Britney Spears Is Number 1

I read today that Britney Spears was the number one search on Yahoo in the last year. Fascinating. I don’t know which is more amazing to me, the fact that Britney is still relevant to anyone’s day; or that the 12 holdouts still using Yahoo and watching Beverly Hills Cop on their Beta Player, have managed to take a break from playing pogs and cruise their dial-up internet looking for celebrity sex tapes.

Seriously? What kind of bullshit statistic is this? Of course outdated, white trash celebrities are searched for with outdated, white trash engines. It’s about as surprising as finding out that Tom Cruise kind of likes dudes.

I’m pleading with you poor relics, put your Tony! Toni! Tone! records away, close-out of Netscape, and join the rest of society on Google, so I never have to read an article about Britney Spears being number one ever again.

The Baby Red-Eye

Don’t bring your child on a red-eye flight.  They should be in bed, and everyone on the plane should be asleep.  Why are you even traveling with an infant anyway.

Save 2 Hours

I saw 21 at the $1 theater with very little hopes going in.  Unfortunatley even my small expectations were not met.  The writing was supremely  terrible.  Although, I did pull one line out that I will gladly use for the next couple months when my friends piss me off.  “I will break your cheekbone with a small hammer, and then I’m going to kill you.”  WTF!  Why my cheekbone?  Why is the hammer small?  Laurence Fishburne was appropriately cast in the role of a bad ass Vegas security guru, but if you give anyone lines like that, they’ll look like a giant bag of tools.  I was encouraged to see this movie by a friend, but as a true friend I beg of you to save your two hours and Stumble instead.

Peer Review

There is only one thing more frustrating than having someone qualified rip apart your creative work, having someone completely unqualified do it. I can’t fit all of my gripes with public education into this one blog, but I will voice my concern with the overrated and overused practice of peer review. There is not better way to kill creativity than having equally apathetic people write all over each others work.

Yesterday in my creative writing class I read a classmate’s story about zombies. Our GTF told us to underline the parts we liked about the story. I scowered for a few things, underlining the rather graphic segments of the zombies eating the townspeople and wrote “great detail,” and “I really liked the part about the half-eaten jaw. NICE!!!” The story sucked. But, that’s ok, I’m sure the GTF will help him get better. The point is, no matter what I wrote on his story, he wouldn’t take it seriously. I’m just a student too.

I’m not saying any of this to be mean, but it’s really unrealistic to have students who are at all different skill levels review eachothers work. No one wants to make anyone sad, no one really wants to take the time to improve another students skills, everyone just wants to write enough critique to show the teacher they tried editing it. I understand the point of reading through and critiquing work to be more cognizant of your own mistakes, but there is plenty of good writing out there that could be looked at. If you want to improve your baseball swing, you probably don’t go to a tee-ball game and dissect the little booger eater’s swings. You take notes of what the pros are doing.