Needs a Signature

Gail Collins lays out how the current federally guaranteed student loan system works in today's New York Times. Here's an excerpt:

¶We the taxpayers pay the banks to make loans to students.

¶We the taxpayers then guarantee the loans so the banks won’t lose money if the students don’t pay.

¶We the taxpayers then buy back the loans from the banks so they can make more loans to students, for which we will then pay them more rewards.

She goes on to call for reform, and I agree. Maybe we can't agree that Health Care shouldn't be for profit (although we should be able to), but can we at least say that lenders shouldn't be able to exploit students? Federal loans should not be for profit, we shouldn't just be giving away money, but this is supposed to be a type of subsidy for education, not a subsidy for banks.

How to sign your name. [A Photo Essay]

A bleed within the skull.

Mass Effect
You may have heard that Mass Effect is a brilliant, but deeply flawed game. At least half of that statement is true. After a few hours of navigating dialogue trees filled with tedious exposition, I sold the game and decided to wait for the sequel. Maybe by then they will have fixed the atrocious combat engine and incorporated all of those titillating features [Warning: potentially NSFW link. Do not click if you work for the Utah government or are easily offended.] that Faux News (lolz!) promised me.

Grade: INC

A vanishing act. In one act.

It was like a magic trick without a magician.

One moment there was a chicken. And then PFFT! All that remained was a ball of feathers.

No evidence. No hints at possible stagecraft. No signs of struggle.

Just a lingering riddle with no solution.

And feathers. Feathers everywhere.

same old misery

I've had the worst gas lately. I don't know why. My diet hasn't changed. But it stinks like diarrhea. It's so bad that I wake up in the morning short of breath because I've been farting all night and won't take full breaths. Plus there's the same old acid reflux thing going on so my esophagus hurts and when I take a deep breath when I get out of bed it hurts like fuck and stinks like shit.

I stayed in bed till like 2 p.m. and then I went out to buy some new t-shirts because my old ones either don't fit or were burned by my ex wife. I had to go to my car first to get my sunglasses because it's so bright outside and I can't just deal with the brightness because the sun makes me sneeze, which is excruciatingly painful because of my intense and chronic ear pain. But I was so drunk when I got home last night that I can't remember where I parked my car. So I had to wander around my hood looking for the car for like half an hour without my sunglasses and it was just awful.

My girlfriend broke up with me because she can't stand my snoring. It's not my fault I snore. She told me to go to the Ear Nose Throat doctor to get it checked out and while I'm at it have him fix my ear problem, but I don't have health insurance so how am I supposed to do that? So she dumps me, which wouldn't be that big of a problem, except the NYPD just busted my prostitute service as part of their ongoing Craigslist crack down. So now I can't just email Sadie via Craigslist for a blowjob. Now the only blowjobs left on Craigslist are the ones where you pay graduate students $1,000 to hang out and hope that you can talk them into giving you a blow job for an extra hundred bucks. Like I can afford that. If I had $1,100 I would have gone to the fucking ear doctor and avoided the whole fucking problem.

Meanwhile, I'm being extorted by the city. They claim I owe them several hundred dollars in past due parking tickets on my motorcycle. Fucking christ. What am I supposed to do when I'm late for work and I can't find my car becuase I was so drunk when I parked it? I have to take the bike, that's what. It's not my fault I can't get press plates on the bike. So they tow the bike and say I owe them some outrageous amount of money to get it back. That's fucking extortion. Fucking government. I can even get a cheap blow job anymore because of them.

Two ex girlfriends called me this week and asked me to dinner. They're both fucking psycopathic bitches, but I figure what the fuck. I got no other prospects. So I go out with the one, and I find out the only reason she wants to see me is to ask if my dad can help her get some fucking internship. I havent talked to him in months and she expects me to call him up and ask a favor for some girl that once through a vase and my head and then refused to take me to the emergency room? Fuck that. So I go out with the other one, who is crazier than I remember, and she wants my help moving her shit to a storage locker because she's moving out of her apartment and into a rehab center, which she claims is to to research an for the New Yorker, but that's obviously bullshit. So I tell her no because I can't find my car, and then she starts in on me, saying I shouldn't drive drunk and blah blah blah. Fucking hell.

Why I haven't written a blog post lately

Not finished. (I've changed the masthead already.) But a glimpse of what I'd like to do in the next few months. On a non-Google server, no less.

That is... assuming I don't get distracted (or de-monied) by distractions or one kind or another.

Roach Motel

The cockroaches in Virginia are menacingly huge. Imagine an old school silver dollar with spiny legs, oily wings, and impossibly long antennae scampering around in the dark. You can actually hear the pitter-patter of their tiny footsteps. Over the course of the two years I spent there I was fortunate to only encounter roaches individually and occasionally in pairs. I never had reason to hunt or fear them. We peacefully coexisted.

I moved into a sublet in Chicago this past Sunday, and the woman from whom I’m renting mentioned that she’d recently seen a few tiny black bugs in the kitchen. No big deal, I thought, I’ll set out a couple of roach traps and they’ll be dead in a week. Sure enough, that night I noticed a couple of small roaches in the space between my counter and stove.


On Monday morning (yesterday), I popped into my local True Value and picked up a twelve-pack of roach motels. I set them out as the instructions indicated and figured problem solved. Later in the evening, however, it seemed the problem was a bit worse than I’d thought: Despite the dozen traps I’d placed in my 4’ x 10’ kitchen, I noticed between five and ten tiny specks retreating into my stovetop when I entered the room. No big deal, I thought, I’ll just get a can of bug spray in the morning and sort this out once and for all.

Witnesses can attest to the fact that I spent yesterday evening joking and gloating about how I was going to massacre the family of roaches using a series of shock-and-awe attacks. I didn’t care how many there were: Those idiot bugs [didn’t] stand a fucking chance.

Last night I had perhaps the first nightmare of my life about bugs, and that was when I thought I was dealing with a small handful of them.

I was waiting on the steps of True Value when the store opened this morning. Weighing my options carefully, I opted for the TAT brand household roach spray over the “Industrial Strength” Viper. It struck me that the all black can of Viper, branded with a pair of lurking eyes, seemed overkill.

I came home, shut off the gas to the stove, and set out to find the root of the problem. It was immediately clear that there were in fact roaches living under the stove as well as in the space between it and the counter, but I knew there had to be more. I pulled out the stove and opened it up every way I could, squishing the few bugs I found along the way. The roaches ranged in size from a tiny spec to a small safety pin. I then did a bit of investigating in the cupboard under the sink and deduced that the source of problem had to be the space between the back of the cabinets and the wall. So, naturally, I placed the hard plastic hose—the kind that comes affixed to cans of WD-40—into the end of the bug spray nozzle, and sprayed a few short burst into the gap.

I was right about there being more roaches and the spot where they’d taken residence, but I underestimated their number and the extent to which they’d freak the fuck out when I attempted to poison them. In fact there were hundreds of them, of varying sizes, and they fled, en masse, toward their only exit: The cupboard under my sink.

This post is already too long, so suffice it to say that the worst part of the whole experience was seeing cockroaches pouring into my kitchen from cracks in my cupboard and counter that I didn’t even know existed. I’ll never forget the sight of stepping back to see bugs fleeing in all directions into my kitchen from, among other places, the space where the counter meets my sink.

I called the emergency maintenance number for my landlord to say that I had a serious roach problem and, within minutes, a plump Mexican man with a thick accent showed up at my door with a can of Raid. He suggested that I use the entire can and come back tomorrow.

I think there should be a word in the English language to represent the specific kind of fear evoked by an onslaught of scores of some enemy invader. It’s been a long time since I've felt a firm slap in the face by nature, reminding me that she is in fact in charge. I feel fortunate to have, most nights, an insect-free place to sleep.

After killing an insane number of roaches, I went back to True Value and bought a can of insulating foam to seal the cracks and holes at the back of my cupboard. For now the problem appears to be under control.

The Battle For The Island

Come one, come all! Post your predictions in the comments section for the L O S T season finale. There will probably be SPOILERS for you procrastinators who are not all caught up.

The Master and The Molotov

Grand Theft Auto IV
For better or for worse, the Grand Theft Auto series has come to define an entire generation of American gaming. I don't want to play armchair psychoanalyst, but it is hard to separate the appeal of the franchise from the ineffectualness most young American men must have felt during the post-9/11 Bush Administration years. It is no accident that the series barely made a dent in the sales charts in Japan or that the franchise has just now been culturally eclipsed by Guitar Hero/Rock Band and the Nintendo Wii.

Quite frankly, critics lingering infatuation with the franchise is just embarrassing. I would be willing to ignore the absurd grasps at cultural relevance (any critic that seriously compared the "script" to the The Wire should be permanently disbarred), but the fact that most reviewers willing turned a blind eye to the fundamentally flawed game mechanics is simply unforgivable. The mission structure is infuriating. The on-foot controls are atrocious. And while it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer scope of the game (the first trip through Times Square has an undeniable wow factor), that breadth doesn't translate into depth. The environments look great when you are speeding through the streets in a race car, but once you actually get out and start walking around everything is revealed to be a horrendously low-resoultion facade.

Grade: B-
Grade Curved For Hype: C+

Boldly...

Star Trek (2009)

Verdict: A shallow villain. Cheap comic book storytelling (I'd hope at the behest of the studio). And lacking logic to a level that makes me worry about Lost. Still, Kirk and Spock prove that they can almost always be interesting. Even in a brainless action movie.

I Love You, I Love You Not

Rushmore. What is there not to like?

Bill Murray. The drummer from Phantom Planet. Futura Bold.

Needless to say, I was taken aback when Nell said she didn't like it.

Let me rephrase that. She hated it.

Which is okay. We all disagree about movies. But this wasn't one of those "agree to disagree" situations [like that fight Mark and I had over the merits of Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever]. I didn't even have particularly strong feelings about the movie.

The point was this was the kind of quirky little indie flick that high school Nell, a quirky little indie in her own right, should have loved. But she didn't. And I refused to accept it.

We all formulate little algorithms in our head about the kind of things our friends like and dislike. They are superficial and reductive, but they usually work.

Ian, bless his heart, has an incredible tolerance for the worst movies. And I mean the absolute worst. In the span of six hours we once sat through Walking Tall, Doom, and Soldier. If there is a trashy action movie that nobody else will see, I know I can always rely on him. Yet, he mysteriously loathes Ghost World -- a fairly harmless twee comedy in the vein of Wes Anderson.

What is it about these turn-of-the century indies that is so polarizing?

And it is not just my circumstantial evidence.

There is a large industry dedicated to deciphering a person's individual taste. In fact, Netflix has a competition based around trying to improve its rating estimation by 10%. Succeed, and you net a cool $1,000,000. What people have discovered, however, are a few vexing movies that seem to have a high variability of people loving them or hating them. These outliers are the final obstacle in surpassing the 10% threshold.

It has become such a problem that people have dubbed it the "Napoleon Dynamite" issue.

A few of the top movies with high variance stick out for obvious reasons: Fahrenheit 9/11 (political), The Passion of the Christ (religious), Twister (Bill Paxton).

What intrigued me were the top 5 didn't seem to have these obvious signifiers.

The Royal Tenenbaums ([My] User Raiting: 5.0, Average Rating: 3.3)
Lost In Translation (UR: 5.0, AR: 3.3)
Pearl Harbor (Likely User Rating: 1.3, AR: 3.5)
Miss Congeniality (LU: 2.1, AR: 3.4)
Napoleon Dynamite (UR: 3.0, AR: 3.4)

Instead, I would categorize most of them under the quirky indie comedy label. [Pearl Harbor remains a mystery.]

Although the Netflix data only extends to 2006ish, I have a feeling we could safely throw Little Miss Sunshine and Juno into the volatility index.

So, I repeat my earlier question and open the floor to you: what is it about these turn-of-the century indies that is so polarizing?

[Editor's note: future Nell later recanted her heretical views on Wes Anderson. She now rates Rushmore with Four Stars on Netflix. Ian's current opinion on Ghost World could not be determined by the publishing deadline.]