Status Report

Ugh, the twitter update feed for the sidebar is broke. Since the messages streaming through haven't been approved by my mullet or Chuck Norris, I've disabled the timeline until such time as the issue has been resolved. So if you want to follow my tweets, I'm @katosmullet.

Writing my personal statement for law school is hard. Really hard. Harder than pretending I care about Leibniz's ontological proof of God even. I don't find it easy to talk about myself and, what's worse, I don't have any great stories to tell about designing some nanotube thingy that circumvents a rival's patents or working on a major case resulting in big penalties for a global finance group's financial malfeasance. I'm smart, didn't graduate on time, and hate my job. Why wouldn't every law school want me ;)

You may have noticed I like to complain about stuff in this blog. Stupid bigots, what were you thinking moments in racism, famous rapists, crappy songs... Well, I plan to continue exploring such "vital" topics. Maybe some stuff about movies, too. And music I like. And other stuff. But I'd like to take a minute to introduce a new, ongoing future feature to That Texas Drawl.

I never finished my Plan II Honors Thesis. It's not because I didn't have anything to say on my topic; far from it. I had way too much to say and had too many troubles trying to pare it down to a coherent argument. Well, 8 years after the fact, I put this one little blight on my otherwise flawless academic record behind me, took my last philosophy class (and wrote the aforementioned paper about Leibniz), and finally obtained my B.A. (yay me). But I don't want to let all that thesis research go to waste, especially given the importance of my subject. So I would like to inaugurate a discussion of porn on my humble blog.

No, I'm not going to show you porn. Rather, I plan on critiquing it. And anyway, I focused on textual porn, not the visual kind so no dirty pics anyway. But over the next weeks, months, and possibly years I'd like to submit to the wide world of the interwebs the issues, arguments, and such that interested, confounded, upset, and amused me. I'll try to spell out in greater detail the goal of my project as well as introducing my reasons for rejecting the standard Freudian / Lacanian line of criticism advanced by anti-porn feminists. Party party stuff, I know.

Worst. Song. Ever.

I first became aware of Owl City's "Fireflies" when it shot to the top of the itunes download list earlier this month. I say "became aware" because I did not listen to said song at that time. I didn't actually hear to it until my twitpal @madeinkowloon blip'd it my way a few weeks ago. I know this review is coming a little late, both in terms of when I heard the song and after the song hit its peak popularity, but I just want to add that it's a TERRIBLE SONG. Just plain bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI4JLa0hbUw

The song is straight up theft of The Postal Service sound. But it's like Owl City took all that was creative, innovative, and cool about the Dntel-Jimmy Tamborello & Ben Gibbard collaboration, dumped it in an acid bath of top 40 pop mediocrity, and let the resulting Frankenstein monstrosity loose on the radio to murder, ahem, bring indie electropop forward for mass consumption.

Honestly, the music isn't too awful, being snatched unfinished and incomplete as it were from Jimmy's harddrive. But that *IS* the problem with it. Whereas the Postal Service tracks were each carefully crafted, complex, and full of interesting sounds and hooks, "Fireflies" feels like gimmicky hack electronica. It's not egregiously bad, just forgettable and uninteresting.

And then you get to the words. OMFG, the lyrics to this song are the suck. Seriously, it sounds like they were written by committee of third graders. I'm not categorically opposed to songs about fireflies (re: Magentic Fields "100,000 Fireflies") but this song is entomology fail. I couldn't imagine a more blatant example of a tween panty-dropper without Stephanie Meyer's name attached to it. They are cheesy, lame, and oh so cliche.

However, I wouldn'y say that "Fireflies" is the worst song ever. That prize is reserved for this little "gem":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSMEVuRjz-I

Until next time...

P.S. You can follow me on blip.fm as dj katosmullet to hear what music I *do* like.

Breaking the seal

It's been a strange week indeed.

We had French Vogue inexplicably decide that reviving blackface would somehow get a bye in the age of Obama. The jokes were hard to swallow in Tropic Thunder and Downey's blackface there was deployed with irony in full force. "What do you mean 'you people'?" There isn't anything ironic about painting up a white Dutch model for a magazine layout. Fashion fail.

And today we find out some justice of the peace in Louisiana feels he has the right to deny interracial couples a marriage license. But oh no, he's not a racist; he has "piles and piles of black friends" whom are so privileged as to be allowed access to his bathroom. Anybody else feel we might need to search under his house and in the woodshed? Who counts up people by the pile... except, you know, Nazis and Rwandan warlords. And what's his excuse? He's just thinking of the children who, according to our good friend, will never be accepted by either the white or black community. Damn! Do his marriage licenses also include a one-way ticket on a time machine back to 1957? Please, Keith Bardwell, please stop being so helpful.

The battle lines were drawn more sharply surrounding Roman Polanski. On one side, Hollywood (notably minus Jamie Foxx) supports Polanski and thinks that slipping a 13 year old girl a quaalude and then having sex with her against her will is somehow ok when you make great movies. Journalists, on the other hand, found themselves cast again and again this week in the role of saying drugging and raping a 13 year old is not cool, no matter how many Oscars or lifetime achievement awards you may have won. You know how he lured the girl to Jack Nicholson's house? He told her and her mother he wanted to take pictures of the girl for French Vogue! You can't make this stuff up. Please sign this petition to cancel French Vogue. Do it for the children.

Tomorrow morning I will be saying goodbye to Capital One as my bank. They decided to delete all of my scheduled utility and credit card payments via bill pay. When I asked them to take care of the late fees and negotiate to re-establish the 0% interest rates on my cards as they promise in their TOS, they strung me along for 3 weeks and then said "sorry, since these weren't scheduled as auto-payments we won't help you." Which they knew from the beginning when I called on September 22 and on every subsequent call. I had to twist the arm of every rep I spoke with to get them to take a look at the notes left by previous reps. What a nightmare! I'll try to give the uncondensed version in the future so you can know what kind of pointless runaround to expect if you ever call Capital One customer service. I will never bank with Capital One again. Can't wait to see the bank manager's face when I come in to pull out all my money.

And lastly... finally got my LSAT score. Disappointed.