2. When I have no client billable work (i.e. today, the better part of last month), one thing I love to do is spend about 20 minutes and construct a mean-variance optimal portfolio with the financial instruments I've invested in. If I have an afternoon of nothing to do, I audit the recommendations that the investment auditor made last quarter. ("Once again, the conservative sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor.")
While on the topic of finances, I've noticed that if you don't put money some place else, you are going to spend it on garbage. All of it.
3. I've been half-assedly watching "How to Deal" - the thought-provoking Mandy Moore vehicle - for the last 45 minutes or so. Sincerity isn't normally my sack of rocks, but I fucking love these kind of movies.
4. Becoming a coke mule: positive career move or negative career move?
5. I don't think much academic work has been done on competitive cheerleading - even if it has, I bet hardly any of it is from post-modernists. But competitive cheerleading is weird as hell, because what is actually happening looks a lot like a snake eating its own tail (ouroboros, "Adaptation" - remember?). If they don't have a team to cheer for, who do they cheer for? They cheer for themselves. I'm completely serious. Perhaps it's better to think of it as mirrors that face each other or a perpetual motion machine or, better yet, absurdist theater.
First, the cheerleaders yell at you to cheer for them.
Second, the crowd cheers for the cheerleaders, because the cheerleaders told them to.
Theoretically, the crowd cheering will cause the object to do more of what they are doing, making this a potential inexhaustible source of energy.
But my comfortable distant intellectual appreciation for the activity seems to miss whatever "quality" component is hidden in it, because (according to my sister) they "sucked" today.
Another thing that shocked me is how many freaking digital video cameras were at this event. With the increasing ubiquity of broadband, I fear the embarassing record of home movies will actually begin invading email. Also, when they talk about how much information is being created, videos like this are included. And so is metacrap, like me talking about it.
