what am i, a farmer?

In the midst of doing ‘research’ for one of my classes this quarter, I’ve found myself hooked on “30 Rock,” the show run by Tina Fey, and yes, the one with Alec Baldwin. Whatever. He may suck as a human being, but he’s totally got acting skillz, and is absolutely the STAR of this series. Every scene with him is hilarious. I also love the character Kenneth, for whom the description “pathologically chipper” is dead-on.

And hey, what do you know, NBC has decided to stream all 21 episodes of the show, in their entirety, in medium-quality flash video! You don’t even have to wait for the DVDs!

Highly recommended. It’s no “Arrested Development,” but it’s still pretty fun. I’m definitely screwed this quarter.

Filed under: tv, video

this is totally fair use

This is hilarious and awesome, and not just because my studies are directly related: I mean, read the opening to this article:

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like “Charlie’s Angels,” “T. J. Hooker,” and “Starsky and Hutch”?

The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.

Sony’s (yeah, boo, moving on) trying to make money off of their aged holdings by repurposing them as ‘minisodes.’ It makes perfect sense in lots of ways, the very least of which is the horribly slow pace of old TV shows and the need to tighten it up for modern viewers (I think that book by that one guy…..Everything Bad is Good for You is totally right, and that human brains today are trained to be more sophisticated in the way they process information than they were even just a few decades ago).

Ok, I really have to include the end as well:

Sony is even making a mini-version of “Ricki Lake,” one of its syndicated talk shows. “It’s great,” Mr. Mosko said. “The people get introduced, there’s a big fight, then they come together, and cry and hug. You get everything in five minutes.”

Filed under: tv

squiddy squeamish

There are many things I don’t know about Korea, but this is by far the most unsettling thing I’ve learned, and it figures that it’s from a BoingBoing post: “I has a flavor!”

The “I” in that sentence? A live octopus.

Now, I’ve had octopus before, and find it okay in small doses, if a bit too chewy, and I like fried calamari, but that’s the thing….food should be well and dead! Holy moly, and I thought that David Foster Wallace article on lobsters was bad…

And then there’s this story about visiting a K-town restaurant that serves live prawns. I’ve been to K-Town innumerable times, but clearly, I’ve been missing out on something big. Soon-tofu? Meh!

Who would’ve known that eating raw fish was the *tame and boring* thing to do?

Filed under: food

from the supermarket: honest tea

I didn’t really buy this beverage from a supermarket, I picked up a bottle at the student store on campus, but close enough. It seems to be sort of a hippie-brand tea, the kind that I’m sure Whole Foods-shopping, latte-sipping, smug liberal wannabe cool-seekers buy by the pallet- but hey, it’s really tasty!

I like it because it’s just barely sweet enough to be palatable, but not oversugary like Lipton and Snapple. And whatever tiny amount of sweetener they use is either cane sugar or rice syrup, which hopefully is better than the high-fructose corn variety; in any case, it’s a tiny amount. Plus the whole beverage is organic, certified and everything. They even use Fair Trade tea, so it’s infinitesimally easier on the conscience.

So far I’ve only tried the Peach Oo-La-Long: the label says it’s “just a tad sweet,” taken to mean, sweeter than their other flavors — and provides a slightly precious little tale about why it’s so — but even then, it’s not sweet!

I like!

Now, of course, I had to go and visit their website, and apparently there’s a new flavor of tea — and it includes mangosteen! On seeing this, I drew an audible gasp, and that was when I realized I seriously need a life.

A life that entails becoming rich enough to turn into a Whole Foods-shopping, latte-sipping, smug liberal wannabe cool-seeker who can buy this stuff by the pallet.

Filed under: food

in which i learned to skim

For some reason all three classes of mine had abnormally huge amounts of reading assigned for this week. For TV class this morning we had well over 200 pages to read. For the class I had yesterday it was in the neighborhood of 100. And for Restoration class tonight we had around 100 as well. I looked ahead to future weeks’ readings and thought, “Yay, I’ll have fewer than 100 pages to read each week from now on!” And then I cried.

[OMG someone please get me a decent ebook reader or something for...mother's day? My half-birthday in July? My quarter-birthday on the 29th? Really, though, someone please invent a super-duper PDF reader that is as nice and easy to read as paper. I hate these long-ass PDF articles! They're unpleasant enough to read as it is!]

Instead of reading, though, I spent my weekend frantically trying to get my stuff together for paper prospectuses that are due soon, talking to professors, finding films at the archive study center, scrambling to write a resume and cover letter, and entertaining Friend J, who suddenly flew into LA on what might loosely be called a business trip (her crazy boss was apologetic enough to give her a ticket to her hometown further north for the actual weekend, but she returned Monday to fly out of LAX back to NY that evening, and I dragged her around to 3 campus libraries just so I could get my other crap done. Sorry for being lame!).

Fortunately,the writing load is a lot less this quarter, because for one of my classes, the grade is based on an art/database group project. Then I have a 20-25 page paper for TV (which I might do on cooking shows or PBS), and a 15-pager for restoration and a film dossier of indeterminate length.

I feel bad for the second-years, though. There are only four of them now, because one dropped out to join the regular IS people. Next week is their comps, in which they have to answer like, 5 questions, writing around 10 pages of answers for each. Which sounds easy, but they get the questions on Friday, and the exam is due Monday. So I guess that’s something I can look forward to for next year.

Filed under: school

Chasing Henrietta

Chasing Henrietta

Originally uploaded by schoolio.

An alarming number of my flickr faves are photos of strangers’ pets and other Internet animals. However, I am pretty sure this was one of the main reasons why the World Wide Web was invented, so I don’t really have a problem with it.

As you will learn from the owner’s caption for this photo, this is a pic of a dog named Moxie. I love how his energy leaps off the screen the same way he does as he fetches a toy called Henrietta the New Sexy Chicken.

(I’m all too familiar with the practice of over-naming fake chickens, having once owned a Pez dispenser top in the shape of a chicken head, which my high school friend dubbed Eduardo the Great Lover and Valiant Vigilante Against Anti-Capitalism, or something like that. I confess, I’m not sure what inspires people to apply racy/anti-Marxist adjectives to anthropomorphized poultry, but find it a bit too disturbing to worry about right now.)

Anyway, the overall adorableness of the doggie and his enthusiastic leaping prompted me to add this pic to my faves.

Filed under: faves, flickr

from the supermarket: cats cookies (for people!)

My friend who works at Trader Joe’s told me that people really *have* asked about the cat cookies they sell in a tub, wondering if they were for kitties or for humans. Even though they’re shelved with all the other human snack food, above the frozen food cases. I guess they don’t believe the vanilla and ginger flavors look all that distinguishable from kibble, looks-wise…I’d hate to think they remained confused after they actually tried eating some. (Also, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not very familiar with kibble.) Which is why they have to add those two little words underneath the colorful logo.

I like the vanilla ones the best. The chocolate are okay too, but they’re really sweet and artificial-chocolate-y, and pall. The ginger ones are very gingery, lots of heat. They should make a calico-flavored one, with chocolate and vanilla. Or maybe make one with orange flavoring.

I like to get Cats Cookies because they’re among the cheapest snack cookies (a whole tub for $1.99!) at TJ’s. Apart from that, I mean, they’re marginally better than Teddy Grahams, but certainly not preferable to, say, TJ’s own Brownie Bites or chocolate chip cookies from Diddy Riese (where you can get a day-old dozen for $2, or a fresh half-dozen for same). Cats Cookies aren’t particularly delicious or satisfying, but they’re a decent buy. So they *are* kind of like kibble, I guess (but for people!).

Filed under: food

so *that’s* what jaw-dropping sounds like!

Yesterday in TV we watched an episode of “Father Knows Best” (we’ve been watching many other wonderful things, this is definitely my favorite class this quarter, but I don’t want to digress). We watched the episode called “Betty, the Girl Engineer.” It aired in 1956.

So Betty’s in high school and during spring break the students get to do some city vocational program or something. Betty decides to join the civil engineering dept. This goes over extremely well with her family, of course. Even strangers try to talk her out of it. When she asks why she can’t, her mom is the first to respond, ‘Because you’re a girl!’

Betty, of course, is determined to do well, but the handsome young college engineer she’s assigned to work with bothers her so much that she stomps home after half a day. She endures her family’s teasing, but is still determined to go back the next day, until the engineer comes by her house later that evening holding a box of candy, she puts on the new dress her mother’d bought for her the other day, and he asks her out, and everyone’s happy again.

I wish I could find a transcript of the dialogue, but suffice it to say, it was totally awesome.

Filed under: school, tv

he is up in heaven now.

Kurt Vonnegut had a big impact on my adolescence. Me and about ninety gazillion other poeple. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. RIP. So it goes.

Filed under: book

another brush with internet fame

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive gave a lecture at school today. The room was packed, and when I entered it I realized why I’d seen the same four people hauling what looked like one desk, 40 times, going in one direction, all morning.

Mr. Kahle is a really, really optimistic man. He’s also a pretty dynamic speaker, which surprised me for some reason. Anyway, he is super ambitious, but I guess the guy who invented the Internet Archive would have to be. At some points he did seem overly idealistic, especially when it came to copyright issues and the feasibility of archiving everything. At the same time, though, he’s grounded enough to know what’s what, and so he’s worth listening to.

Another high point for me from the lecture was getting to touch an actual prototype of the $100 Laptop, from the One Laptop Per Child project. He’d brought it along to suggest that it really would make a decent e-book reader, and it really would, because the screen, despite is size, is perfectly acceptable. If I were one of the children receiving one, I’d be thrilled to bits (no pun intended, seriously). Actually, even if I were to get one now, I’d still be thrilled to bits. It’s adorable! The one Brewster brought with him was white with green trim, with a green keyboard. It’s SMALL! And somewhat heavy for its size, but still super portable. And, as it was being passed around, people were messing with it and it made the cutest bloop-y noises.

Anyway, this quarter is getting off to a fairly-okay start. I guess it helps a lot that I have no classes on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. Woohoo, weekend!

Filed under: computer