we probably think this story's about us

college students are more narcissistic than ever, which is surprising to no one. and i just love proving their point by posting the story in the first place.

btw, i didn't know i was a complete and utter narcissist:
"The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to.""

YES. YES. and YES.

but while we're at it, why don't we make up a drinking game called "find the fear-mongering, non sequiturs, and breaks in logic in this story."

i've just started playing and i'm already so wasted.

NEWSFLASH: cute white woman missing ...

local media frenzy follows. and psychics? really? they should get patricia arquette.

is al gore the highest ranking government official to win an oscar?

i don't think reagan ever came close.

out of curiosity, i googled in the news section "inconvenient truth" and came up with the conservative voice holding onto the pipe dream that global warming is not real and that somehow this is all the fault of the volcanoes. aren't we all over this stance by now? warming denial is so three years ago.

spreading the good word

this american life = crack in radio form. and now, they're going to be on TV. and i have to say, i've never seen what ira glass looked like until now. i hearby declare this my firm endorsement of all things TAL.

on an unrelated note, does anyone else hate how double clicking words on nytimes.com now links to a reference center entry of that word? what if i just want to double click on words because i don't want my finger to feel left out? or what if i want to highlight a paragraph by quadruple clicking? ugh.

dear DC taxis, i think we need a break to really get to know ourselves better

ever since i found out i could expense cab rides to us news-related events, i've passionately latched onto the concept. 3 cab rides in 2 days. here are their stories:

1. first ride, pretty average. awkward silence etc.
2. second ride, i get in and am hit with a distinct smell. urine. riding from the hill to georgetown takes about 15 minutes and the whole time i wanted to vomit. the windows were down, but certainly not b/c it was a nice day (although it was). someone came into that cab, with some extra-yellow pee, and just took it to town. also the driver had some monstrous hands, which i actually think is a genetic disorder so i won't make fun, but it was interesting, to say the least.
3. third ride, i sit down and the driver tells me how happy he is that i got in his cab. he lavishes me with compliments etc and i decide i love him. then he tells me what he thinks about gay people. that he used to think that gay guys are just the ones who are too ugly to get women, so they have to settle for men. but this is of course confusing b/c the gay men in DC are very good looking, so now his whole worldview is askew. he says how there are soooo many single women in DC, but very few single men (his estimate 4:1), but assures me that i will have no problem finding someone to marry. thanks cab driver. very reassuring.

henry ford: maybe he's been cryogenically frozen

Bob Casey from the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn on NPR last week:
"Ford said at some point in the future, we'll run out of oil. But before that time, oil will become so expensive that we'll be looking for some alternatives. He was eighty years perhaps too early, but he was looking into the future."

not only did henry ford basically create detroit and the entire auto industry, he also can predict the future. unfortunately clairvoyance and general awesomeness is not genetic. just look at anything his progeny touches. ugh. did henry ford, by any chance, make any predictions on how to make it to the nfl playoffs?

wimbledon = appalling

i just can't believe that the wimbledon prize has been unequal until now. women still have a long-ass way to go. the sad thing is, at least if you ask me, women's tennis is a gazillion times more interesting than men's. ya see, europe isn't that great. go america.

i sort of wonder who the best paid prof is

not exactly breaking news, but i always find it interesting to see who really are the most important people at michigan. seems as if i have to go into education to make the big bucks. or something.

1. Robert Kelch
Executive VP for Medical Affairs
This year's salary: $656,910
Last year's salary: $637,777
Up 2.9 percent

2. Mary Sue Coleman
University President
This year's salary: $516,501
Last year's salary: $501,457
Up 3 percent

3. Douglas Strong
Director and CEO, University Hospitals and Health Systems
This year's salary: $490,000
Last year's salary: $348,974
Up 40.4 percent

4. Timothy Slottow
University CFO
This year's salary: $437,750
Last year's salary: $301,084
Up 45.4 percent

5. Erik Lundberg
Chief Investment Officer
This year's salary: $426,500
Last year's salary: $291,434
Up 46.3 percent

6. Robert Dolan
Dean, Ross School of Business
This year's salary: $405,000
Last year's salary: $390,000
Up 3.8 percent

7. Bill Martin
Athletic Director
This year's salary: $355,770
Last year's salary: $346,080
Up 2.8 percent

8. Zelda Geyer-Sylvia
M-CARE CEO
This year's salary: $349,818
Last year's salary: $339,629
Up 3 percent

9. Lloyd Carr
Head Football Coach
This year's salary: $347,619
Last year's salary: $337,493
Up 3 percent

10. Teresa Sullivan
Provost
This year's salary: $340,000
Last year's salary: First year at the University

bridge to terabithia

the first i had heard of this film was the commercials they played on bravo during law and order: criminal intent. i was unimpressed and uninterested. just looked like a pan's labarynth rip-off (which i haven't seen yet. phooey). terabithia is based on a kid's book, PG, Disney, stars two unknown kids, etc. so many reasons to not see it. but i was dragged along by my 6yo cousin and her dad. the rest is history.

this movie is fantastic. of all the movies seen recently, i was most impressed by this one. i can't talk much about it without ruining the movie, so i won't. i'll only say that i full endorse grown adults to see it.

and as the world comes crashing down ...

the boston globe's second most e-mailed story is about a golden retriever eating a turtle, and then a 12-year-old girl saving it.

the heroics are heart-wrenching, i must say.

tim hardaway. you're an idiot.

"I hate gay people, so I let it be known." - hardaway

like i said, idiot. and if history serves us right, he will soon be confessing to some horrible morality-bending addiction to alcohol or coke and that he will be seeking counseling , ala mel gibson, michael richards, or the black guy from grey's anatomy.

google can do no wrong

the title of this Time blog post was "what was google thinking?"

when i read this, i thought google began murdering puppies or something. people apparently are just upset that the valentine's day google logo didn't apparently say "google" but rather, "googe"



talk about fear mongering.

are too many of my post titles questions?

yes. which means i have to stop. i just got into a zone or something.

anyway, this is a hilarious piece in slate about interjections (i love when people write about grammar and usage).

the audio on the piece is pretty amusing, although i can't say i've ever seen "awwa" used in IMspeak. maybe i don't chat with enough 12-year-olds. in any case, i found this part the most entertaining:

"Most egregiously abused are what linguists call "discourse markers"—short sounds (it seems a stretch to call them "words") that speakers use to register hesitation, agreement, encouragement, ambivalence, and other responses. Uh, er, and um, in particular, have been flagrantly overused by feature writers and columnists to signal an impending attempt at irony or humor; the maneuver is now well beyond cliché, somewhere in the neighborhood of desperation. A LexisNexis search of major English-language newspapers for um yields 132 hits in just the last week, including a striking number in various newspapers' coverage of the Grammy Awards."

note to self, do not sound desperate when writing.

is obama black enough?

the question is absurd, but only a black columnist is black enough to say so.

why are all left-wing pundits ugly?

the washington post has a feature on michelle malkin, the ann coulter-esque right-wing blogger. at this point it's not even fair to refer back to coulter when describing malkin, since she is a celebrity and phenomenon in her own right. the real question is, where are all the leggy, hot liberal bloggers? and i don't just mean "liberal" like how wonkette and maureen dowd are left of center. but i'm talking crazies. who do liberals have to represent the left fringe? al franken and michael moore. NO WONDER THE HIPPIES LOST THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. no one wants to hear what you have to say if they don't to look at your either. as any media mogul will tell you, we live in a visual world nowadays.


vs.


or


vs.


p.s. sorry for the shitty formatting. i'm too lazy to fix.

why did he pee in a bag? now he can't bring it on the plane!

the manchester airport reveals how crazy the liquid ban on planes makes passengers.

"One passenger was so incensed at having his deodorant confiscated that he proceeded to publicly empty his bladder of liquid in a plastic bag in protest at the legislation."

this must have been the same guy who couldn't take a bottle of vodka on the plane ... so he drank it. all of it.

doggies on my mind

i just wrote a story about people who travel with their pets on business trips. i can't really opine on it because it just seems wrong (oh the ethics of pet travel reporting!) but it does relate directly to this slate article about the evolutionary reason people love dogs.

this part spoke to me the most, and maybe you can figure out my stance on dogs in general.

"Archer suggests, "consider the possibility that pets are, in evolutionary terms, manipulating human responses, that they are the equivalent of social parasites." Social parasites inject themselves into the social systems of other species and thrive there. Dogs are masters at that. They show a range of emotions—love, anxiety, curiosity—and thus trick us into thinking they possess the full range of human feelings."

a lazy friday

today, i will be blogging my day, constantly and without remorse. this means, i will be reading as much of nytimes.com, slate, washington post, detroit free press, and any other random media i can handle. until maybe i decide to do work.

to start off, commentary on john tierney, a science writer for the new york times, and his blog. Tierney is smart, and the blog is informative/well-written/interesting enough. But it tries to ride the line between edgy (look, i write about pot! polygamy! spring break!) and straight-laced new york times establishmentism (not a real word, i think). the headlines are cutesy, but the posts can be bland. it's a censored william saletan (from slate) and where's the fun in that?

and then you get comments like this, which exemplify the problem. on a post about greenland glaciers, one reader has something apparently important to say:

"How bracing and encouraging that John Tierney believes that global warming is “the kind of collective-action problem that isn’t easily solved by market forces.” This seems to be a libertarian’s conversion of epochal portent - rather like Archibishop Wilberforce declaring his insulting words to Thomas Henry Huxley of 1860 “inoperative,” and then admitting to “Darwin’s Bulldog” that the good Reverend Wilberforce himself had primate ancestors on both his grandmother’s and grandfather’s side."

translation? anyone? readers like this are half the problem. sigh.

happy valentine's day

and for those of you with a sweet honey nearby, here's some advice on how to french kiss.

excerpts:

Moisten your lips. Dry lips do not move well together, but you do not want them to be dripping wet either.


Start with a gentle and soft closed-mouth kiss. The French kiss is an open-mouth kiss, but do not lunge in with your lips agape like you're going to eat them;


Kissing should be a shared decision. You need to have permission to French kiss someone, but when your lips are locked with your theirs you may want to stop and ask, "Hey, this is great, but can I put my tongue in your mouth?"


Breathe! Forgetting to breathe is probably the most common French kissing error. Do not hold your breath--everybody needs to breathe, and it is a lot more awkward when you have to pull away gasping for air than if you're breathing normally.

SNOW DAY!

i haven't had one of these since high school. i'm so happy. that is all

the curse of sanity

last friday was one of those nights. by starting to drink at 7 and not stopping till 2, i was able to get into one of my wasted rambling states. what do i ramble about? how i wish i could be THAT GIRL, just one night. the one who gets into a catfight, spits in someone's face, gets kicked out of multiple bars, pukes, then gets up and makes out w/ some dude. you know, that girl.

of course, i was drunk enough to be that girl. but instead i decided to talk about being that girl. i'm an idiot.

Forecast: 1-2 inches of snow plus mass hysteria

i know i'm not supposed to say anything about work, but this is more of a DC thing anyway. i have been at the office for about an hour and have already received two e-mails and half a dozen verbal forewarnings that the next two days are going to be weather catastrophes that shut the whole damn city down. snow days at school, snow days at work. i can't remember ever having this much anticipation for a weather event, well, ever. two inches of snow. two. inches. granted, there's gonna be some freezing rain or something, but this place has got to be a little more roll with the punches. at least there's no lite-brite bomb scare here.

granny shoes are the new hotness

these are flat, and generally old-fogeyish. but they are my new favorite shoes. i think they're pretty stylish when worn with irony. kind of like when i had these HUGE blinged out aviator sunglasses. fitted for J-Lo except i'm not ghetto fab at all.

and if you look closely, you can see the bling on the top of these puppies. gramma wouldn't be wearing that kind of ice on her shoes.

for the record, i took this photo about one minute before i posted this. also, note my stash of shoes/boots in my office, plus the general disorder of my workspace. having my own office rocks.

no more halfies = ugly america

a study out of ohio state basically says the number of interracial marriages is decreasing - mostly b/c new immigrants keep marrying eachother.

"The study suggests Hispanic and Asian immigrants are likely to marry among themselves. In addition, more native-born minorities are selecting marriage partners from the growing pool of immigrants.
"The result is that the number of native-born Hispanic men in intermarriages with whites declined by nearly 4 percentage points between 1990 and 2000 – from 35.3 percent to 31.9 percent. The number of native-born Asian American men in intermarriages declined from 50.2 to 45.8 percent."

so basically, the american born are opting to marry FOBs instead of whiteys. I wonder if the gender of immigrants makes a difference, like maybe more of the new immigrants are female. you know the saying that asian girls don't want to marry an asian guy (but end up anyway) and asian guys only want to marry asian girls? well yeah. welcome the FOBs.

i have no in-depth, insightful commentary on the hispanic side of things. since i'm not hispanic, i don't really get the same automatic legitimacy as i have when talking about asians and their fobbiness.

i love buses

i lived on north campus. i took the bus. i lived in boston. i took the bus. now that i'm in DC, i take the bus all the time. sometimes three buses in one day. exciting, no?
the red white and blue hurtling toward me is an often comforting sight.
(there she is!)
until recently since i've noticed that more of these buses are huge painted advertisments. i have no problem w/ corporate america subsidizing my ride to work, i do, however have a problem when my ride looks like a giant turd.

i actually think the snickers buses are long gone, but others have taken its place. sad.

"cold" day in DC

Not much to report today except two awesome things.

1. the pilot of my plane from newark to DC today was named "captain kirk." i knew i was in good hands.

2. i wore pajamas under my pants to work today.

headline: aqua teen hunger force shuts down stodgy self-righteous city. wait. what?

why i left boston:
"Enraged city and state officials yesterday readied a legal assault against those responsible for a guerrilla marketing campaign that dotted the city with small battery-powered light screens, setting off fears of terrorism and shutting down major roadways and subway lines for parts of the day."

my favorite part is that this ONLY happened in boston, and not the 9 other cities the campaign was staged.

"Menino and others said the campaign was especially reckless given Boston's sensitivity to terrorism threats, after planes that left Logan Airport on Sept. 11, 2001, were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center."

here's a newsflash bostonions. you're not gonna get attacked. no one cares enough. the city doesn't have much present-day symbolic importance and doesn't create enough industry to deserve a bombing. you notice how the 9/11 bombers left boston? a false sense of self-importance is very unbecoming. oh yeah, the red sox suck.

btw, mayor menino, you sound like a whiny bitch.

"A visibly angry Menino said he would ask the Federal Communications Commission to yank TBS's broadcasting license for what he called "an outrageous act to gain publicity for their product."
...
"Menino was also upset, he said, because top executives at Turner Broadcasting did not contact him directly to discuss what happened. The mayor said he did not receive a call from the company until about 9 p.m., and it was from a low-ranking press official.
"Give me a break. . . . It's all about corporate greed," Menino said, adding that he wanted make sure "not the guy we arrested today pays, but also the people in the boardroom have some obligation also on this issue.""

WAHHHHHH. i didn't get to talk to the important people. WAHHHHH. someone is making money off boston's idiocracy. WAHHHHH. i look like a retard.

lastly, from E!Online:

"It didn't take long to see that the battery-powered boards, some with exposed wires, weren't bombs. And it didn't take long to see that the Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotion was a bomb. A big one."

cute play on words, eonline, but i think you're plain wrong here. this "blitz" campaign clearly worked. it's got everyone talking about the show and has blown the roof off the viral marketing campaign. the only people who are pissed off are the people who would have never watched the show anyway. congrats aqua teen hunger force. you've MADE it.