact same shirt and hat everyday. It is a region where children know not the difference between Peyton and Eli, Giselle and Montel, Patriots and Giants. It is a gap between consciousness and fantasy, a gap of the magnitude of that between Michael Strahan’s two front teeth. It is a place where those indifferent to the ways of the NFL appear to be the most impassioned of fans. Though every man, woman and child’s shirt here reads “perfect season,” all of the sign posts in this dilapidated dimension read…The Twilight Zone.”

Well, the few of you who have kept checking this site, I applaud your sticktoitiveness and loyalty. You’re probably wondering why it seems Flumesday has gone from a dynamic China-based news website to the tame, tickerless blog you see before you. I’ll tell you. After two years living in Shanghai, writing and pursuing different projects, I have moved back to New York to work as a blog editor for a popular news site. I thought that I might be able to keep up Flumesday with the tenacity and devotion I gave to it while living in China. I was wrong. I quickly realized that the essence of Flumesday was, in fact, China and the fact that the guy writing it was living there. I haven’t lost my interest in China, nor have I lost my zeal for reading stories relating to China and offering my take. But I find myself with a new job and new surroundings that have somewhat limited my time and ability to maintain two daily news columns — one about China and one about the U.S. — as I did with the old Flumesday. And forget about keeping up a daily headline ticker. So, I’ve decided to do what any man must do when his scrotum does not sit comfortably in his underwear — adjust. And I have adjusted. I redesigned the site to make it more of a blog, which gives me more freedom to write about whatever I want and more importantly, whenever I want. And there doesn’t seem to be as good of a reason anymore to separate China and U.S. topics. Basically, it makes more sense. So if you’ve lost your faith in Flumesday, I understand, and thanks for the memories. But in the coming weeks, now that I’ve adapted to this New York life — with HD television, uncensored internet and all the food delivery options someone with HDTV and an internet connection could ever wish for — it is time to revive Flumesday. Someone even asked me if Flumesday had “pulled a Heath Ledger.” Too soon.