Reason and Accountability.

According to this article, a "Chick-lit King Imagines His Way into Women's heads". Perhaps more accurately, to quote Jack Nicholson, he "think[s] of a man and take away reason and accountability."

Summer Reading, for the Week of July 28

I started reading through The Story and Its Writer last night. The first story I read was by Sherman Alexie (author of Ten Little Indians). The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven was rather enjoyable. The Second story I read was by Woody Allen about a City College Professor who through the use of a magician is teleported into novels.

Both stories were quite good, and I would certainly read more stories by Allen, who I had no idea did anything but movies set in New York. Alexie concerns me though since I'm not sure if I should expect the other stories he's written to be as exciting as the one I just read.

Also last night I went to Barnes and Noble and bought Don Quixote, the Norton Critical Reading edition. I hope this translation doesn't suck.

I've also been reading the Penguin Classics edition of the Canterbury Tales. I bought and started this back in high school and as I was reading the prologue I found my old book mark. I'm now up the The Miller's Tale, so I'm doing a lot better than when I was 17.

Finally, I've been reading Jude the Obscure. Despite what I have heard, its not comparison to Tess Of The D'Urbervilles or the Mayor of Casterbridge, both novels that I enjoyed.

Hemmingway

I only now learned that Hemmingway and I share a birthday. Perhaps this is why we share a love of the drink.

Money

Grads are apaprently earning more money this year according tothis article. Interesting to note, Poli-sci government is $33k, marketing at $35.3k. I've beaten the curve.

Amish in the City

Tonight will premier the television reality show Amish in the City. The show started out with heavy criticism from kinds of people including 51 Congressman. one group claims its offensive to all 'rural people'.

I'll say straight up that 'rural people' do offend me, so I don't see anything wrong with them being offended by my entertainment. For instance, during the first Simple Life, Paris and Nicole bottle milk that is shipped off for sale for drinking without being pasteurized. WHO DOES THAT?

In either case, everyone who is afraid that the Amish will be offended by this show are forgetting that they don't have television.

Water

Bottled water at the Democratic national convention is $3.50. Attendees are not allowed to bring bottle water in from the outside, since it might contain poisen. (Source)

This at first might sound like a conspiracy, except there is no mention of how drunk everyone is.

Whoring

Nextel bought a train on the Las Vegas monorail. Now the MTA is whoring itself out to the highest bidder. The article points out that while naming things like stadiums has a huge draw, this is in part because the name appears everywhere-- tv, radio, and in print--it may not work for a mass transit system that smells and people get shot in.

Even though I was fairly young when it happened, I thought it was pretty stupid that poor Brendan Byrne lost his place in history to continental Airlines. So why put up with it? I propose that places only be referred to as their christened name. If Grand Central Station ever becomes The White Rose Grand Central Station, or something equally absurd, everyone should just call it Grand Central Station.

As a side note, I suppose I could live with branding in some cases, such as if the subway was renamed the the Subway subway.

Reading

Last week I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude. I've begun reading Jude the Obscure and The Western Canon, a book defending the western tradition against the influences of post colonialism.

A Victory for Free Speech

A few months ago a California Student was arrested for a poem he wrote. Today he was freed.

Its about time our Constitutional rights had some defending.

Cheese and 23

While I did enjoy the events of my birthday, they pale in comparison to Michael Monn, who also turned 23 this week. Although, all told, events involving alcohol, nudity and nacho cheese would not necessarily exclude me.

"MARYVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- Michael P. Monn's birthday celebration went a little awry when he was arrested while drunk, nude and covered with nacho cheese....Investigators suspect Monn climbed an 8-foot fence, broke into the pool snack bar through a window, threw nacho cheese on a wall and scattered chips on the ground. ....Monn was charged with burglary, theft of less than $500, vandalism less than $500 and public intoxication and was cited for indecent exposure....It was Monn's 23rd birthday.

On 3 & 20

Yesterday I turned 23. At 23, its hard to offer any words of wisdom worth reading on turning 23, since I lack the innocence of youth and experience of age. Searching google for what other people have to say when they turned 23 really doesn't return much content worth mentioning.

But as it is, I'm a year closer to cheap car insurance, collecting social security, and death.

But at least I'm not 30.

Or 50.

And eventually, when I'm old enough to have to the wisdom to explain turning 23, I'll have forgotten what its like to be, and in so doing, having nothing to say.

Here's an Idea...

Changes in the SAT are said to reduce "coachability". Critics cry bullshit, and rightfully so. Let's face it, standardized tests like GREs, SATs, LSATs, ect., test nothing more than a students' ability to shell out money preparing, whether by paying Kaplan or buying prep books.

The best solution would be eliminating the standardized tests entirely relying instead on genuine tests of intelligence and academic skill: GPA, University specific essays, portfolios (where appropriate), and personal interviews.

The cost of university tuition has only gone up recent years--at the same time more students are attending (more students = more tuition fees). With fewer Tenure track faculty, most classes at universities are being taught by $3000 per class adjuncts (or there abouts). So why not take that huge disparity between the actual cost per student and student tuition to have a thorough process to be more selective.

For the fifty to one hundred dollar application fee, a university can certainly spare the time to meet with every applicant for ten minutes--that's six hundred dollars per hour (assuming a hundred dollar fee for application yields 10 minutes of interview per applicant and that the application fee money at present is merely being consumed by the beast of red tape).

Instead of having a standardized writing test, why not actually read application essays? Students spend tens of not hundreds of hours preparing application essays for both graduate and undergraduate college. So why should the SAT and GRE test writing? If an application essay were 1,000 words long, it would take a qualified application reviewer only a few minutes per applicant to thoroughly read the essay--and for the hundred dollar application fee, they should read it twice.

But then again, our nation has reality television, and so any more time spent on applicants to college would take away from the precious hours spent in front of our vacumn tubes. Let's just gut primary education, teach only test preperation, and judge everyone on their standardized test score. We could even do away with dissertations since all we really need are Professors of SAT and Doctorates of GRE. Everyone who can score a 2400 on the SAT can become an adjunct at Kaplan to teach others.

The Chinese are planning on going to the moon.

Unions

In a recent deicsion, the national labor board ruled that private university graduate students do not have the right to unionize.

What? Why do not all employees have the right to unionize? Graduate students (who work) are workers, not only students as the labor labor board as asserted. Already with recent decisions from the current administration, the US is feeling a brain drain. Example: limits on stem cell research has shifted a lot of research to Europe and Japan.

So at a time when undergraduate admissions are at a record level-- when graduate students are needed most to teach classes, are private universities with individual endowments of billions of dollars preventing graduate students from organizing.

In a society that cherishes Fear Factor and Fox News, isn't it the least our government can do to ensure graduate students--the academic elite of the nation--are allowed their consitutional right to organize? No, instead, let's turn on another episode of American idol and allow our nations' collection brain power to sit fallow while the Chinese go to the moon, Russians cure cancer, and South America learns english.

Jesus. Its Funny Because its True.

"Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit."
The New York Times

I hate people.

Dunkin

I went to Dunkin today and boy was it strange. First there was a 7 foot tall bald black man wearing a baby blue faux velvet jump suit. He didn't recieve any whipped cream on his drink. He asked for some, which cost 15 cents extra. He ordered it. So I'm not sure which is more bizarre, the fact that Dunkin charges an extra 15 cents for whipped cream, or that the man in the faux velvet suit actually paid the extra fifteen cents?
 
I thought the weirdness was over but then there were four foreigners--maybe Russians. One looked like Otto and the other three were younger. They acted so strangely and seemd so out of it I at first thought they were high. This was then confirmed when purchased ice cream sundaes at 10 am.

Tom Ridge, Telecom Investor?

Tired of Cellular service blackouts? The FCC wants cell companies to report widespread area network outages, just as landline telephone companies have had to do. But the Dept. Of Homeland Security is afraid that terrorists might seek out this vulnerability.

And if terrorists won't, then consumers will. Landline services have improved each time they publicly report widespread outages of service. With cell service that is shitty (I mean you AT&T, Cingular) why would anyone want to hinder improvements?

Well for one thing the wireless companies. Improving wireless networks is relatively expensive in comparison to "innovations" like camera phones. (call me crazy, but wouldn't a real innovation be a cell phone that doesn't drop a call?) So really its not the terrorists the telephone companies are protecting us from, its the revolt of their customers.

Are these people Real?

So some stores have excluded "Merry Christmas" from their holiday lexicon. So what. Who the fuck cares?

This Guy Cares.

I think James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, must be absolutely wrong.

Radiation Mountain

The Federal government is going ahead with plans for a radioactive waste repository in Yucca mountain. Scientists want the moutain to ensure there will be no leaks for at least 300,000 years, though a court order stipulates only 10,000.

Won't we have blown ourselves up by then?

Communists in UK?

It seems to me that a recent report suggesting the end of the Order of the British Empire might be a long over due updating of the British award system is foolhearty idea.

The United Kingdom has certainly seen better days-- Their armed forces are pretty much the sixth branch of the American Military (and when they act independently, they are more like a flatulant old maid then a modern army). The great poets, philosophers, and politicians of the UK are all so last century.

So without the Order of the British Empire, can the UK seriously hope to be have a great culture?

The critiques of the system point out that the commoners in England no longer feel the system is representational of the nation-state, that it promotes a class structure left over from the industrial revolution. Class Structure? Commoners? Sounds like communism to me.

Long live the Empire. Long live the Queen.

When AOL introduced the flatrate service for internet use in the mid-1990's, the internet took off as a commoners' means of communications, and birthed the dotcom boom. Ever since then, users and critiques have condemned the internet to death for this reason or that-- whether it was taxing users or spam or pop up advertisements, innovation has "threatened the internet as we know it" countless times.

Well I'm calling this development as the apocalypse of the internet. Essentially, Geolocation devices are attaching a computer's IP number with specific geographical areas so that certain regions of the world are served different digital content. This is good if say you are looking for restaurants and google pops up an add for your local diner. But it can also be malicious.

For instance, MLB may broadcast a game over the internet-- but only to people in the "Broadcast" zone, just like television.

Why is this the end of the internet? The internet's allure is the free exchange of data-- Geolocation will only lead to information costing more. Of course, already there are ways around this, like using a false IP address, or using dialup internet to dial into a different area then you are physically located at.

In eithercase, its the end of the internet.

Another Article on the same topic.

Ronnie

The Barcode turned 30 last month. Now American barcodes are adopting the world standard. If you are bored enough to read a brief history of the barcode, you'll find that it first hit the stores between 1974 and 1976.

Ronald Reagan was so out of touch with reality that as President, he did not know what a barcode scanner was at a local grocery store.

And don't overlook barcode Art.

Extinction

We are facing extinction. It seems that dumb America is, big surprise, reading less, particularly literature. Whether our profession (or hoped profession) is writing fiction or poetry or studies in English Literature, it seems very possible that society will be eliminating us altogether.

Will the novel be relegated to the place of poetry with circulation of 5,000 to members of the academy?

It is possible that many of the readers of books are simply moving away from printed material and reading the same amount, only online. But a digital novel is not the same as a tangiable printed novel, bound in a book.

Before we completely condemn society to moving into the next dark ages, we should not overlook the fact that while there may be fewer people reading its most likely that these are the same people who read trashy romance novels. It may behoove of us to sell our stocks in Barnes and Noble and publishers of pulp fiction romance series, but to give up all hope I think would be too much.

People who read books that are worth reading are likely still fervently reading. I think what is in fact happening here is that the mass consumerism that the modern printing press made possible is being reduced. Movable type may have brought books to the masses but perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Books in the 20th century were turned into a consumer product like many of the other overly advertised, unnecessary items we buy. Dime novels may have first appeared in the 19th century but it was really the dollar romance novels that have defined the genre of pulp fiction. Indeed, people were told to buy them, and for the most part, they did.

So the decline in reading perhaps is simply the rejection of a consumer product. The sophisticated minds of the intellectual elite are likely still reading literature while the remainder of society that has a difficult time understanding anything that asks them to think is finally giving in to the easier mediums of DVDs and Games consoles. Not a great loss.

Family Parking

Last night I went to Ikea to get some curtains. Not that the parking lot was particularly full, but there were two spots up front reserved for "Family parking" with icons of little people and little children.

Normally I ignore these signs and park in the spots if available, especially at the A&P. (My feeling is if you are too much of a fucknut to use a rubber or pill or diaphram then you should be able to walk to the A&P. Just because you have some fat copy of yourself hugging your thigh doesn't give you special rights. Two words for people who can't walk across the A&P parking lot with their kids: Boarding School).

But anyway, I didn't park in the family spots at Ikea because they are foreign and from socialist country, so I felt like they deserved the benefit of the doubt for not knowing this kind of discrimination is not allowed. (After all, imagine a little sign with a white stick figure that instead of "Family Parking" read "White Male" parking. There would be outrage.)

This ikea incident though got me to start thinking of all things, Walmart. Walmart ranks just above Landfill on places I like to be. Walmart also refuses to sell RU486, the Abort-o-matic pill. I haven't been to a Walmart in a while, but I imagine in their Family friendly atmosphere, I could expect them to have "Family Parking" signs (also, I would sort of expect them to have "White Male" parking signs, but that's not the issue here).

Well now if Walmart doesn't sell RU486, they are just helping to create more people who need the "Family Parking" spaces. This is good for them, since families are going to spend alot more at Walmart. Families with Children are more likely to be poor, thus shop at Walmart more. They are also going to spend more at Walmart, because instead of buying for two people (a loving couple) they are at least buying for three (a loving couple + bastard child).

This is a brilliant scheme. I think I should buy stock in Walmart.

The customer is always right

Best Buy is featured in an article that suggests some customers need to be "fired" and that they are not always right. Best Buy was the primary focus, suggesting that some customers abuse rebates (by returning an item after sending in a rebate--this is brilliant and I wish I had thought of it).

But in either case, lets review my experience(s) with best buy:

XBOX
I bought my XBox at the Best Buy. The cashier tried to convince me to get a service policy, just in case the system stops working. I wanted to ask why Best Buy was afraid their 180.00 X Box was inferior to the XBox being sold at Funcoland, two storefronts down, that should cause me to need the service warranty. Besides, Visa covers me for 30 days anyway, and it doesn't cost an extra fifty bucks.

CAR AUDIO
This is a good one. So i got the a Honda Civic with only an AM /FM Cassatte radio. I wanted a CD Player.

I first went to a Best Buy in West Windsor, NJ. It was just before closing, but I noticed that every player was had the promise of free installation if you arrive before 2 pm. Awesome. So the next day, Sunday, I went to the Best Buy in East Brunswick (USHWY 18) at about 1 in the afternoon. It was a no go, at least if I wanted the player installed that afternoon. Still, I was before 2pm, and the little yellow signs were everywhere.

The following weekend I got up early. Too Early. I, along with a half dozen other eager Best Buy shoppers were waiting for the door to open at the same East Brunswick Best Buy. I was the first one in the car Audio section. When I told the car salesman the model car I drive-- a 2002 Civic LX-- he politely informed he would not be able to install a CD player that day; they did not have the part. How could you not have the installation part for one of thetop selling cars in 2003?

In either case, the nice salesperson directed me to the Best Buy in Woodbridge (US HWY 1). I was there about a half hour later-- perhaps forty minutes after the store opened. The sales person there said it would be impossible for me to get a CD Player installed in the same day, he was all booked up. Also, the same CD player at the Woodbridge Best Buy was $20.00 more expensive than at the East Brunswick Best Buy. Not that it mattered, since despite the yellow signs promising same day installation, I would not be able to have a CD player installed.

Best Buy, You're Fired.

Garlic

Since when is a little clove bad? Conde Naste has banned garlic in the cafeteria, and a visiting chef used some in a recently prepared dish. This is the kind of news making that leaves me wondering WTF? Garlic? Its not like Pine Nuts or Peanuts or something that will cause consumers whoa re allergic to face near death. Its garlic. ITS GARLIC!!

Religion

A collection of public polling information on religion. Its irresistable.