You scratch just like a monkey, yeah you do

January 29, 2008
  • One could probably instigate a riot, or at least a good deal of vitriolic complaint, by playing Bob & Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” at a party or dance. (You’d know why if you heard it, or even looked it up on Wikipedia.) I’m sorely tempted to do so. (It’s a good thing nobody reads this blog.)
  • There sure were a lot of songs whose names fit the pattern of “$verb1, $verb2 and $verb3” back in the early days of rock and roll. F’rexample:
    • Shake, Rattle & Roll
    • Jump, Jive an’ Wail
    • Flip Flop and Fly
    • Jumps, Giggles and Shouts
  • Though I am not a cynic by nature [this will be the substance of a future post], I had an extremely cynical and eminently plausible realization today. For the past several months, I have been busy putting off applying to law school. Deadlines are beginning to breathe down my neck. It’s sheer idiocy to have waited so long, especially considering it’s rolling admissions everywhere, so my chances of getting in are decreasing steadily and monotonically, and have been for quite some time. I keep getting letters and emails from various law schools, offering to waive my application fee, ostensibly because I did OK on the LSAT and as an undergrad, but more importantly because I ticked a box saying “Go ahead, send me crap.” So today it occurred to me that the real reason for waiving people’s admission fees is much more straightforward, and quite cynical: US News rankings. Convincing more people to apply to your school, particularly near the end of the application window, when their chances are lower anyway, means you get to reject more applicants and thereby look more selective and give your US News stats a subtle boost.
  • Speaking of which, it’s going to be a Laugh Riot when I procrastinate this so effectively that I don’t even get my act together in time to take advantage of all those offers.

Son cheval est son partenaire

January 25, 2008
  • White Russian milkshakes are the best thing ever. Especially when they’re made with [redacted], which I suppose would make the drink some kind of “beige” or “taupe” Russian.
  • Chai, on the other hand, is gross.
  • Bubble tea, on the gripping hand, is merely OK. The tapioca ‘pearls’ can be a bit much.
  • You have to eat the fortune cookie if you want the fortune to apply. Does anybody seriously dispute that?
  • There was a story in last week’s Washington Post magazine about a woman who had a shoelace break. She decided to replace the shoelace instead of throwing the shoes in the garbage, and that decision was apparently worth writing a page-long story about. Is that what American consumer culture has become? Is it that noteworthy when somebody puts forth minimal effort to repair something rather than discarding it and buying a new one? For fuck’s sake.
  • This whole ’subprime’ fiasco, which would more accurately (in my decidedly non-expert opinion) be considered a ‘collateralized debt’ fiasco, reminds me of the following joke:
    Q. What do you get when you stir a spoonful of shit into a gallon of ice cream?
    A. A gallon of shit.

    (Apparently a lot of expert financiers thought the answer was “AAA-rated bonds”.)

  • This whole ’subprime’ fiasco also reminds me of the lesson I learned from the S&L fiasco of the 80s, which I was far too young to understand at the time but read all about in Inside Job (which I highly recommend); a lesson that was reinforced by the Enron fiasco some years back. That lesson, of course, is that novel accounting practices are Bad News. Obviously that’s an oversimplification, but should you really be able to treat hypothetical money you might get in the future as a current asset? It’s like that other joke: If you owe the bank $100K, you’re in trouble. But if you owe the bank $100M, the bank is in trouble.

Songs of the Moment: «Nouveau Western» — MC Solaar; «Bonnie & Clyde» — Serge Gainsbourg

Random thoughts

January 8, 2008

  • How can Coca-Cola justify and/or get away with asserting that they use the “original formula” for Coke, when the current formula has only been in use since 1984? That’s when they changed sweeteners from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which strikes me as a rather substantive, if straightforward, change. Funny, though, that Mexico still has “the real thing” while those of us in the land where Coke was born have to make do with a compromised version made necessary by the combination of ridiculous import tariffs on sugar and downright grotesque subsidies to corn growers.
  • When I first tried contact lenses, it was such an amazing and wonderful experience that I couldn’t believe it. For one thing, I could see clearly—that was quite nice, but I could achieve the same result with glasses, and had been doing so since I was 8 or 9 years old. The difference with contacts was that I could see without distortion.

    Glasses, especially ones as strong as mine, introduce a good deal of distortion. Objects appear smaller, for one thing, and straight lines become curved, especially if they’re far from the optical center of the lens. And, of course, your peripheral vision is shot to hell, since you have what amounts to a patch of clarity floating in a sea of blur. No matter how big your glasses, they simply can’t correct your vision in every possible direction you can look. Even lens materials introduce their own issues. Go with a fancy lightweight plastic, and you have to put up with frankly sickening amounts of chromatic aberration. (The first time I tried plastic lenses, I had to return them to the store an hour later because the fringing literally made me sick to my stomach.) Glass is much better in that regard, and is a good deal more scratch-proof to boot, but weighs a ton, especially when your prescription is as strong as mine.

    I’d internalized all of those flaws during my ten years of wearing ever-thicker glasses, to the point that I didn’t even notice them anymore. It was, I understood, the price to be paid for being able to see things more than a few inches from my face. So it was that, upon being fitted with contacts, I felt like I’d had my eyes opened for the first time. All that shit was gone, and I didn’t have to subconsciously compensate for any of it, or worry about them falling off or slipping down my nose, or anything. I vowed never to go back to glasses, because contacts, after all, gave me a more correct view of things.

    It was years before I even got a pair of glasses at an updated prescription, because I was so averse to the glasses paradigm. Now, though, I split my time pretty evenly between contacts and glasses. I still am grateful for contact lenses for the same reasons as before, but I now appreciate glasses for their own reasons. They’re more convenient, in that you don’t need to wash your hands before manipulating them, but that’s merely an ancillary benefit. No, I now appreciate glasses exactly because of their flaws and distortions. They serve as a reminder that everything I ’see’, my vision of the world around me, is inherently a construct of my own mind, an inference pieced together from some sensory perceptions and tinted by my own biases, assumptions and preconceptions. Glasses reinforce the fact that experience is subjective.

  • Does nobody at the New York Times read Bob the Angry Flower? I mean, jeez:
    So it came as little surprise that Diebold, a company once known primarily for making safes and A.T.M.’s, [sic] …

  • Soon I will find out whether 94.85% is sufficiently close to 95%. Fingers crossed. I could have just taken an extra hour of leave to bump myself up slightly, and in fact my supervisor just told me, “That’s how the game is played,” but evidently I like cutting things close.
  • Speaking of cutting things close, there’s a lot of other shit I need to get done yesterday, that I’ve been putting off for months. We’ll see how that all goes.
  • In other news, pictures from Yosemite are coming, just as soon as I stop being extremely lazy.

Song of the Moment: «Soul Finger» — The Bar-Kays

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