Cool Cherry Cream

Take a 10 second word association quiz to help with my linguistics homework!
Okay, so that question actually wasn't assigned, but I'm still curious, so let's see what happens.

And now, your regularly scheduled blog entry:

I started to write out a really long and detailed entry about trying to figure out who to vote for, and I'll probably post that eventually, but this revelation seemed much more important to post now.

I looked up capitalism. I looked it fucking up! And I don't see anything wrong with it. In fact, that's what I've always believed our society should be.

And okay, it's what I've always accused the man of being when I went into my sarcastic hippie mode. Fuck those capitalist pigs, man, fuck 'em!

But I was just throwing around that big word without realizing what I was saying. I'm the capitalist pig! Me!

an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market
Webster's fuckin' dictionary, man

Okay, so that definition means nothing when it uses big words like that, and I apologize for that. Basically what it's saying is that capitalism is business. People own businesses and other people can buy from them and/or use their services for a price. And what is wrong with that? Umm, how about nothing at fucking all?

The word "capitalism" has been corrupted. No one knows what it means anymore. Everyone thinks it means "the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer", but it doesn't! It means the people who provide a product or service will make money. And that they should; nothing is free and it never will be.

Now, this doesn't mean just the company and/or the CEO and the big cheeses should make money; it means the employees of the company too. Nowhere in that definition does it say "Mr. Wal-Mart should have a billion dollar salary and everyone else should get minimum wage". Do you see that anywhere? Because I don't.

That's not to say it's not gonna happen; it just has nothing to do with capitalism. Rich people earning more money than they should is not a product of capitalism, it's a product of rich people being smart and poor people being stupid and/or not doing anything about it.

So, I apologize for my misuse of the word in the past, and I am now embracing my capitalist self. Long live capitalism!

It's been awhile since I've done a real movie review, but I suppose it's been awhile since I've seen a real movie. No, no, I take that back. I've been seeing a lot of movies lately. I saw "Tropic Thunder" and "Billy Madison" and "Red Eye" not that long ago. "Tropic Thunder" was surprisingly good, the other two, not so much. "Billy Madison" had it moments, but "Happy Gilmore" is much better. "Red Eye" was sort of ridiculous, but at least it was short.

It's kind of disgusting how many times "Ghost" has been redone, especially lately. And how people are now accusing the movies that are redoing it as being ripoffs of the original ripoffs. This movie was alright as a comedy, but the story itself was silly.

I apologize that my feminism is showing, but I've just become so aware of how sexist things are. As soon as I saw the clumsy girl trying to get into the elevator while carrying this big obnoxious box, I knew she would of course be the love interest. We're all just stupid Susan Meyers, aren't we?

I hate how relationships develop in so many movies. It's always the same. The one that really bothered me was "Big", but I saw it in this movie and "Billy Madison" too. They make the male lead seem incredibly repulsive and unattractive, and yet, the girl always ends up falling for him. Which, well, does happen in real life. Okay, okay, I guess I'm overreacting. Most girls are stupid Susan Meyers who fall for the stupid guys. It's just unfortunate that movies always portray as so, when there are some women who aren't so stupid.

That aside, they do always attempt to make the male seem more desirable and humane. In "Billy Madison", the turning point was when he pretended to pee his pants so the other kid wouldn't look bad. And after that, she liked him, he was suddenly sweet and lovable. In "Big", I guess she fell for him because of his fun child-like nature, which was really more immature than anything else. And in this movie, it was because he showed an interest in what she was doing. While respectable, I don't think it made up for how much of a jerk he was previously. I understand the time restraints thing, but it's just so unrealistic. Well, unencouraging, at least.

And the fact that apparently these people working with mummies didn't know anything about dental stuff? Totally bogus.

And the fact that they used Papyrus for the banners at the big gala? Totally realistic, but totally disgusting. I seriously let out a groan and put my head in my hands at that part.

And what's with people who can hear ghosts not wanting to help them? If I could hear ghosts, I would totally help them. I'd be like, okay, everybody gets a day, and I'll do whatever you need me to do. Then you can leave me alone. I don't get why people don't agree to that sooner.

Overall, the movie wasn't that bad. It was just a regular, forgettable story. Some pretty funny stuff, but nothing that memorable.

At home I watched "Time at the Top", a 1999 movie I'd taped off the "bad movie" network. And yes, it was bad. I read the book sometime in grade school, and vaguely remembered some of it. It was about a girl who took the elevator in her apartment back in time to the 1800s and met some kids there. I don't know how much the movie followed the book, but it's been a long time since I read it. I'm fairly certain the book took place in the 60s and not the 90s, so I'm sure a lot of it was changed.

The characters were pretty ridiculous. There was a man who lived in the apartment, a writer, who didn't have much to do with the story, but I'm pretty sure he was the narrator of the book, which was I thought was rather unique at the time. There was also this big maintenance guy who was incredibly annoying but was named Bodoni which was rather amusing.

All in all, it was pretty ridiculous and bad and not in a good way. It wasn't laughably bad, it was just annoyingly and unrealistically bad. In the end, the 90s girl (Elisha Cutherbert, actually) and her widowed father go back to live in the 1880s with her two new friends and their widowed mother, and they're all a big happy family.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say about those movies. I decided to follow up their disappointingness with another episode of "North and South: Book III" to complete the lunacy. We saw good old Brett finally but no Billy and no fake Billy, which I suppose is a good thing. Ashton had a nice new dress. Bent got a haircut and looks much less crazy, but of course had to go and kidnap fake Charlie's kid for no good reason. Fake Charlie continues to be considerably wimpier than the real Charles was. New characters continue to be unnecessary and uninteresting. Madeline continues to be shown out-of-focus and continues to be her stupid self. George no longer has his grey hair and wrinkles. Funny how quickly those come and go.

So it's been a couple of weeks and I'm kind of into the groove. I basically know what time my classes are (though I did nearly forget to go to class twice to do) and I don't need to look at maps to find them. I've figured out what's going on and what I need to do. Which is basically go to class and take notes. I haven't had any real tests yet, just one "quiz" in my computer science tutorial which I totally passed (but also totally bombed), but that didn't count for anything really.

Anyway, I went on over to Rate My Professors to see (again) what people were saying, now that I actually know my professor's names and all. A lot of the comments surprised me. My favourite professor so far is my Math professor. That class is hilarious. Today he commented that it seemed the room was shrinking since there weren't that many people there. Someone mentioned that they were giving out free hot dogs and he started walking up the stairs and saying "oh yeah? Where is that…?". You kind of have to be there for a lot of stuff that I find funny in that class, but it's really just hilarious. He didn't have that many comments on the site, and the ones he did have weren't really great.

My astronomy professor, yes, can be boring and monotone, and everyone on the site complains about how he's given great materials (galaxies, black holes, all that awesome sort of stuff) and makes it boring. Not at all. He doesn't make it exciting, but he knows his stuff and I have no problem staying awake in that class. Re-reading the comments, I know understand why "focus" and "it turns out…" are funny. A lot of people mentioned how he doesn't have a sense of humour and doesn't smile… and honestly, that's bullshit. The other day, somebody knocked over a glass or something and it made a loud noise and the professor goes "cheers". It was pretty funny. And what does it matter if someone doesn't smile? That's just bullshit criticism, like pointing out peoples' typos on the internet.

My French professor is really a very good teacher. Mean, yes. He's tough on you, which most people probably haven't experienced before, but you know, sometimes you just gotta be tough. My French teachers in high school never corrected people who said "OOHNE" instead of "UHH" for "un". They didn't care. They didn't care if you said "news" for "nous" or "eels" for "ils". At first, this class seemed kind of silly. Le, la, les? Honestly? We're doing present reflexive verbs now. I know. But really, this is necessary. We already have a foundation in French, but it's crumbling. This class is where we rebuild it the proper way and don't hire the cheap contractors. (We hire the $4,000 a year ones).

I haven't really decided how I feel about my Computer Science teacher yet. He's a funny guy, likes to bash Macs a lot, which I'm fine with, but it's gotten old. He jokes around a lot, but it seems kind of fake, rehearsed. As the comments say, he does indeed have terrible handwriting. Computer science lectures kinda freak me out. Computer science isn't a "listen" thing, it's a "do" thing.

And finally, my linguistics professor. The fact that I can't understand why anyone would pursue a degree in linguistics aside, she's seems alright. She seems a bit distant, but seems to know what she's talking about.

So, all in all, I don't really have any problems with my professors. Which is a big ol' change from high school, where pretty much every teacher sucked (with the exception of maybe… four). Of course, I say this now before I've talked to any of them personally or had any tests or anything marked. We'll have to do a re-revaluation soon enough.