Category: NaBloWriMo

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Demand relief and it shall be supplied

Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for our Economics group (“Team Awesome”) today. This last week has been a giant pile of suckage, but now a whole lot of weight has been lifted off our shoulders and we can coast through the rest of the course. Unless the prof decides to ignore the assigned curriculum again—he taught us material from Chapter 8 in our first class and Chapter 15 in the third.

The class started with our midterm exam. Up to this point, we’ve taken one online quiz that was open book and multiple choice. Today, we were told it was short answer and would be more analytical versus multiple choice-style questions. That’s all we knew. Consequently, most people in the class were ruing the experience. (As a side note, since it was short answer, we needed to write our answers with a pencil. I’m used to typing, so my hand was cramping and my handwriting kept getting worse over time.)

Many late hours, several nights with almost no sleep, multiple social obligations abandoned… very uncool. Right now, I think I’m functioning almost entirely because of a large-scale consumption of Mountain Dew. Doing the Dew, baby, yeah…

And did I mention that our group had to make our presentation today? We had an hour to finish the quiz—immediately after the time ran out, our group of six walked up to the front of the room and began presenting a slideshow to the class, discussing a case study that very few people had read. (Everyone is supposed to read every case before it’s presented, but given the midterm today… we asked how many people had read it and I could count the number of hands on two fingers. Three, if you include my middle finger for the professor.)

As part of our group project, of course, we had to write an 8-10 page paper. It ended up being more like 11 or 12, but I’d rather cover more material than accidentally miss something important and have the prof bitch about it later. That was due the day of the presentation, so in the course of a week, we wrote a paper and prepared a presentation along with studying for the midterm.

The best part is that while studying last night, I spent some time lying on my stomach to read, which led to me tweaking my back this afternoon. Thus, I had to stand in front of the room with my group, leaning against the whiteboard and having occasional back spasms. So maybe we’ve been supplied with some stress relief, but these muscle spasms… I don’t think they’ll care very much about my demands.

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Six Words You Can’t Say on Television

This is something I saw a couple weeks ago, but never got around to writing until now. On Election Night—I promise this isn’t a political post—I decided to watch The Daily Show’s live coverage on Comedy Central. I had no idea what to expect: maybe the show would be on all night and be less ridiculous than some networks that take themselves seriously (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc.). The truth is that it was still half an hour long, it still had commercials and it was… sorta live.

During the course of the show, they had a correspondent broadcasting from each party’s headquarters, made possible through the magic of green screens. Yay for magic! Aasif Mandvi was talking about the big celebration in the Romney camp, which they were calling… there were blank spots in the audio as opposed to bleeps, but if they had used bleeps instead, it would have sounded something like this:

*BLEEP* piss *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

To clarify, Jon Stewart said the audio probably cut out completely because Mandvi had just recited the list of George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”. (I’d write the list on here, but I thought you’d appreciate reading the entire bit plus my grandmother might see this blog entry some day.)

So given the audio feed on Comedy Central, “piss” is now considered acceptable language for television viewers and I’m trying to decide how happy Carlin would be about that. Sure, the list is shorter, but just one word since 1972? What a bunch of *BLEEP*ing squares.

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Should I watch The Big Bang Theory?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’ve had a handful of friends say it’s my kind of show, I should feel morally obligated to watch it, that fact that I haven’t is the reason why there’s a war in the Middle East, etc. Someone turned up the pressure this week by lending me the Season 1 DVDs, saying that I should include his name when writing my “Thank You” note to all the people who told me to watch it.

Of course, some of these people are the same ones who told me to start watching Lost, a show that I avoided like the plague. The closest I got to watching an episode was when Conan O’Brien hosted the Emmys.

Everyone said it was a great show and I was tempted, but two things held me back. The first is that I don’t like the idea of being addicted to a TV show and having a panic attack if I miss it. The second is that after each season finale, the most common reaction I saw wasn’t “Ooh, I can’t wait to see what happens next time!” It was “What the hell just happened?”

The fact that it’s a sitcom means the second concern likely won’t be a problem, but being addicted… I’m afraid for my life (and whatever portion of it that might be spent sitting in front of a TV with a bag of microwave popcorn in my lap). So I ask you all again for your opinions: Should I watch The Big Bang Theory?

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IMDb thinks I’m a rising star

I’ve had a page on the Internet Movie Database for years. The only really impressive thing listed is my appearance on Beauty and the Geek, but there are a smattering of other credits as well. I think it’s nifty enough (or my ego is just large enough) that I included that in the “My Other Websites” category here on the blog.

My stats page says that earlier today, someone clicked on a link to imdb.com, so I wanted to double-check and see which page it was. The page was mine, of course—why my master blogger instincts didn’t kick in, I’m not entirely sure—and up at the top, it has a little graph that says “SEE RANK”. I had a couple minutes of spare time, why not take a look? So I moved my mouse over the chart and it opened up a small display.

The graph was there to indicate a STARmeter. Now, if I was someone like Angelina Jolie or Johnny Depp, it probably wouldn’t change much since I’d be up toward the top of the list of STARdom. I’m not one of those people. Thus, when the STARmeter display opened up, it showed my change in ranking: “Up 206,361 this week.” That may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but I think my ego just got a little larger.

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Hey, man… wings.

“The Clair and Gladys Strommen Executive Speaker Series brings local business leaders to Augsburg’s Minneapolis campus to share their insights and expertise.” It’s something they organize quarterly and I normally wouldn’t be very interested. Yesterday night, though, their guest speaker was Sally Smith, president and CEO of Buffalo Wild Wings. That in itself didn’t make it an amazing opportunity, but by preregistering for the event, I got to enjoy “sample wings from the restaurant chain” for dinner afterward. It had the potential to be a crappy presentation, but hey, man… wings.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the presentation, so it may or may not have been crappy. Like I mentioned a couple days ago, I met with my Economics group so we could talk about our paper, bounce around some ideas of what to add/include in each section and figure out what to put in our PowerPoint slideshow. We started talking at 4:30; Smith began her presentation at 5:00.

When we were done, the clock read 5:50 and she was scheduled to finish at 6:00… oops. But hey, man… wings. One of my fellow group members and I headed over there to hear what was left. As soon as we walked into the room, I sat down in closest available chair in the back row, then started being amused at the person in front of me who kept having to move her head around to see the podium because of the two fidgety teenagers with big hair sitting directly in front of her.

And then I stopped being amused. Smith was talking about the more popular sports they show on TVs in their restaurants: football and college basketball (baseball and the NBA aren’t as big of a draw until the playoffs). Then she mentioned commercials like the one where the maintenance guy was activating sprinklers to send a football game into overtime. Buffalo Wild Wings commercials… the horrific memories came flooding back.

Don’t worry, I didn’t rush the podium screaming in a fit of primal rage. It was tempting, but I had to make a choice: a massive swath of destruction vs. a trip down a buffet line of food. The deciding factor that led to my enjoyment of dinner? Hey, man… wings.

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Was there a Hurricane Curt?

At trivia tonight, the image round on the back of the sheet had black and white pictures that matched names of storms. We knew ones like Wilma Flintstone, Andrew Jackson, Isaac Newton and Sandy Cheeks (from Spongebob Squarepants)—Hurricanes Wilma, Andrew, Isaac and that monster Sandy that so recently graced the East Coast with her presence.

However, the tenth picture had us stumped. He was a pro wrestler and you could see the upper part of the championship belt wrapped around his waist… the picture was black and white, but I knew his outfit was pink on top and black on the bottom… he was blonde and was a teammate of someone with dark hair (that guy was Bret Hart)… so many tidbits of information, but I couldn’t come up with a name. (Most of the tidbits of information were wrong, mind you, but that’s what I was picturing in my head.)

We finally wrote “Curt Hennig” on the sheet and got that answer wrong. It was the right guy, but the wrong answer. The name of the wrestler that coincided with the name of a storm? Mr. Perfect.