Rain? It’s really raining outside? Hallelujah! Call off the burn ban, I’m stocking up on fireworks!!
In case you missed it, last night’s lightning storm was the most impressive display of nature that I’ve ever seen. And no, I don’t have pictures. If you missed it while text messaging your boyfriend while driving 90 miles per hour down the freeway and singing along to some loud non-music on the radio, too damn bad! You really missed out. 
Ed McMahon.
Farah Fawcett.
Michael Jackson.
Billy Mays….
This June is going down as the most lethal month for celebrities EVER.
I worked Pride Parade this year again. And by that I mean at my regular job, which happens to be right at the epicenter of Gay Pride Houston. This year, they opted not to serve alcohol on the streets–you can buy and drink all you want at the bar and at home, but they’re not selling it to you outside. Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from drinking themselves stupid (starting yesterday at 8:00AM, apparently, judging by the arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct outside of Mary’s yesterday morning).
Right off the bat, the people setting up were demanding to use our restrooms, then they wanted to fill their water buckets (for “hand-washing”) from our restroom sinks, and then they wanted to block off our side entrance (they did this last year, too, with a huge Budweiser beer tent; we made them move it before we opened).
As usual, there was a colorful array of people and I forgot my camera YET AGAIN! We had the six foot tall black drag queen, in spandex booty-shorts, a cut-off top, and HUGE fake lashes with silver eyeshadow. The girl with a six-inch rainbow tulle skirt and red burlesque-style lace underpants, rainbow tights, and combat boots. Then there were the Lolitas–two heavyset girls in the most outlandish rainbow-colored Lolita outfits I’ve seen outside of Harajuku Street in Tokyo. THAT was awesome!
And, of course, there was the gay boy who decided to come in wearing nothing but his navy blue briefs and a smile. No shirt, no shoes, NO PROBLEM! It’s party time!
We blasted Madonna, Bjork, Annie Lennox, and Erasure from the stereo. For the most part, everyone had a pretty good time, except for the guy who came in wanting to sell ten boxes of moldy books, VHS, and cassette tapes. I was extremely generous with my offer, but he was still very unhappy. Sorry, dude–we’re not paying you for the pleasure of recycling your trash. :/ So with the exception of that guy, Montrose is partying down!
I don’t know how I’m going to work a normal job after this.
Links from my blogroll have been added to the new layout. It should be completely set up, unless I find something else to tweak.
This is quite possibly the most intriguing video I’ve seen about education. Rather than proposing legislation or complaining about the system, it poses some very interesting facts that serve to highlight issues that our education system isn’t addressing and must address if our country is to maintain a position in the global economy.
The video asks, “So what does it all mean?” We’re being bombarded with information and our world is ever-expanding. Despite the fact that we (in the US) introduced or helped develop many of the technologies that led to this information revolution, we’re being overshadowed by India and China, and they’re poised to overtake us in education, technology, and innovation. I think that focusing on standardized testing has caused us to completely miss the mark on education–we’re focusing on test scores, not on learning or really “educating,” and so our students are ill-prepared for the future. However, most of these students are self-educating with the internet. It’s an amazing wealth of resources, but we need to shift our thinking if we want to compete.
It’s a thought-provoking video, and I hope it causes people to re-think our education system, not just our test scores.
I just upgraded to the latest version of Word Press, and I downloaded a new layout. It took me damn near forever because it’s been awhile since I had to upgrade last and the procedure has changed slightly. I really like the new Dashboard, and I’m really digging the new layout.
I forewent the card and gift this year for things my dad can really appreciate: high scores in my summer courses, plans to leave my job for a better one (self sufficiency FTW), Tiramisu cake, and Klondike bars. The last two were the real gifts, the first two are just bonuses.
And the universe appears to have given my father a gift as well. The “shenanigans” (election-stealing, riots, protests, murder, mayhem….) going on in Iran mean more to my dad than they do to most of us in the west. For my dad, it means that he gets to watch the shackles of Islamic oppression being forcibly cast off. Last night he said, “No matter what happens from here on out, the ruling party in Iran is completely discredited. They really deserve it.” (”It” being the protesting, increased scrutiny from the rest of the world, and the embarrassment of being caught in the act of cheating.)
Sure, we joke and talk about how our leaders are corrupt, but there’s really no comparison. These people are literally fighting and protesting for their lives. When these protesters get caught by the Basij or the revolutionary guard, if they aren’t shot in the street, they go to jail for an indeterminate amount of time, where they are beaten, tortured, and kept locked in cells with little food or water. When their families ask to have them released, they’re told to come back for more information “in thirty days’ time.” In this way, the government in Iran hopes to quell the protests and the complaints–in thirty days, these people could be taken behind the prison and shot. And sometimes, the Basij will just break into your house in the middle of the night and take you from there. The sanctity of the house means nothing to them.
To my father, the continued protests despite the dangers of death as punishment for defiance are a signal that perhaps he could see, not mere peace (usually at the end of a sword), but real democracy and freedom start to take place in the middle east. If it can happen in Iran, it could also happen in Egypt. (According to this article on CNN.com, we’re not alone in believing this.)
That means more to him than all the cards, klondike bars, and gifts in the world.
Despite the fact that readership for my blog is limited to pretty much me and maybe one or two other people, I’ve started getting random comments from people on really old entries. These comments don’t appear to be spam-bot-generated, so it makes me wonder who’s Google-ing my blog for random commenting?
I just got a comment on an entry I recently made, in which I griped about a sample paper given by a professor, and I was accused of being pretentious and hypocritical. “I don’t understand your sentence structure, and I don’t understand why you’re complaining. Therefore, you must be a pretentious jerk!” Indeed. “Givemeabreak” obviously didn’t bother to really understand the nature of the post, nor is this person familiar with me or my blog. I’m a smart-ass, I grouse constantly, and I am bothered by what I see as the willful refusal to maintain a standard of intelligent communication. Or perhaps I should put it this way: “LOL PPL DUN TALK GUD NE MOR”
Then there was a comment relating to an e-mail scam from a pet-finding website–the e-mail scammer used the addresses of people posting to the website and would demand money for the “safe return” of the animal. I complained about it, questioned whether the scam was related to the website, and eventually let it go. The entry is a few years old, so imagine my surprise when I find someone associated with the actual pet-finding website has commented stating that they “resent the accusations” that their service is a scam. I would too, were I in that person’s shoes, but in fact I had an issue that I simply never pursued. I’m not a journalist–I don’t investigate these things to uncover scams, cover-ups, or other lies.
So imagine my surprise to find that people are taking a sudden interest in my blogging subjects. But it does bring up something that I haven’t really properly addressed.
Blogging is really a means for people, who have nothing of real value to say, to share their thoughts, feelings, and day-to-day minutiae with the entire world, whether the world likes it or not. It’s open and free for anyone to come in, read, and/or comment (occasionally comments will be restricted). I am constantly amazed that anyone cares about how frustrated I am with classmates, how much I dislike traffic, what I read in my free time, and the annoyance of losing pets/keys/textbooks/wallets/money/etc. Why would anyone care about how much I think Wells Fargo sucks? (They’re significantly lesser in their evil than Bank of America, in my opinion.) Why would anyone care about my reasons for being a-religious? (I really do love studying religion, even if I never have had a single spiritual experience in my life.)
I suppose people find blogs interesting for a number of reasons:
1) “I find some sort of common interest between myself and the blogger.” Readers find that they generally agree with the blogger’s intentions, they enjoy reading about someone who is similar to them in some way and feel comforted by the fact that someone out there is like them.
2) “I find this blog informative in some way.” The blogger’s primary intent is to inform the readers about some situation (war), place (Japan), or other thing (literature, art, history). Readers find the information more accessible and timely than they would a textbook or academic journal, and perhaps find it easier to understand the content if it’s presented in “laymen’s” terms.
3) “I find this blog entertaining in some manner.” Webcomics, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog, maybe even boingboing–Readers find the blog appealing because its primary purpose is to entertain in some way.
4) “I know this person in real life.” Readers want to keep in touch with the blogger, because distance or some other factors make it difficult to keep in contact otherwise.
5) “I hate this person and wish to learn more about their ideology in order to oppose it in a public forum.” Two words: political blogs.
I fail to understand where I fall into the scheme of bloggers. I post so infrequently that I may as well just stop blogging altogether, and its been so long since I updated my main domain that I’ve been thinking about shutting it down permanently. My internet presence exists pretty much for the sole purpose of taking up space. So when people come to my blog and comment, I have to wonder why they would bother. Who’s going to read it besides me? or a very small group of people I know personally? I suppose it’s driven by some need to make any and every opinion known. “The world must know how much I love cheese, and how much I disagree with this douche-bag’s blog!” Well, if you insist.
Comments are open on my blog. In general, I welcome commentary about anything I post. I do delete comments, but I also have second thoughts and delete a lot of my posts. It’s one of the benefits to a blog (and the internet in general)–I can’t un-say the things I utter out loud, but I can delete a post if I later change my mind about it.
I can’t emphasize this enough: when you write a paper, don’t pull any word out of the thesaurus to make your paper more “fancy.” One of my summer course professors sent us a “sample” paper as an example of how to write a “good” business paper, and the first thing I see is unnecessary commas, improper use of punctuation, and the worst sin of all: random thesaurus words.
For the home improvement retail industry, this means that one needs considerable capital, with which to ascertain space and hire skilled employees to help customers, and as regards resource ownership, one would need a vast stock of products in lines that home improvement-oriented consumers desire.
With which to “ascertain” space? Are home improvement stores making their space certain and precise? or are they learning and finding out about the logistics of space? And as regards the structure of the phrase “as regards,” don’t do it. Here’s how this sentence should be structured, rephrased in order to make it more clear:
For the home improvement retail industry, this means that a firm needs considerable capital in order to procure space and hired skilled employees. In regards to resource ownership, a firm needs a vast stock of products in order to meet the needs of customers shopping for a variety of different home improvement products.
The sample paper is, unfortunately, twenty pages of nothing but unnecessary verbiage, spelling and grammar mistakes, and outright misuse of the English language. I realize that Paper Writing 101 isn’t a course for most business schools, but it damn well should be. This kind of sloppy writing shouldn’t get higher than a C–cramming as much information into your paper doesn’t matter much when it’s essentially unreadable.
I’ve been working on economics all day. I am currently at least one class ahead, and by Tuesday I should be done up to the midterm. However, I still need to work on the first analysis paper, start planning for the second, and on Tuesday get with my group for the group project.
Then I also need to think about my research for Behavioral Theory.
And finally, I’ve got a semi-rant working in response to Ode Magazine, which my mom got as a gift subscription. 
So yeah. That’s what I’m up to from now until mid-July. Yay summer school.