even mo’ bitchin’

by the way: i hate the new look of the IMDB. They actually used web2.0 concepts to make the site LESS user-friendly.

Filed under: Uncategorized

more bitchin’

It’s been really difficult to find my focus this quarter. I have 3 big papers due in a few weeks, and I still don’t really know what I’ll be writing about for any of them. Even though I probably should’ve started finishing up my research by now.

But every time I read or watch something, whether it’s required for class, or web surfing, or even just magazines, makes me want to investigate something different, and maybe write about it. In a way, this is good, because it means I find the coursework engaging enough to think about during my “off” hours. But I’m like an ADD-afflicted squirrel, constantly drawn to new, shiny things, too distracted to sit still and just *think* for a second.

Speaking of which, I’ve also been watching Look Shiny every day it’s been on (so, for about a week now). I find it the perfect length for procrastinating without feeling overly guilty, and sometimes I even laugh. Which is why I used to read ValleyWag, when Nick wrote it more or less exclusively. Those Gawker people are so good at the snarkishness! Well, most of them, anyway.

But yes, I do see where the vlog thing is going. Still, I would not be disappointed if some new (and shinier!) trend came along to take its place very soon. There just aren’t enough interesting people to make the whole enterprise worthwhile.

Wait, lemme get back to complaining about school. So yeah. I don’t know why I thought this program was gonna be more or less easygoing. Part of it may have been that I’d expected a lot of my education to consist of “I have to watch this film/TV show.” But no, there’s quite a bit more to it than that. And the profs are scary smart, and that is intimidating. Rationally, I know that it is their job to be scary smart and all-knowing, but it’s still difficult to think about having to write something that won’t make them die of boredom or vomit in disdain. So that’s another reason why I can’t seem to get with the program.

Somme toute, If I’d known this was gonna involve so much work and thinking (and, worst of all, g**d*** m*****f***** paperwriting), I don’t think I would’ve signed up for it, really. Yeah, even a lowly M.A. requires a fair amount of brainpower. Who knew?

Filed under: school

uncelebrified

A syzygy of circumstances led me to spend chunks of time at LAX, WeHo, Beverly Center, and Santa Monica today, the day before the Oscars.

Number of celebrities I saw?

0.

One factor may be that I am completely celebrity blind. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but one time while walking home from class at night, my friend and I passed by a limo parked near the Ackerman parking lot. Naturally, it was only after we were well away from the limo that my friend turned to me to ask, “was that Will Arnett?”

I whipped my head around, naturally, but the limo was long gone. That’s right, GOB Bluth was standing in front of me and I MISSED him!

Rahhhh.

Filed under: personal

*yaaaaaaawn*

ARghhhh I’m so bummed.

I have a 10-page paper due in approximately 12 hours. It’s not what you’re thinking, though – because I had to teach the GRE tonight, I knew I’d have to work well in advance. And I did! I started writing late Sunday, and by Tuesday afternoon I actually had the requisite 10 pages written, and then some!

Except, yeah, it was all crappy and stuff. So after I came home from teaching tonight, I got to work trying to edit the damn thing. I had the moral support of my classmates (our email thread is currently 52 messages strong).

But now it’s nearly 6, and I’m finally done, but I still have to write the bibliography. I wish I could drop to sleep right now, but I have class at 9, so I don’t think I should risk it. Also, I need to shower. Bad.

I’m just so bummed that I’d worked ahead of time, all disciplined-like, and everything, and yet I’m pretty sure this is the crappiest paper I’ve written, bar-none, and I’ve never stayed up this late to do a paper, not even that freaking 20-pager. Well, at least for that one, I was able to get some shut eye because I didn’t have freaking class in the morning!

Which I would totally skip, but it’s the class for this paper, and the prof specifically told us we’d better show, or she’d have our asses. She’s pretty scary, so I think I have to go.

If I can live long enough!

Filed under: school

for munching

I would just like to give a shout-out to this cereal, Quaker Oats Essentials, which is amazingly addictive. I bought a box on sale at Ralph’s, and ate almost half of it the first day (hey, it was paper-writing day!). I finished the box like, 3 days later (by the way, I just finished another paper!).
It’s sweet and crunchy, but not tooth-breakingly so, and it’s even better with milk, naturally.

It’s quite delish, but strangely, the Quaker website (or Quaker/Pepsi website) doesn’t even list the product. But seriously, it’s super good, and when I went back to Ralphs and found it was no longer on sale, I was really sad. And today, when I had nothing to eat but real oatmeal for breakfast, I mean, the McCann’s Irish is okay, but it was just not the same.

Filed under: food

midterm hell is off to a good start

I amazed myself yesterday by writing half of my 5-page paper in less than 2 hours. Normally, I wouldn’t have even started writing until about 7 hours before the paper was due, but after basically wasting the entire weekend, I sat myself down and got to work at precisely noon yesterday. By 9PM I had all the pages I needed, but I still stayed up til 3AM to refine it, and then put together my bibliography this morning. And finished early!

How early?

This paper is not even due til 6!!

Granted, it was a lot easier thanks to supersampling. In school we learned that filming images on a large area of the negative produces a high-quality image when optically reduced and copied onto normal-sized, 35mm film. This is called supersampling because the original negative contains a lot of information that makes it into the reproduced print, leading to a picture that has more resolution, detail, and depth of field when projected than if the image had initially been shot on the normal-sized film to begin with.

What does this have to do with my paper? Well, it was only a 5-pager. And I’d done enough research to write, maybe a 15-pager. So all I had to do, really, was barf out all the information I knew about the topic, weed out the crappy and irrelevant stuff, and voila! There was still more than enouh information left over to produce a submittable piece of work.

And I even had time to watch this Ze Frank’s “The Show” episode about procrastination! It must’ve performed some kind of reverse voodoo on me.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all the time I have left now. It’s way too early to begin the 2000-word report I have to write by Friday.

Whee!

Filed under: school, video

oh, the irony

It’s been nearly 80 years since Sam Spade wandered the streets of San Francisco in search of the Maltese Falcon. Now, the statue is missing again.

John Konstin, the owner of San Francisco’s John’s Grill on Ellis Street, said someone broke into a locked cabinet on the second floor of his establishment and took a signed reproduction of the Maltese Falcon — one used for publicity stills for the movie — along with several vintage and signed books by and about Maltese Falcon author Dashiell Hammett.

Here’s a link to the full story in SFGate [via Boing-Boing]

Filed under: best thing, movie

ever-so-slightly-amusing quote

This is from a story about how politicians and the media often clean up certain things, either for propriety’s sake, or for general PR reasons.

Asked for President Reagan’s reaction after winning a hard-fought 1981 vote in Congress authorizing the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, the White House aide Michael Deaver told reporters the president exclaimed, “Thank God!” What Reagan actually said, according to someone in the room, was, “I feel like I’ve just crapped a pineapple.”

[dangit, I lost the source link to this, but I'm sure if you Google around you'll find it]

Filed under: fun

casual vitriol

Argh, it looks like my Audioscrobbler hasn’t been picking up my iTunes for the past few days. If it had been working, you might have noticed that a big percentage of my last hundred listens or so has come from songs by Of Montreal. And most of *those* entries were for just one song from their album “The Sunlandic Twins.”

Because Forecast Fascist Future is just too peppy and fun. Like, I almost embarrassed myself by dancing wildly on the bus when I first caught it on my iPod. It’s got a catchy chorus with nice melodic twists, and I really like the singing style of the main vocalist, and also the cool, guitary stuff. And the harmonies. Basically, everything.

Sorry you can’t hear the whole thing, but you just might find it on a mix CD sometime in the future. And you can find more of their songs from them for free if you Google around.

Filed under: music

hey, it didn’t kill me

Today marks my having done the dumbest thing I’ve done all year:

When I first bit into the turkey sandwich I’d made for lunch, I felt something weird while chewing. I thought I’d chomped on a turkey tendon or something, and that was gross, but hey, it happens. I just spit that bit out, and the rest of it seemed fine.

Then, as I reached for the second half of my sandwich, the top part slipped off, revealing something quite dismaying that more or less put me off my appetite.

So if you’ve ever bought Trader Joe’s cheddar cheese, you know that they put little slips of paper in between slices to keep them from congealing or whatever. Well, I guess I made my turkey sandwich a little bit hurriedly today, and didn’t notice that as I’d slapped the cheese slice on, it had a little cellulose companion tagging along.

The most disturbing part was that I only ever found *half* of that slip of paper in what was left of my sandwich.

Filed under: Uncategorized