We Got No Respect.

I blame the system, but I'm getting tired of the Big Ten getting no respect.

Too often the BCS takes TWO Big Ten teams to fill its spots (Unless one of us is ranked 1st or 2nd, there should only be one of us going to the Rose Bowl) It's happened the past several years, and it has made the Big Ten look like crap on a national level. There's a severe mis-match of in-division rank between schools going on when the system does this.

Logic would dictate that the best team from one conference should play the best team from another conference, the second best against the second best, and so on. The 2008 season is a wonderful example, as are most other seasons.

In 2008, The Big 12 Champions, Oklahoma were ranked #1 and played The SEC Champions, Florida, who were ranked #2. Perfect thus far.

The #3 Team in the nation, Texas (Big 12 South Co-Champ), whom had already beat the #1 ranked Oklahoma team in Conference play, was then matched up with...wait for it.

The #10 Ohio State Buckeyes (Big Ten 'Co-Champs'). Why were they there? It was a BCS Game...there was no reason that they HAD to pick a Big Ten Team...Replace Ohio State with someone else in the top 10...(Boise State and Texas Tech didn't win their bowl games that year, but they had as much right to the Fiesta Bowl as Ohio State did that year)...then move Ohio State BELOW Penn State to the Capital One Bowl and replace Michigan State, both teams which would likely defeat their respective opponents in their new Bowl Game assignments. Ohio State definitely had a chance against Georgia, and Michigan State would have done well against Missouri. If you keep Iowa in the Outback Bowl (they get to be the exception in this scenario because they actually WON their bowl game) that matches up Northwestern against Kansas, and Minnesota against Florida State. All of those games look and sound much more interesting to watch than their respective outcomes. Wisconsin gets shafted out of a bowl game, but maybe that's what's necessary for a while to make the Big Ten look better.

Penn State was already playing USC in the Rose Bowl (a Big Ten Bowl Game that was actually worth watching, even though Penn State lost).

I think that's all I'm really trying to get at. These games should be fun to watch...fairly matched, etc. Much like backyard football, or a fun pick-up game on a Sunday afternoon, the point is to have fun. It's no fun playing 5 on 5 football when the other team has the two fast guys, and you got stuck with the gimp and the fat kid.

I'm not saying the Big Ten is out of their league. All of those games last year were completely winnable. It's just a system that naturally stacks the odds slightly against the Big Ten, and more often than not, the Big Ten doesn't come out on top.

Are you ready for some football?

No one reads this. I do this for me.

Room's rearranged. Not clean yet, but rearranged. There's temporarily an xbox in my room, so I'm playing Gears of War when I'm not doing school work or sorting out all of the shit on the floor of my room.

My toe is very much purple. Crowbar fell on it while I was cleaning my room. Doc melted a hole through the nail and volcanically 'eased the pressure under the nail'.

Classes are finally in full swing. It's different having no class on Mondays/Fridays.

Happy Football Season. Go Bears, Go Hawks.

Crazy Flashback

I saw something today that I haven't seen since I was probably twelve. It's a book on Star Wars weapons and technology. Supernerd, I'm well aware, but half of the literature I read growing up was Star Wars based. It took me back, because I haven't done or read anything REALLY nerdy in a long time. a long time.

Thanks to this book, I know where the Power coupling on a sensor jammer is. That's important shit to know.

No new movie reviews...just life today. Let's talk music and television.

I've been discovering a lot of wonderful new music the past few weeks. One of the wonderful things about Pandora and Last.fm is that they don't exclusively play artists that are very well known, so when I typed in MJ to get some Billie Jean going, some really cool bands started popping up. One thing lead to another, and now I'm listening to a bunch of bands I didn't know, and a few I did. Adding these new bands to my summer playlist that already had some great material on it, I'm pretty much set until September.

Wow. Old Kings of Leon came on my Pandora right now. I know this because I have three of their albums. I'm not going to say that I discovered them long before the Radio did, but I knew them well before anyone could sing along to their music in the bars...which it never got played in. (The Ting Tings, however, I've been listening to for the past year, and I'm getting tired of the fact that Sex on Fire and That's Not my Name are on severe repeat in the bars)

I currently can't get enough of "The Whitest Boy Alive", a collaborative work between several members of several bands, but I like them. The Kings of Convenience lead singer is their vocalist, so they're very familiar to me.

Rescue Me
This show never ceases to amaze me. The amount of "don't go there" subject matter that they are able to cover is absolutely ridiculous. From world views on 9/11 to Alcoholism to dead parents and dead children. With the exception of the alcoholism, I find myself relating to Tommy Gavin a lot more than I wish I was, but a lot of the time, I feel the same way he does about things...except when he doesn't get something or backs himself into a corner. That's just funny.

I'm going to a Cubs-Cardinals Friday afternoon. Exciting stuff.
I leave for a four-week trip to Massachusetts on Saturday. Even more Exciting. I'm already packed.

So why am I just going through all the motions? Why don't I feel excited? It's a question for another day to answer...I need some sleep.

Rating system Change. and some Frisbee. My Sister's Keeper (6), and Inside Man (9)

So, I think I've figured out a way to condense my rating system. I think I'm going to do Enjoyment out of 5 and critical review out of 5 and then add them together. One number per movie makes it easier to deal with, and pay attention to. I'll be going back and changing the others accordingly.

My Sister's Keeper - 6/10
Critic: 3/5. Enjoyment: 3/5
One of the reasons that this might be so high compared to the National average on Rotten Tomatoes (44%) is probably because I haven't read the book. I saw it with a bunch of friends and colleagues from Dance Marathon, most of whom have read the book, and say it is very different. As dramatic as it got at some points, I didn't think it was overdone or unnecessary. It had its humorous moments, but overall it did what it was supposed to: Let you look into the lives of a family dealing with childhood cancer.

Inside Man - 9/10
Critic: 4/5. Enjoyment: 5/5
This is one of the more interesting movies I think I've ever seen. The plot has you confused and enthralled the entire time, The cast has more talent than most ensembles out there, and the end is just twisty enough to spin you around without making you dizzy. I watched it a second time tonight with my Dad, and HE thought it was a great movie. That doesn't happen often...

I'll send some more reviews out when I see some more movies...

Happy 4th of July Weekend, The Hangover (8.5) and Transformers 2 (c5/e8)

Hello everyone. After driving a LOT this weekend, I'm finally back in the Chicago Suburbs. Blogging about the rest of life as I know it. I used to have a Xanga, which I used for Xanga-esque things, but I feel this has much more potential to do great things.

Why do we celebrate the day we declared Independence and started a brutal war? Why don't we celebrate the day we signed peace agreements with England and they recognized us as a sovereign nation? It was September 3, 1783, for those of you that care.


On to some Movies I've seen recently.

The Hangover - 8.5/10
Critical: 3.5/5. Enjoyment: 5/5)

I really enjoyed The Hangover. The second time I saw it just made everything that much funnier. It is vulgar, raunchy humor, with a pinch of a Napoleon Dynamite or Borat style of awkward-funny, but just enough that it doesn't pull the movie down, and the other characters are aware of it and play off it well. The plot has purpose and a drive to it. Similar movies have been made without this drive and have missed terribly at the box office...giving The Hangover some class, credibility, and added humor to the plot that sets it apart from its peers. The movie itself is lacking in the class department, but I suppose it was made to be racy.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - 4/10
(Critical: 1.5/5, Enjoyment: 2.5/5)
A decent sequel to the original movie, it had a lot of moments that were difficult for me to watch (I have never been so dizzy watching a movie before...they do that like six times, too!). Then there's the father-son corniness. And the Roommate corniness. And the stereotypical frat-boy party corniness. And the "Love" corniness...what was that, the Matrix?

It was a fun movie to watch, but it's been thrown into the category of "popcorn" flick, and won't win any oscars, except for visual effects, of course. It was a fun, cool movie that had a few too many comic-relief, plucky, quirky, or annoying characters (Seymore, Leo, Galloway, Mud Flap, Skids, Wheels, Starscream) to take it all seriously in the long run.

More later (see Subject line for the next stuff). I'm tired. Been watching Dexter (9/10), and there were some intense games of frisbee today. More on this later. Let me know if you keep up with this.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine 3.5/10

As an action movie, it was mediocre. Maybe if Ryan Reynolds was the budding sidekick for most of the film, I could see it doing better, but they gave that role to Will.I.Am. Mistake #1.

As a comic book adaptation, it was horrific. The liberties that the writers and directors took with the characters mess so many things up I had trouble accepting the movie for what it was. They FINALLY got Gambit into an X-Men movie and he was in it for probably 10 minutes. Along with what they did to Deadpool, I'm not surprised why so many hardcore fans despised this film.

I'm not saying this movie didn't have its moments. The parts that were supposed to be funny were worth a chuckle or two, and I was duped into feeling emotional during certain parts. That shows good acting and good directing.

I did like the movie. There's just a difference between my critical review (1/5) and my "how much will you enjoy this" review (2.5/5). The latter isn't worth a damn, but that's how much I enjoyed the movie when I went and saw it.

more later.

This thing's purpose.

I've decided I'm going to use this thing to review stuff. Random stuff. All kinds of stuff. Movies, Restaurants, Music, Books, and Video Games mostly, but there's always room for anything else I can find. Because for some reason Movies I like get bad reviews, Restaurants I eat at get bad reviews, and bands I hate keep making albums. So as long as I'm around, I'll be here to add my two cents.

1131.8 miles later...

I drove way too much this weekend. The sad thing is I enjoyed it. From Iowa City to Chicago to Des Moines to Palatine to Chicago to Iowa City. It was a fun and eventful weekend. I even got some frisbee action in. It was good to see some old faces like Travis, Kate, and Joel, even if it was for only a few hours. The weird thing is...anytime I'm home in Palatine for less than a week, I feel like I could be there all summer. Push seven days, and I just get bored, though. Granted, if I worked full time in Chicago over the summer, I would probably feel differently about the whole situation, but I don't.

I've been having some crazy-ass dreams the past couple of days. I blame the fact that I haven't slept in the same bed since Wednesday. Last night, I was this crazy detective on a skyscraper that was looking for my father. Didn't really get it, but apparently I could jump to other skyscrapers without much trouble. The night before that, some chick and I were getting chased by Terminator robots and I was getting away until I had to swim...then it grabbed my leg and I woke up. Crazy stuff.

I need to restart my computer, so this is going to be cut short, but at least I remembered to post.

I've written in this thing probably four or five times since the last time I posted...I just got distracted in the middle of a sentence and forgot to publish and then closed the browser.

Beautiful Iowa City

I know some crazy people from Iowa that had graduating classes of like....12. I would like to point out that every state has places like this. My dad had a graduating class of 16, so I'm used to the idea. But I digress...

I know someone from Riverside, IA that I don't know if you all know. His name is James Tiberius Kirk. You should get to know him this weekend.

If NBC Cancels Chuck without a 3rd season

Things I will do if NBC Cancels Chuck:

• Kill Kittens
• Stop watching NBC for the rest of my Life.
• Kill More Kittens

I'm serious, this is the LAST time I get invested in a television show. ABC's done it twice to me this year, and this is the THIRD time in two years that NBC has done it to me. Y'all can suck it.

Whoever is in charge of making these decisions...I want their job. I would be so much better at it.

Canceling shows is a necessary evil for all TV shows. From M*A*S*H to ER, it happens eventually. Even Monday Night Football was canceled on ABC in order to move to it's sister network, ESPN.

However, if I was a network, I would be much more transparent with the whole process. Just because a show has ONLY 6.3 million weekly viewers, that doesn't mean that it only has 6.3 million fans. Most of the television I watch is online, and I would love to see more of the ratings system accommodate the millions of people that use recorded TV like Tivo, and online TV like Hulu.

I was reading an article the other day about ER and how "big" their finale wasn't. Who gives a crap if it ONLY had 15 million viewers. There's probably double that amount that watched it online sometime that week.

ugh.

What's wrong with me?

I don't understand it. I want to do well. I want to see myself do well. I want to try, and I want to excel, but for some reason, I can't focus.

I don't have that drive that....well, I guess I never really had it to begin with. The high school diploma is mostly because Mom was able to wake me up at 7am for four straight years. I took care of the rest, but I was there for the people, the friendships.

That's pretty much still the exact same, except my schedule is working against me. I'm floating in the gray area between no class time and not enough class time. Either way, I supposedly have to pick all of this up on my own...but it's my own fault for slacking off. $25,000 later, I've learned a valuable lesson.

If I'm going to be doing anything the next few years, I'm going to be doing it for me.

4-year-plan: to be on a revenue generating career path that I can stand going to 4-6 days a week. Whether it's with a non-profit organization, or a fortune 500 marketing firm, I want to find pleasure in what I do. I would also like to gain 15lbs of muscle and learn how to play the guitar. Oh! Almost forgot. I want to also learn CSS, and take some French in there at some point. Baby steps....baby steps. need the bachelors before I can attempt the masters...

I think the toughest part about everything I've been going through the past few years is that my lack of focus has translated into a lack of motivation. I didn't want to be an engineer...stuck in a cubicle all day doing something involving matrices and trig functions...

All my adult life, I've told myself that I spent too much time on the interweb. Maybe I could actually make a living off of it.

Online Television and New Media

I hate the TV ratings system. It hasn't accounted for variable change, nor has it been able to properly measure an accurate number of viewers since episodes started streaming on the internet OR episodes started getting tivo'd.

Shows are getting canceled that I only have the opportunity to watch online. Being in college, I take night classes Wednesdays and Thursdays...two HUGE nights for me in the TV realm (Lost, Life on Mars(not anymore), The Office, Grey's Anatomy, 30 Rock, and ER(not anymore)). All of these shows I watch online and view the fun Honda or Scrubbing Bubbles commercials every once and a while, but Networks are not including me in the statistics.

I know it's going to take a few years for the system to catch up to the internet, but still. Should the shows I watch now have to suffer becasue they aren't including me and millions of other viewers in their statistics?

The Shows I watch on a weekly basis ONLINE:
Monday: (Fox) House, 24, (ABC) Castle, (NBC) Chuck, Heroes, (CBS) How I Met Your Mother
Tuesday: (FX) Rescue Me
Wednesday: (ABC) Lost, Life on Mars/cancelled, Scrubs
Thursday:(NBC) The Office, ER/cancelled, 30 Rock, (ABC) Grey's Anatomy

I can't watch Television on time anymore. The internet offers myself and millions of others a chance to watch all of the programming they want...maybe because they're busy, maybe because they had stuff to do, and maybe because the other networks foolishly are going head to head with MY favorite shows. grrrrr.


Congrats on Ashton getting a million followers on Twitter. My turn soon. I think it's great that Ashton is supporting the Malaria No More foundation, and that Hugh Jackman is going to donate $100,000 to someone's favorite non-profit. It really shows the power of new media these days. If it was up to me, he'd be picking Dance Marathon (which he re-twitted), but every cause is a good cause.

School, College Humor, and The increase in Attendance on your Grades

Well,

It's nice to start things off fresh. Downloaded and deleted the old blog (so none of those potential employers can read about my angsty, non-eventful high school years)

I was going through the College Humor web celebrity archive, and I was very sad that they did not have the dancing hamsters. They had all of my other favorites, and a few good ones that weren't on there. Granted, I didn't see everything that I love from the web, but for a list of 40 URLs, they did a pretty damn job. (Follow the link to see them all: http://www.collegehumor.com/web-celeb-hall-of-fame )

This video gives me chills every time:
http://tinyurl.com/cjcp8y

So I'm in two classes that take attendance regularly. In no way does it ever affect your grade in a positive way, yet it is still taken. There are no attendance points, there are no participation points, there is only the cold, hard truth that if you don't come to class, the teacher can lower your grade.

Now, I have nothing against regular attendance if it has a direct relation with earnings, points, or some sort of salary. However, if someone feels they can do the work(which is on the University website), read the lectures (on the University website), and still do well on the tests, I don't see why it should be a requirement for them to sit through two hours of class and be disrespectful by not paying attention 100% of the time.

Here are two situations: Average Joe, Ill Issac, Cheating Carl, and Slacker Shawn are in the same class, which meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays during the semester for sixteen weeks.

• Joe Goes to class every day, gets a B and A on his midterms, has trouble with the Final (C-), and gets a B- on his paper. Grade in Class: B-

• Issac got sick in the middle of the semester, missing two weeks of class before he finally got a doctor's note, and found out he had pneumonia. The note covered him for his sick days, but he suffered when his teacher made him take a midterm that he wasn't prepared for due to his illness. He also was deducted for turning in his paper late(while he was sick). Grade in Class: C+

• Carl doesn't care about class. He's good friends with a guy who's dating a girl in his same class, so she signs him in every class. She also copies him the homework, practically wrote his paper, and lets him cheat off of her tests. He went into the final with a 98% in the class and got a C- on it. Final Grade in Class: B

• Shawn doesn't go to class on Fridays because he's involved with the school's frisbee team and thinks it's a better use of his time (he's well aware that each hour not spent in class costs him roughly $87). He works very hard to study outside of class, and leads a He aces both tests, gets an A on his paper, and scores a 99% on his final. Unfortunately, he missed sixteen Fridays, and ends up with an %83 in the class. (B-)

The real questions:
Who would you want working for you?

and

Why is this policy in effect?


I have a lecture on Tues/Thurs with an old guy who owns/runs a trucking business. He's not a Teacher, Doctorate Student, Masters Student, Professor, etc.....he's a business owner teaching a business class....and he tells the same story at LEAST once a week. It's like being home on vacation...

My time is more valuable to me than to have to worry about that stupid story that isn't even a good metaphor for the model he's trying to teach.

@*(#&!@_*&#!
-Frost