TeresaCentric

I just wanted to send a quick message of love to everyone who has left a comment on this blog since I started it four years (!) ago. Sometimes I feel like there just aren't enough hours in the day to respond to every wonderful thing you guys say, but I'm resolved to do better in the future after my marvelous conversation with the wonderful Liz Strauss yesterday. So how are you all? Please leave me updates about what you're doing this summer? Listen to any good music? Read any good books lately? *mwah* to all of you!

Yesterday, as I was heading into a meeting, my iPhone died. I had just finished listening to Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and was about to move on to Patti LaBelle's "Lady Marmalade" when my iPhone went into a kind of torpor. The screen went blank as though the device had been powered off. No amount of button pushing could resurrect it. After my meeting, I drove frantically to the Apple Store in University Village. One of the sales team there took my iPhone and plugged it into one of the many iPod chargers lined up along the tables. Instantly, the phone sprang back to life. Here's the problem: my phone's battery didn't die. I had charged it the night before, and after the brief plug-in at the Apple Store, the battery showed itself to be fully charged. The Mac geniuses told me nothing was wrong with it and sent me on my way. Just a few minutes ago, I put on Pat Benetar and once again got down to work. As "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" finished playing, the phone repeated its hibernation act of yesterday. At the moment, I can't get it to awaken. I fully expect that when I get home and plug it back into its charger, it will spring to life again and act completely normal for another day or so. Or until I listen to Pat Benatar again... UPDATE: I came home and plugged my phone in. Nothing happened. The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I picked up my home phone to call AppleCare. The geeks there told me to hold down the "home" button for a moment, then press the "on/off" button while still holding the "home" button. About fifteen seconds later, the silver apple appeared on the screen. It lingered there for a moment and then my phone was back. I listened to Pat Benatar again and this time, the phone didn't die. Patti LaBelle didn't break it either, so I guess my iPhone likes good music after all. Still, having to hard-reset a $650 piece of electronics after playing the same song twice in two days does not bode well. I'm still wondering whether I was an idiot to shell out for a 1.0 Apple product.

I can't decide who I should be more angry with right now, Representative Jerry Lewis and his Congressional allies, or President Bush and his cronies. Bush is currently showing a complete disregard for the idea of oversight, claiming executive privledge keeps his aides, such as Harriet Myers and Sarah Taylor, from testifying before Congress about the fact that he illegally politicized the Justice Department and then lied about it. Can we impeach him yet? Representative Jerry Lewis (R) is treating Congressional earmarks like his own personal piggy-bank. He just used 500,000 dollars of taxpayer funds to build a park in DC two blocks from his house. When questioned by reporter Anderson Cooper, he screamed at him and told him to get lost. Apparently trying to hold a Congressman accountable is no longer supposed to part of a reporter's job. I'm so disgusted by Washington right now I don't know what to do.

It seems that whenever J.K. Rowling writes a book more than 500 pages in length, the movie version inevitably sucks. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix -- which I saw with Andy and friends at midnight last night -- felt so utterly thrown together. There were many places where the filmmakers departed from the tremendous depth of storytelling in the book and relied on stupid contrivances to hold together what was little more than a sequential re-enactment of the most visually stimulating moments from the book. Here are just a few of the many issues I had with the film:

1. The first chapter was all wrong. The book starts off with an ennui-ridden Harry spending the summer in Little Whinging without a shred of news about the return of Voldemort. His frustration and anger at his wizarding friends, and the massive unfairness of life with the Dursleys sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Harry is a first-class prat a good deal of the time -- as teenage boys are prone to be.

   
   The movie took away all of that underlying motivation and went straight into the scene in which Harry and his horrible cousin are attacked by dementors. They don't mention that Mrs. Figg is a squib. They don't mention anything about Mundungus Fletcher going off after dodgy cauldrons. Rowling sets the whole rising action up so brilliantly in the book. The movie could have done it justice with just a couple extra minutes of screen time.

2. Fudge's motivation for not believing Voldemort is back is all wrong. They don't explain until halfway through the movie that Fudge isn't simply in denial because You-Know-Who was so terrible. His true motivation in the book is his fear and jealousy of Dumbledore's popularity and brilliance. This pops out unexpectedly with no set-up halfway through the film.
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3. Umbridge isn't nearly evil enough. Actress Imelda Staunton got the false, girlish sweetness down pat. But her performance did nothing to demonstrate the truly evil nature of this woman. In the book, I seethed right along with Harry at the injustice of Umbridge's rise to power at Hogwarts. In the film, her role was so one-dimensional that she didn't make me angry at all.


4. No Quidditch. And no "Weasley is our King" either.


5. Nothing about Ron and Hermione being prefects.


6. No Marietta Edgecombe. Instead, Cho Chang is the traitor, and there's nothing about veritaserum in the book. And no brilliant Hermione's enchanted parchment.


7. The Weasley's departure was quite lackluster. No everlasting swamp in the corridor.

I could go on about the many reasons why this movie didn't live up to the book, but those were the big ones. I don't think they should be making films of these books at all if they can't do them right.

Teresa and I have a long-standing debate. I think PC are superior because they are cheaper and compatible with more programs. Teresa prefers Mac's because they are easier to use, and don't crash or freeze up at least 3 times a day like my PC's do. So to settle this debate once and for all, I give you nerds rapping. As you can see from the rap battle, PC's are clearly superior. Feel free to comment on your preference.

Thank you for always being there for me. Sorry I didn't get a chance to beat you at scrabble on your birthday. I will defeat you promptly upon your return from Idaho. 07-07-07. What a lucky birthday date. Happy Birthday also to Esther and David. P.S. I know some of you might claim that today is Sunday, the eighth, not Saturday, the seventh, and that I'm writing this post one day too late. You're wrong.

My little brother -- who turns 12 tomorrow -- was complaining tonight that summer is massively boring. We suggested all the usual remedies: ride your bike, read a book, clean your room, but he wasn't having any of it. That's when I suggested that he get out his K'Nex, his legos, and all the other stuff in his room and turn it into a massive Rube Goldberg device. That got him going. We spent the rest of the evening working on it, but we're still not finished. The goal, to start out with a weight pulling downward and finishing by knocking a pickle into a jar. We'll see how this goes, but one thing's for certain: Rube Goldberg devices are excellent remedies for summer boredom.

This summer marks the forty-year anniversary of the "Summer of Love," or more aptly, the "Summer of Drugs" as Ted Nugent called it in his recent Op Ed piece. In 1967, the parents of today's twenty-somethings were twenty-somethings themselves, and many of them were running around making fools of themselves with wild parties, unprotected promiscuous sex and profligate drug use. That's why Jeffrey Zaslow's article in today's Wall Street Journal about my generation's sense of entitlement pisses me off so very much. In it, he relies on the same tired complaint uttered by generation after subsequent generation, "kids today!" He opens his article with a quote from Louisiana State University finance professor Don Chance about how very entitled his students feel. Every semester, Chance says, his students make "a pilgrimage to his office" to grade grub for A's they haven't earned. Zaslow then makes a huge, unsubstantiated leap from one professor's experience to blaming Mr. Rogers for a whole generation's supposed sense of entitlement. Zaslow argues that by telling us that we are all special just the way God made us, Mr. Rogers set us up for a lifetime of believing that the world owes us a living. Zaslow goes on to make a number of excellent points about parenting. He says that kids should be held accountable when they behave badly, instructed to call adults by their last names instead of their first names, and made to listen to adult conversations without interrupting. I agree with all of these parenting practices. But I still find Zaslow's assertion that there is something wrong with my generation as a whole -- based on anecdotal evidence -- to be profoundly misguided and offensive. But as long as we're relying on anecdotal evidence alone, let me run down the list of kids today that I know:

• Jeff Sommers, an officer in the Marine Corps, Jeff is on his third tour of duty in Iraq.
• Elliot J. Partin is also in the Marine Corps. Elliot is about to ship out for his third tour of duty in Iraq.
• Andrew Sparrow, my beloved fiancé who spends his life preparing today's high schoolers for the flat world challenges they will soon face. He could be making bank as a computer programmer. Instead, he teaches and I love him for it.
• Ellie and Dan Swanson. Recently married, Ellie and Dan are honeymooning in Costa Rica during their final summer vacation before returning to medical school. Incidentally, they're staying in hostels, not four-star resorts.
• Mark Melief, a good friend of mine who recently put his whole life back together from scratch. Instead of pouting about the tough times, Mark finds the silver lining and keeps on slugging.
• Nicole Cotes, recently returned to the Pacific Northwest after teaching underprivileged children in Chicago for a year.
• And on...and on...and on...

My generation are no slouches, Mr. Zaslow. Many of us are just as tough and hardworking as you and Dr. Chance. I'll admit freely that we don't measure up to our grandparents' generation. But there's absolutely no way that anyone born after 1940 has any right to complain about our supposed inadequacies as a group. And you certainly have no right to blame whatever sense of entitlement we do have on Mr. Rogers. After all, his show wasn't on the air when your generation was out running around stoned out of their minds and trying to fix the world by throwing flowers at the Russians.

Some students at my alma mater are working on a project for their campaigns and elections class. The project involves leveraging social media to gather support behind a fictitious candidate. They've chosen Bart Simpson as the man of the hour. Their goal is to get as many people to join their Facebook group supporting Bart Simpson or sign up on their Bart 4 Prez website. So if you're in favor of students using social media in their projects, perhaps you'll consider supporting Bart Simpson for president in 2008.

I ran into a reader at the Tully's near my house yesterday. He asked me why I had stopped video blogging and he told me that he thought I was a natural and should keep doing it. So here is my return to v-logging. It's a doozy. Hope you like it! UPDATE: YouTube is apparently not uploading my videos. I'm trying once more this morning and then I'm moving to some other service. UPDATE: I've now uploaded the video on Revver. It's working! As a bonus, here are the still shots we got.