sub-con bound
See y’all in 2008. -
Archive for December, 2007
big bang
A classmate of mine mentioned I check out the new sitcom Big Bang Theory, and when I say ‘mention’, I mean he said it several times, on numerous occasions, emphasizing how much I would like it, stepping on my foot looking directly into my eyes asking me to watch this show please.
And so I did. It’s a sitcom about some PhD students with a hot blonde neighbor as a neighbor. Yes there is an Indian character. One never realizes how much of a nerd one is until one sees oneself and possibly the lives of their friends portrayed on TV. Fire up your bittorrent client. Highly recommended.
that’s macheritee
Last year, after I finishing exams, I brought back chicken & rice, logged onto iTunes, and bought a song containign David Bowie singing “Peace on Earth” with Bing Crosby, all while heavily heavily …. besotted.
This year, not so much. Am just glad to be done. I threw my stuff in a duffel and fled with feathers in a ruffle.
psa: do not let us vote
People, democratic feedback is not for teh internets. The nerds will conquer everything. If you ask them what the 2007 word of the year is, they will tell you. If you ask them to name a humpback whale, they will indeed dub him. Their obsessive amount of man-hours on the web equals actual clout. Please, just let it stop.
Anyway, did anyone else see the hidden anti-Millennial bent to the other choices on Merriam-Webster’s word of the year list? “facebook”, “quixotic”, “apathetic”, “hypocrite”, “charlatan”. Outrageous.
RE: How to be Gangsta
Video: How to be Gangsta. YouTube: Providing a Forum for Your Child’s Authentic Raging Adolescence since 2005. And my god, the little sister is a perfect foil. Do you have the stomach to watch all the way through?Am still in exam-mode, doing my Copyright take-home exam (hence, the youtube-inspired procrastination.)
columbia join google book search
Columbia joins Google book search. Yes this is what passes for content around here, these days.
millennials strike again: the entree
NY Times Dining asks whether the dinner entree is standard fare on a menu anymore. Who’s to blame? Implicitly, those darn Millennials:
One theory is that people like to customize their worlds. Personalized playlists on iPods have replaced albums. TiVo has replaced channel surfing. In this quick-cut, video-on-demand universe, the entree is Walter Cronkite.
I’ll add one: “Tailored Starbucks soy lattes with vanilla boosts have obsoleted your cup of joe.”
rejected
Yesterday, I got a rejection letter from a firm I interviewed in DC back in October. This letter joins the other two rejections from that weekend, making my trip there a complete waste of time, money, and hope. In any case, I like to think that PH hiring committee spent the last 7 weeks in closed-room deliberation, heatedly debating my candidacy. And not think that my file merely laid overlooked on a paralegal’s desk, nor that my letter was heavily spooled in the rejection queue.
handi-HAWT
Angela, a quadriplegic ex-model, inspires us all and shares TEN NEW WAY TO PLEASE YOUR MAN. See also, the forums, where “[s]ome questions are best answered by peers- people who know what you’re going through. Get the real story about spinal cord injury and sex from members like Angela.”
Sometimes I’m not sure where my web browsing takes me, or why.
early xmas gift
Dear friends of conscience & LazyWeb of majestic opinions,I am 5 seconds away from purchasing this $400 Sigma 30mm f/1.4 HSM lens, in time for Christmas. I need it to take pictures of my pretty friends, their babies, your babies, friendly Indians, unknown Indians, and whatever might be indoor and under low light conditions. Please convince me not to, or forever hold your peace.-sleepy crab.Update: purchased. No job/career/future bedamned.
extension
Dear God/Zeus/most favored caesium-133 atom,
Please extend every day this month by three hours. We sure could use the time. You can have the time back in February. That month is practically vestigial anyway.
Best
the undersigned
filler
NYT op-ed: The Dictatorship of Talent. David Brooks riffs on the state of modern Chinese education, and the ascendancy of the Chinese economy. He doesn’t think much of the exams:
As you rise in school, you see that to get into an elite university, you need to ace the exams given at the end of your senior year…. The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.
Can you smell the disdain? “work hard and memorize things,” indeed. Even though (American) Millennials are generally dismissed for their lack of work ethic, this piece seems to disregard the work habits the Chinese students develop. Nonetheless, it provides a nice summary of the modern, prototypical, Chinese aspiration.
The punchline at the end:
You feel pride in what the corpocracy has achieved and now expect it to lead China’s next stage of modernization — the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. But in the back of your mind you wonder: Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.
Did you catch the subtext? Here it is: Chinese people are math-grinding automatons with no creativity and cannot beat our free-wheeling American creative service-oriented kung-fu. With insights like this, Brooks could have a second career as a college admissions officer.
2 distinct ways to vomit
- Tree man. A viral infection runs amok causing… tree-like growths on hands and feet. Don’t miss the photos.
- 2 Girls 1 Cup (NSFW). I can’t even bare to link to it. It’s the Goatsecx for the YouTube generation. Don’t miss the parody featuring John Mayer.
greatest generation since your mom
Several weeks ago, 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer ran with a story called “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming,” discussing how businesses and HR has struggled to deal with our generation’s so-called me-first, everyone’s-a-winner complexes and its impact on the workplace.
Some favorite excerpts:
They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it.
* * *
“These young people will tell you what time their yoga class is and the day’s work will be organized around the fact that they have this commitment. So you actually envy them. How wonderful it is to be young and have your priorities so clear. Flipside of it is how awful it is to be managing the extension, sort of, of the teenage babysitting pool,” Salzman tells Safer.
* * *
“I believe that they actually think of themselves like merchandise on eBay. ‘If you don’t want me, Mr. Employer, I’ll go sell myself down the street. I’ll probably get more money. I’ll definitely get a better experience. And by the way, they’ll adore me. You only like me,’” Salzman says.
So who’s to blame for the narcissistic praise hounds now taking over the office?
This thinly-veiled “in-my-day-we-walked-to-school” story is almost plain offensive. Is Safer really denigrating us on the way our parents raised us? I’m surprised he didn’t throw in a mention of ‘Starbucks’ in there, so you can have the bitter diptych of “yoga” and “Starbucks lattes”.
Hang in there, my fellow members of our lost, selfish generation. We should all look up to Safer’s generation, and bring back racial segregation, anti-Semitism, and sexism. Those were the good ol’ days.
firefox woes
I used a PC the other day, and I realized what a poor browsing experience I was having on my Mac. The pages came whizzing by as fast as I could click, and makes my Firefox seem like it crawls. Is Firefox that neglected for Mac?? Has the time come for me to abandon my extensions and keyword’ed bookmarks and the bloglines-friendly RSS-recognition? Safari 3 just got pushed out to the masses, and Camino has finally hit version 1.5. My frustration might have risen to a level where I might actually be willing to pay for a web browser.