Freaking pissed

My mom came up to visit me this weekend, which was a lot of fun. She got here on Friday and we went to the outlet mall to walk around, although I had gotten little sleep the night before and it was hot so we didn't shop for too long (I don't usually shop for long anyways). Then we went to Crepeville for dinner with my aunt, since it was her birthday. I had told her to Netflix Eddie Izzard, so we went and watched some of that, which is funny as always.

Saturday my cousin was having a huge birthday bash (with like 30 high schoolers over) so we helped set up for a little bit then drove to Davis since my mom had never been there and wanted to see the town. Sunday was a successful attempt to escape the heat with a trip to the Bay Area to visit my aunt. We had a nice brunch and then I pretty much spent the day playing video games (Super Smash Brothers Brawl, so take that Chris and Rob). It was great fun.

I have three finals in three days, so I really should be studying right now (the first one stats in an hour and fifteen minutes), but I'm obviously not. I guess I'll end this and get to work. Or perhaps I'll go eat breakfast instead.

Oh, I almost forgot the reason for the title of the blog! My mom's brand new car was parked on the street next to the house on Sunday, and some idiot (I'd use stronger language, but my family reads this) hit her car. At first we thought they had just nailed the side mirror, which is annoying but not worthy of really getting angry. But it turns out they also managed to clip the car near the back wheel, denting it. It's just a little one, and if it was on my car I wouldn't get it fixed, but this car is seriously less than a month old. I'm freaking pissed!

Remind me again...

Why I never went to parties in high school.

Oh wait, it's because of bad loud music and silly people. My cousin had his birthday party tonight (even though his birthday was 2 plus weeks ago), which consisted of a bunch of kids over at the house and a heavy metal band. The band wasn't supposed to go on until 8, but they showed up before 4 to set up, and proceeded to play pretty much for the entire 4 hours until 8. Once they started their set for real, they only played for about 40 minutes, which nobody else finds ironic (annoying). Thankfully they were cut off at 10 because of promises to the neighbors.

My madre is up visiting this weekend, which is fun. We're headed over to the Bay Area tomorrow to try and escape some of the heat (summer is apparently in full swing) and see my aunt. My uncle just got a Wii (in addition to the 360 he has) so it's going to be a fun day. Of course, I probably should be studying for at least my final on Monday when I'm over there, but I'm almost certain that's not going to happen. Maybe I'll make Mom drive and I'll study in the car.

I'm done on Wednesday, which means that I need to officially start figuring out what I'm doing this summer. I'll be in Bakersfield for at least two and a half weeks, but after that I have no idea. I'll keep everybody posted, though!

Holy Venom Batman!

I almost stepped on a rattlesnake today. I'm serious and not exaggerating at all. If I hadn't stopped when I did, there would have been no way to stop my stride before stepping on it. Belle (the dog) gave me no warning, and just ran past. Freaking scared me.

I saw Iron Man and wasn't disappointed, although I didn't like the climax. It just felt forced and cliche, but the beginning was really good. If you're going to see it, see it through the credits, since there's a little tidbit for fans (although most probably won't get it unless they're familiar with Marvel).

Guadalajara!

I find it highly ironic that there are signs about campus proclaiming the celebration festivities of Cinco de Mayo on Wednesday, May 7 (and also Wednesday, May 8 on some for added humor).

Also, I'm very excited that it's finally test crunch time, and that professors are starting to do the normal final's backoff. By this I mean the lightening of the work load that happens every semester right before finals so that we can study. My studying being done for a couple hours the day before the test, I'm sitting pretty for two weeks of no work, tests, or papers. This means I can make a few bucks (hopefully) by subbing without the stress of knowing I have papers to work on.

PS The title of this post comes from a video we watched sophomore Spanish class, where a mariachi kept singing, "Guadalajara." Chris and Rob - you remember the one I'm talking about?

Thorstein Veblen

I have found my new favorite economist, not so much for what he talked about, but rather because of the method that he used to talk about it. Take, for example, this passage (yes, I realize there will be eye glazing, but I still have to share).

If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctring and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome, or karyokinetic process to which we may turn, and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality and controlling principles? What are we going to do about it? The question is rather, What are we doing about it?

In the article I'm reading, the sentence preceding this is, "An excerpt from the same article, where Veblen attempts to denigrate conventional economics by employing the nomenclature of botanical classification, show his style at its worst."

I think I'll include the earlier excerpt tomorrow, once this paper is done. It's highly entertaining.

PS I've decided I will name my next pet "Thorstein" and it will go by "Thor" for short.

Well it's about time

So I really shouldn't be working on this - I should be working on my Econ project that is due tomorrow (well, a draft). But instead I've decided I've put this off long enough, and I heard Carly's words, so here's the results!

The quiz was for Heroes (could you tell by all the 'hero' references?). First, a breakdown of the possible results. It should be noted that this is all season 1 stuff for those of you who watch the show (although I might be the only one).

Claire - You've always known you're different, which is probably why you spend so much time trying to act like everybody else. Bubbly, bright, and athletic, you're a searcher, someone who yearns for beauty and meaning in an often cold and callous world.

Peter - Earnest and kindhearted, you look out for the little guy first, thought it may be because you were always an underdog yourself. As someone who always thought life was about something bigger than yourself, you're both the ultimate dreamer and the ultimate idealist.

Hiro - You have something special about you that draws others to you. Part of your charm is your contagious enthusiasm, evidenced by both your intellectual curiosity and your willingness to drop everything to go on an adventure. You'll always be ahead of the curve.

Niki - Outspoke yet private, wild yet cautious, you seem to have two different sides to your personality, which often leaves you wondering what it is you really want. The one place they seem to meet is your understanding of how mind games are played, which will always be to your advantage.

Nathan - Smar, charming, traditional - by all appearances, you have it made. Behind your public image, however, lurks a much more ambivalent heart, one that yearns to break out of the normal definitions of succewss, though in most matter you allow your intellect to rule over you.

Matt - Always someone who's sensitive to the feelings of others, you don't always have an easy go of things, especially in your romantic life. One of the many great things about you, though, is your willingness to work through your problems instead of burying them.

And here's the results for everybody. Rachel and Jessica - I answered the questions for you, so if you don't like the results, answer for yourself next time! I've included most and least, just for those of you who are curious.

Robert - Hiro (4), Niki (0)
Chris - Hiro, Nathan (4), Peter, Niki (0)
Tim - Hiro (4), Niki (0)
Becca - Hiro (6), Claire, Nathan, Matt (0)
Carly - Hiro (3), Niki, Nathan (0)
Jessica - Niki (4), Peter (0)
Rachel - Claire (4), Hiro (0)

I think the questions were a bit skewed and unanswerable, but the results are still interesting to see. Hopefully I'll be putting up another one sometime soon.

On a scale of 1 to 10

How much of a nerd does it make me that my bike lock is a mathematical constant?

"In A Minute"

That used to be one of the coolest parts of after school and Saturday morning television. Anyways, on to business.

My History of Economic Thought test took me about 20 minutes today. Not sure what that means, exactly.

I saw a rattlesnake on the way to campus this afternoon. I was glad I wasn't running, because knowing me, I wouldn't have been looking up, and probably would have ran right into it.

School only has like a month left and I have no idea what I'm doing this summer. I should probably get on that soon.

I will get the quiz result up sometime soon. It's just a matter of my computer and the book both being in the same place at the same time.

I'm done with my Marx paper, so I will (hopefully) no longer be calling for the downfall of the bourgeois anymore. Instead, we're moving on to American Institutionalism and the German Historical School, but I don't know what I'm going to be calling for because of them, yet. I'll keep you posted, though.

No distinction without differentiation.

I was reading an article today about a school principal who, after seeing the low standard test scores of certain races in her school gather all the African-American 4th, 5th, and 6th graders for a pep-talk. Of course this pissed off all their parents, because she was singling them out and making them feel dumb. She was going to do the same for the Latino students, but decided not to after the backlash from parents.

I really have to wonder what exactly the state and federal governments except but that when they require all the different races in a school to test the same. The parents were saying that she should have brought all the low achieving students in for the assembly, but that wouldn't fix her problem - that there was a gap between these races and the white students.

I think Ockham is the one who talked about the fact that there can be no distinction without differentiation, and I like to turn that around by saying that there will always be distinction when there is differentiation. As long as these programs like No Child Left Behind insist on looking at test scores across races, teachers are going to have to focus on the differences in student's races - which they shouldn't have to do. All it does is put the teachers in a difficult position, and reinforces for some students that they're are being picked on because of their race. A lot of times they're not - they're being picked on because they don't care about school and underperform - but that's not what they think.

New Favorite Word?

Last night playing on freerice I came across the word 'ballyhoo' which apparently means hype (although they defined trebuchet as a catapult, so my confidence in it is shaken).

Today's dictionary.com word (brought to you by google headlines) is lambaste, which means to beat severely - either physically or with words. I am so using this word more often.

Marxist Poetry

I'm sure you all don't read the little tidbits of economic scholarly journalistic writing (how's that for adjectives), but I'm going to keep putting them up anyways. Read on for more about Marx!

"Marx is one of the few poets we have in an otherwise arid economic landscape. His evocative remarks about the dehumanization of labor, his rich imagery about living and dead labor, and the deathknoll of capitalism, and about alienation are unsurpassed. Marx's metaphor of a 'reserve army' of the unemployed serves to remind us of the immense sacrifice the dispossessed make in their lives, of the constant uphill battle to make ends meet. Workers are expendable; life and limb are readily destroyed for the sake of material gain. Cupidity eclipses all that is life-affirming; even those who scramble to the top do so only by degrading and dehumanizing themselves. Marx is our Neitzsche and should be embraced accordingly."

Don't worry, my paper is due tomorrow, so you will soon be done with this (at least concerning Marx). I did find a brilliantly snarky speech that I'm going to read for fun, and I'm sure to find some fun quotes.

Economists say the darndest things.

And I used to think philosophy was bad. I thoroughly enjoy reading sentences like this; for some reason it makes me happy.

"My own scholarship has covered a great variety of fields. And many of them involve questions like welfare economics and factor-price equalization; turnpike theorems and osculating envelopes; nonsubstitutability relations in Minkowski-Ricardo-Leontief-Metzler matrices of Mosak-Hicks type; or balanced-budget multipliers under conditions of balanced uncertainty in locally impacted topological spaces and molar equivalences. My friends warn me that such topics are suitable merely for captive audiences in search of a degree-and even then not after dark."

Even better, I believe this was first given as a speech. Absolutely bloody brilliant.

Results pending

I'm going to post the results to the quiz later today, so if you don't want me to answer for you, you'd better comment your answers!

Randomly: I'm currently listening to Imogen Heap, and love the CD. For those of you who don't know who she is, you'd recognize some of her songs from the Last Kiss, and Six Feet Under soundtracks (as well as a handful of other movies that you probably don't watch/listen to). She was also part of FrouFrou, which was on the Garden State soundtrack.

Tidbits from Economics

I shared this with Robert, but I think all of you should get to read it. This sentence is absolutely amazing.

"Significant here is the question of whether the errors were "genuine" or "dishonest," as well the fascinating questions relating to the paradigmatic distinctiveness of Marxian economics relative to, say, the Ricardian and neoclassical varieties turning on the role accorded scarcity considerations. "

Robert's response was: Wow. I think I can decipher assembly code easier than I can read that sentence. Assembly code is the binary crap that a computer understands.

Also, in history of thought, we were talking about how sad it is that the marginal revolution (the people that first looked at marginal utility) didn't lay down the "methodological smackdown" that they could have. "Methodological smackdown" is my professor's phrase, not mine.

I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.

I need to start watching Star Wars again, mostly so that quoting it will once again be second nature to me. Lately, all of the episodes have been on Spike, which is great. We watched the end of Empire and most of Return on Sunday, and it was very interesting to watch these movies with people who are not fans. For one, the children knew the main points of interest (Luke and Leia are twins, Vader is their father), but they had no idea about the plot points that get to those places. It's really kind of sad that people can no longer watch these with any suspense.

Also, Clint said something that made me want to wash his mouth out with soap, "They need to remake the old ones," he said, and had no idea why this was a bad idea. To him, the new ones aren't even "realistic" enough, although I fail to see how the graphics could be any better. Perhaps he wants it to be realistic by not being in space, which really, I wouldn't put past him. All I can say is that it's a good thing we're not related.

Shame on todos

Shame on you all (except for Rob) for voting excitedly and then not posting answers to the quiz. I guess I'll give it a few more days before I post the results, which might turn into after next weekend since I'll have a paper to work on towards the end of the week.

There's a BevMo on one of the main streets that I drive on to get to most stores, and I must say that I'm ashamed that I didn't know what kind of store it was. Shame on me.

I went bowling with my aunt and one of her friends this weekend, which was fun. I didn't do very well, but I think it's good for me to occasionally lose at things. Keeps me humble.

I also spent this morning watching three or four episodes of Dexter, which was great. I've been missing it, and have now almost finished season 2. I like this one much more because all of the peripheral characters from the first season are getting some development luvin'. Good things are happening, and I'm really looking forward to the last couple of episodes.

Back by popular supply and demand

Not really, but I just like throwing in economic ties.

So, as always, I'm not telling you the title of the show. Make sure you don't pick your favorite, but pick the one that best describes you. Remember to either post the results in the comments, or email them to me. You can pick more than one answer if you'd like, but try to limit the number of times you do that. I'll either give a week, or until most people have put up results, whichever comes sooner.

1. Which Tina Turner song would you be?
a) "Nutbush City Limits"
b) "Private Dancer"
c) "What's Love Got to Do With It?"
d) "The Best"
e) "Better Be Good to Me"
f) We Don't Need Another Hero"

2. Which video game character would you be?
a) Sonic
b) Princess Zelda
c) Link
d) Mario
e) Lara Croft
f) Harry Mason

3. Which Time Life series would you be?
a) Mysteries of the Unknown
b) Mindpower
c) Fix-It Yourself
d) Wings of War
e) How Things Work
f) The Enchanted World

4. Which video format would you be?
a) VHS
b) DVD
c) Betamax
d) Super 8 mm
e) laser disc
f) streaming video

5. Which type of music would you be?
a) classic rock
b) country
c) hip-hop
d) alternative rock
e) teen pop
f) jazz

6. Which synonym for "hero" would you be?
a) protagonist
b) champion
c) grinder
d) adventurer
e) victor
f) leader

7. Which type of tattoo would you be?
a) tribal band
b) flower
c) seductive pinup
d) cartoon character
e) snake
f) loved one's name

8. Which HG Wells book would you be?
a) The Time Machine
b) The Shape of Things to Come
c) Anticipations
d) The World Set Free
e) The Island of Doctor Moreau
f) When the Sleeper Wakes

9. Which type of revolution would you be?
a) sexual revolution
b) Freudian revolution
c) industrial revolution
d) French revolution
e) Russian revolution
f) American revolution

10. Which muscle would you be?
a) deltoid
b) abdominal
c) bicep
d) tricep
e) pectoral
f) quadricep

Small Updates

Yesterday I was asked if I had a 12 year old daughter. I'm really not sure how I should take that.

I'm still going strong in my quest to have the highest grade in my classes, in fact, I might have to change my goal in one of them to having 100%.

Costco is evil; I went in to get Cheese Itz and cereal, and walked out with those two things, plus VM Season 3, and Tin Man, a mini series from the SciFi channel.

Laziness is ...

finding a pencil. Or not.

I have lots of things to post about from this past week of vacation, but am feeling very lazy, and Episode III is on Spike, so I'm enjoying watching that. It's also been a long day and I don't feel like writing a long post. I will say that there is a new poll, and I remembered to bring up my personality quiz book, so I will shortly start posting quizzes again.

There are also a few new quotes up on the quote page, for those of you who are interested.

A whole different culture

I've gotten to delve back into the Elementary School culture again this week, which is always interesting. Yesterday was a particularly illuminating picture, since I was outside all day with probably 500 children. The school I was subbing at was having it's second all day track meet (for which I wasn't prepared, unfortunately).

I showed up expecting an easy day because I had a 5/6 combo which I've had before, but found out that it would be an even easier day because of the track meet. I helped out with timing some events, and it was a good day. The most interesting thing, however, was the music they played for the kids to listen to during the meet. The Spongebob song came on, and while I didn't recognize it, every single kid outside was singing along. The same was true of Scooby Doo and Powerpuff Girls. Then there are the songs which they all dance to, like the Apache Song (I think that's what it's called), and some other song that tells them to stomp, slide, or clap. What might be even funnier than watching the kids get into these songs is watching the teachers also dance along.

After subbing I headed over to West to watch a softball team, figuring that I should show up and support whichever of my former players were still playing. To my surprise, all but four players on the JV team were on my team last year. They were suitably excited to see me, and tried to pick on me like nothing had changed. I guess it's nice to be missed. Unfortunately they lost, but oh well. You can't have everything.

Tonight I get to help Billy go buy a 360, and it's going to be difficult not to buy Mass Effect for myself. I really don't know yet if I'll manage - it probably depends on which games he buys for himself.