Cecily von Ziegesar, the woman behind the popular Gossip Girl "novels," has a new book set to go on sale in a few week's time. I haven't read even a page of von Ziegesar's earlier work, though I have watched a few episodes of the television adaptation of her popular novels about Manhattan prep school teens. (Between the almost comical melodrama and arrant lack of realism, I've not become a regular viewer. I would, however, highly recommend Modern Family on ABC.) But von Ziegesar's latest work, titled Cum Laude, piqued my interest because it's set an élite liberal arts college in Maine. (It's worth mentioning that von Ziegesar attended Colby College.)

While I doubt I'll buy a copy of the novel, I did take ten minutes this morning to read an excerpt published on the Vanity Fair website. Based on what I read, I don't think Jane Austen or Edith Wharton need worry. Though I couldn't help but smirk when I read the first paragraph:

College is for lovers. At least, this one was. Looming up out of the trees on its hilly pedestal, Dexter College looked so strikingly pretty and at the same time so quaintly academic, it was almost as out of place in its rural setting as some of its students. Homeward Avenue, the road that led uphill to campus from Interstate 95, continued down the hill to the blink-and-you'll-miss-it town of Home, Maine, which consisted of a Walmart, a Shop 'n Save, the Rod and Gun Club, and a few other mom-and-pop shops frequented only by locals.

Substitute "Bates" for "Dexter," and swap out some of the other street and place names, and one has a remarkably good description of my school.

Many people swear by the folks at the Consumers Union who publish, among other titles, the immensely powerful Consumer Reports magazine. At an intellectual level, I like the concept. That the Consumers Union does not accept advertising and pays full retail prices for the products it reviews gives their opinions authority. But I feel like the reviews in Consumer Reports do a poor job of giving consumers good, actionable advice.

The way they review computers — the cover story in their latest issue — particularly irritates me. They spend an inordinate number of column inches on the nitty-gritty technical specifications of each machine, rather than on more understandable metrics. Telling "average" consumers a particular model comes with an Intel Core i7-720QM serves only to confuse them. It's akin listing the specific nozzle configuration of each dishwasher in their kitchen appliance reviews. As with dishwashers — where all that really matters is how well a particular nozzle configuration actually cleans dishes — all that really matters when it comes to reviewing computers is how well it computes. I feel like it would be much more illuminating for Reports to score each model from "Poor" to "Excellent" on more understandable, if less easily quantified, metrics, such as, "Web Browsing," "Cutting-Edge 3D Games," or, "Video Editing."

Moreover, the folks writing in Reports have a tendency to, perhaps implicitly, "over recommend" when it comes to computers. In their latest ranking, the top-of-the-range Apple iMac with a 27" display, which runs nearly $2000 as tested, earned the top score among all-in-one desktop computers. At some level, the machine probably ought to be the top-rated machine. The 27" iMac is indeed very fast; it has a gorgeous, enormous display; and it comes with a lot of consumer features like a wireless keyboard-mouse pair. But I'm sure many people wind up buying that model rather than a similar PC or a smaller (and cheaper) 21" iMac better suited to their needs. I would wager that most consumers would be much happier with a $1500 21" iMac and $500 to spend on a new kitchen television or leaf blower. (This does a good job of illustrating the power of deciding at the margin.)

Likewise, some of their reviews of "chain services" (e.g., chain restaurants, chain hotels) always strike me as rather off. In this month's review of chain hotels, for example, they listed "typical" nightly rates at the Ritz-Carlton as somewhere between $200 and $400, which struck me as low. A quick availability check on the Ritz-Carlton website reveals that the range is appropriate for a basic room, on average: $150 in Dearborn, Michigan compared to $750 in New York City. With services like hotels, I feel like information that accounts for regional differences in living costs would be useful.

The way the hotel ratings are structured also provides a useful lesson in statistics. The review divides the chain hotels into categories on the basis of "fanciness." The Hilton brand falls in the "Luxury" category, while the Radisson brand falls into the "Upscale" category, for instance. And within each category the hotels differ in overall score by very few points, so few, in fact, the differences must be statistically insignificant. Meaning the magazine should scrap their cute table of bars and circles and just say, "Pick a hotel that fits your budget."

(Aside: I was disappointed the hotel review didn't include the Four Seasons. They have a really bizarre management and ownership structure, and I was hoping Reports would confirm the genius of their unorthodox arrangement.)

That said, I do tend to trust the Consumers Union when it comes to cars. In that product category they blow their competitors out of the water. Note that they don't usually spend a whole lot of time discussing the intricacies of vehicles' breaking or steering systems. Instead, they simply provide a nice concise evaluation, using stopping distances — a metric far more easily understood and meaningful than, say, FLOPS, in measuring computational speed — in the case of a car's breaking system. And it's doubtful people will buy "too much car," as they break their car reviews down not by form factor, but by vehicle classes, which tend to correspond quite closely to price and features.

I'm not entirely sure what the "lesson" is in this case. Perhaps that any organization with the aim of helping people make informed decisions should map domain-specific knowledge to metrics meaningful to readers. Think, "great for editing HD video," instead of, "60 gigaFLOPS of computing power."

(Programming note: For those wondering why I haven't posted anything for quite awhile, I'm currently working to migrate my blog to a bespoke Ruby on Rails application. Needless to say, it's taking longer than I had anticipated. Hopefully that will go online late this month. Until then, I'll probably post somewhat more infrequently than usual.)

Given the hubbub surrounding FOX's latest television hit Glee, I interrupted my studying this morning to watch the first twenty minutes or so of last night's episode. I'm not going to become a regular viewer, nor do I intend to provide a critical commentary that's particularly broad or insightful.

No, I want to comment on the way that the producers of the show have chosen to present the musical numbers that have (or so I understand) made the show as popular as it has become. As is obvious to anyone watching with even a modicum of understanding of television production, the music backing the musical numbers is recorded and mixed in a studio. It sounds good, from a technical perspective, as it should, given that it was recorded and mixed in a studio with lots of post. And to a certain extent I can understand why the producers choose to do this. It's hard enough to use the live sound from the sound stage or location that most big budget commercial films go to the trouble of dubbing the dialog in a studio.

But I don't understand why the producers choose to give the music a "recorded in a studio" feel. With modern music mixing and editing tools, I feel like it must be possible to process and mix the music so that the music at least sounds like it was recorded on the stage at some high school (or an idealized high school auditorium setting) rather than in a recording booth.

First and foremost, it would make the show sound more realistic. It smacks of Hollywood trickery when the vocal tracks don't echo or reverberate at all, even when a character is singing in a tiled hallway. Beyond that though, the technical quality the producers lend to the kids when they descend into a musical number gives people unrealistic expectations of what they ought to achieve if they decide to take up singing, or another musical pursuit. I'm sure more than a few reasonably talented teenagers have given up on singing or the violin because they can't match the professional musicians' meticulously edited and manipulated performances.

Not that the producers changing the way they post the show's music tracks would likely have an influence on my becoming a regular viewer. The music aside, I just don't find Glee all that compelling.

I've had my iPad for over a week now. It hasn't changed my life nearly as much as the iPhone, but I'm not sure how I ever managed to live without it. It's certainly preferable to my laptop for "light" computing, such as reading research papers and blogs, or browsing the iTunes Store.

(Some people have complained to me about the lack of PDF annotation tools. One can't, for instance, highlight a sentence in a PDF document on the iPad. I'm of the opinion that highlighters serve no purpose, so I can't say I really mind.)

But there is one feature of the iPad I could live without: the attention it gives me. While many people don't give me a second glance when I'm sitting in a corner reading Les Echos on my iPad, many other people have what seems an uncontrollable urge to exclaim, "Is that an iPad?" and ask me for a demonstration. Admittedly, if I'm not doing anything particularly important, it doesn't bother me all that much to pause and show off the pinch-to-zoom features in the Photos application. And, given I'm on a college campus, it's not as if I don't know most of these people anyway. Still, there are occasions when I just want to sit and read my economics journal without any disturbance.

I really hope everyone on my flight to Portland this Saturday has an iPad. People have shown no hesitation in inquiring about my Kindle, and I doubt they'll attempt to contain their curiosity any more when it comes to a product as "hot" as the iPad. And, unlike encounters on the street or in the grocery store, it's not as if I have a credible excuse (or even the possibility) of walking away to avoid answering a litany of basic questions about the device's specifications one could easily find on Apple's website.

Should be fun.

While I'm hardly a public relations or marketing expert, I do like to think I know a thing or two about the world of social media. So it came as somewhat of a surprise when I discovered a piece in Vanity Fair a few weeks ago about something called "haul vlogging." In retrospect, that I hadn't heard of haul vlogging should not have come as too much of a surprise, however, given that I'm not a sixteen year old girl.

The typical haul vlog — think blog with a "v" for video — is one teenage girl's attempt to share with the world the fruits of her forays into the perilous world that is the American shopping mall. Generally, the teenager in question sits in front of a stationary camera and shows off her latest purchases accompanied by a variety of banal and superficial comments. I sat through juicystar07's "What's In My Bag?!" in preparation for this post, in which juicystar07 shares such wonderful details as the make and model of her purse.

To be blunt, I find these videos' subject matter and presentation soporific and mind-numbingly dull. But that's not really a criticism of juicystar07, or any other haul vlogger. I'm sure most of them would find the lectures I watch online about dynamic programming quite dull as well.

Though I do find these haul vlogs fascinating in many ways, and immensely troubling in others.

On the one hand, these illustrate the wondrous power of the Internet. If not for YouTube and inexpensive video capture equipment, most of these mall divas would likely have no way to share their opinions with and influence their peers around the world. It's quite remarkable, if incredibly boring for someone like me to watch.

But on the other hand, I take issue with the sort of superficiality that most of these haul vloggers promote. In the video I referenced above, the girl even makes the comment that she has no idea what differentiates her iPhone 3G from her iPhone 3GS. And it's telling that she really only knows three facts about her Louis Vuitton handbag: its make, its model number and the fact that the color of its handles shows its age. I have no problem with people buying purses from Louis Vuitton. I do have a problem with people buying them more or less for the sole purpose of being able to show off the fact they own a Louis Vuitton purse. I might have held up her video as an example of the ideal consumer if she had instead given some commentary about seam strength, and the way her particular bag exemplified solid, quality construction.

I briefly considered starting my own parody, perhaps titled "Pretentious Minimalist Things," but then it struck me that people might take it seriously.

And now, back to my paper on credit rationing.

From time to time the fine folks who run our dining commons allow a student or two to play deejay for the evening, regaling diners with whatever bizarre blend of music they wish. I've rarely been thrilled with the musical selections made by these individuals, though I'd be the first to admit I have far from typical preferences when it comes to music. (There's also not quite right about eating dinner to the sounds of a dance anthem.)

What really bugs me about most of these would-be deejays, though, is not so much the music they play, but the quality of the recordings of the music they play. More often than not, it's apparent they either ripped the song from a CD seven years ago or, more likely, downloaded it from some metaphorical Internet back alley without looking at the encoding information.

Back in the dark ages, when dial-up Internet connections were the norm and music players measured their capacity in megabytes rather than gigabytes, this tradeoff between sound quality and file size made sense. It was impossible to squeeze more than a few dozen songs onto a Diamond Rio (remember them?) with a quarter gigabyte of storage. Even the original iPod — with 5 gigabytes of storage at $399 — would only hold about 500 songs encoded at 256 kbps. Portability and flexibility came at the price of inferior audio quality.

Today, however, when even the most inexpensive iPod comes with eight gigabytes of memory and even a basic laptop ships with a capacious hard disk whose capacity is measured in hundreds of gigabytes, this tradeoff makes no sense. In fact, the two largest retailers of digital music — Amazon.com and Apple — now sell tracks encoded at 256 kbps, and many classical labels sell tracks encoded in a lossless format. So why do people persist in tolerating low-quality recordings?

Most people I ask this question say something to the effect of, "This music sounds good enough to me." Which drives me crazy. Anyone who claims they can't hear the difference between a track encoded at 128 kbps and 256 kbps should have their hearing checked. (Or buy a pair of halfway decent speakers.) I don't see why we should settle for less when having more has virtually zero cost.

It's that time of year again. The time of the year when I try to find a pirated copy of the latest album from Les Enfoirés, the French musical group that raises money for the folks at Les Restaurants du Coeur. Not that I want to pirate the music. I'd be more than happy to pay $10 or even 10€ for the album. That is, if I could find a channel to purchase a legitimate digital copy of the album outside of France without a French credit card. And, as I've blogged before, it's not exactly easy to find a pirated copy of the album, given that the proceeds from album sales go to help the impoverished. It's absurd to think I can read newspapers from around the world without a hitch and browse the Web on my iPhone, but I can only obtain this music, which was probably created using digital tools, by physically importing a jewel case and plastic disc from France.

On a related note, I just obtained a copy of Ellie Goulding's new album "Lights," which has just gone on sale in the UK to great success. It's actually not bad, and it's also very difficult to obtain through legitimate channels in the United States without paying $50 for an imported copy. I also recently downloaded an interesting album of world music titled "Un cri dans l'ébène" from a group called Titom, which can be found in the iTunes Store and at Amazon.com. It reminds me vaguely of the soundtrack to the British drama-comedy television series, Monarch of the Glen, though nowhere near as cliché or cloying.

(Addendum: Apparently "Un cri dans l'ébène" is a collection of traditional music from the French region of Bretagne, princiapally that played at the Fest Noz. Remarkable how similar it is to traditional Scottish music.)

This will be short. There's still more liquidity analysis to do.

At any rate, as I skimmed my Twitter feed and various news blogs, I couldn't help but notice a huge volume of people whining, moaning and groaning about the new Facebook redesign. So I visited my Facebook account — something I try to avoid — to see what everyone was complaining about.

It looks almost exactly the same. Sure, Mark and his pals have made a few adjustments to the placement of controls and to the application's design. But nothing looks so completely different that I can even begin to imagine why people feel obliged to rant and rave about the new look.

If anything, this supports my thesis that most normal computer users would prefer a computing appliance, such as the iPad, to a full-blown general purpose computer.

I'm in the middle of a horribly boring and incredibly tedious homework assignment. If I never have to compute another liquidity ratio in my life, I shall be a happy man. So, to interrupt the tedium, I'm going to put up another tirade about NBC's coverage of the Olympic games.

As I've written before, I really only watch three sporting events with any real interest: the soccer World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Olympics, summer and winter alike. But yet again NBC, the official broadcaster of the Olympic games here in the United States, has decided to air almost none of the events live. According to one article I read, only curling and ice hockey will be streamed live online. Only curling and ice hockey! It's like living in 1999, albeit with higher fidelity video and audio. And on top of that, much of the content shown on NBC and its sister networks will be tape-delayed and packaged with all manner of stupid interstitial videos about the number of times some snowboarder cut open her thumb while tuning her equipment.

The tape delays aren't quite as objectionable when the games take place in a distant time zone. But there's no excuse for tape delaying events on the West Coast when cities like San Francisco and Portland are in the same time zone as Vancouver.

At the very least, the folks at NBC should put live streams of the events online for people like me who prefer to watch sports live. For that matter, I would even pay — though admittedly not all that much — to watch the games online. It's the 21st century Jeff Zucker. Wake up!

I just started reading Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, which chronicles the collapse of the financial industry in the fall of 2008. It's an excellent read. Unlike many of the professorial types who have written analyses or other accounts of the financial crisis, Sorkin can really write. Too Big to Fail reads more like a detective novel than a boring academic treatise, and, for those who do not speak financial-ese, Sorkin limits his use of confusing financial jargon.

The book is not illuminating solely because it does a good job of walking the reader through the events leading up to the big bank bailouts and breaking down the complicated chain of events that led to the bailouts. Too Big to Fail avoids the petty politics that have colored the debate over the bailouts and bank regulation. It also helps one form a more nuanced view of the government intervention and the role of banks. Rather than painting executives like Lehman's Richard Fuld or firms like Goldman Sachs, purely as incompetent or villainous, Sorkin more or less sticks to the facts.

Highly recommended.

For better of worse, Pachelbel's Canon in D has become a staple of wedding ceremonies. It's a nice, if somewhat overplayed, piece of music. Except that wedding planners have conspired to have the life sucked out of nearly every recording of the song I've ever listened to. The Canon in D is not a funeral march or the overture for a depressing operetta. It's meant to be played with life and energy at a moderate tempo. I shouldn't feel like the musicians playing it are still recovering from night of Ambien-induced sleep.

But I have recently come across two excellent recordings of the song played by musicians who do not take orders from the cabal of musically ignorant wedding planners. One is from Daniel Hope's excellent album "Air: A Baroque Journey." (For whatever reasons that album is only available in the US via the Deutsche Grammophon online store.) The other is from Reinhard Goebel's recording of Pachelbel, Bach, Handel and Vivaldi.

After my workout this morning, I popped into Commons to have breakfast. Normally, this is not something I would write about. As evidence, I don't think I've ever posted anything about this aspect of my routine before. But what I witnessed this morning was so strange, so out-of-the-ordinary and so remarkable, I had to write about it. For, when I entered the dining room this morning at around 9:30 AM, all the tables were clean. I'm sure to some this does not seem remarkable or particularly noteworthy. But to me it was a small miracle.

Because I don't like to eat breakfast at 6:45 or dinner at 4:30, I'm never in Commons just after they open, when everything is spotless. So I usually find myself sitting at a table that is, to one degree or another, covered with the remnants of someone else's meal. As something of a clean-freak, this always makes me uncomfortable. I like to eat on clean surfaces.

Until this morning, I never really understood this phenomenon. My fellow students may not know as math as much as I think they should, or share my opinion that pajamas should not be worn in public. But they are definitely not lazy or unconcerned for the welfare of others. When I read stories about people collecting the lids of yogurt containers to help children in need, I usually feel a twinge of guilt for sitting at my desk and trying to understand the Khun-Tucker Theorem instead of raising money to dig wells in Cambodia.

This morning, though, I concluded that some people must be sloppy and lazy. For this weekend is parents' weekend, when parents from all over New England come to see a highly-stylized version of their son's or daughter's college experience. And with parents everywhere — parents who admonish their children for eating like dinosaurs and leaving half-eaten sandwiches splayed on the table — there was hardly a stray crumb to be found. I'm sure the lazy mess-makers fit into a Pareto distribution (so about 20% of the people make about 80% of the mess), but it's nevertheless disheartening. Not to mention, I'd bet money the 80% of us who don't leave partially eaten slices of pizza behind would be much less uncomfortable, or at least less like to contract a nasty virus.

As I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog many times, I'm not exactly the world's biggest sports fan. So forgive me for not writing this commentary sooner.

Anyway, I learned the other day that the National Football League (that's "American Football" for any international readers) offers a special channel on most cable and satellite systems called the NFL RedZone. The channel is basically a live mash-up of a given Sunday's plethora of football games, so that whenever a given team in a given game is inside the 20 yard line, the channel will switch to that game. (I'm not afraid to admit that I only have a vague understanding of what the latter part of that last sentence means and why it's a good criterion for determining when a game is about to be exciting.)

My inner-technologist really likes the idea of a curated channel for sports fans. While I'm about as close to being a die-hard football fan as Earth is to Alpha Centauri, I have watched enough football (if very passively) to know that the games can be very boring and devoid of action at times. So I can imagine why someone who loves football as much as I love object-oriented programming would like the idea of having a feed of only the "cream of the crop" moments from a day's football lineup.

But at the same time, I worry that services like the NFL's RedZone only serve to reinforce our society's freakishly short attention span.

Even something as simple (from a technical standpoint) as the president's weekly video address has a cut every few seconds, as if people will somehow be more interested in what the president has to say about tax policy if they are treated to alternately close and wide shots of the president's upper body. Further, the latter four minutes president's five-minute videos are really just recapitulating the well-articulated, but vague and unexplained first minute.

By contrast, FDR's original fireside chats sometimes lasted a half hour, and were usually genuine efforts to educate the public about everything from the role of banks in an economy to the dynamics of inflation, not just superficial assertions that "banks play an important role." I don't think I've ever heard a modern politician mention — let alone explain — the concept of purchasing power parity, as FDR did in one of his addresses. (Or at least not in a message intended for the general public.)

Even in football, I suspect the true magic of a game is not to be found only its most intense moments, or in the final coup de grâce — when one team is on the brink of making a game-changing move — but rather in the sum of the small strategic steps each team or player makes in pursuit of victory.

Focusing solely on the sensational and the superficial, while perhaps more relaxing or "pleasurable," blinds us from understanding and really appreciating greatness. Just as I suspect citizens would not be as angry about the bank bailouts if they took the time to genuinely understand how our financial system works, I also believe even the most die-hard football fan would have an even greater, deeper understanding of their passion if they took the time to appreciate more than the touchdowns alone.

I'm back at school. The food is still reasonably good. The summer weather is still a touch too humid. The state of Maine has yet to entice the folks at Design Within Reach to put an outlet within its borders.

Classes don't begin until Wednesday, leaving me with little to do but work on my Rails application and trawl through other people's shared iTunes libraries. It is the latter boredom-buster that is the subject of this post.

In browsing a few dozen different libraries, I have discovered that real people really do buy those weird "100 Most Relaxing Classical Songs" CDs peddled by home spa companies and questionable music labels. I find their existence troubling.

First and foremost, the recordings on these CDs are terrible. If these "Best of Bach" compilation discs are the only exposure people have to classical music, I can hardly blame them for not liking it more. One recording of Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto I sampled must have been played by a group of musicians on mood stabilizers. It was the most lifeless recording I've ever listened to.

More bizarrely still, none of the compilation albums I sampled bothered to include a single work in its entirety. I suppose this might be a benevolent omission, given how awful the recordings are. But it still seems like an insult to only include the first movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Of course, this particular defect in the albums's compositions might have more to do with our collective short attention span than bad taste on the part of the person putting the CDs together. (If people have trouble reaching the end of a four minute tune by Justin Timberlake, it's not too much of a stretch to assume they'll never make it through all 22 minutes of the Sixth Symphony.)

If you own one of these albums, please delete the music from your hard drive and buy a good album by a good artist. I'd highly recommend Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble's recording of Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony, or Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu's recording of Mozart's Piano-Violin sonatas K. 301, 204, 376 & 526 as good places to start.

Every year, a group of French musicians band together to raise money for Les restaurants du coeur ("Restaurants of the Heart"), an organization that provides hot meals to those in need. The entertainers, who are collectively referred to as Les Enfoirés (literally, "The Dumbasses"), put on a big benefit concert, and release a CD with studio-recorded and live versions of the music. The proceeds from the concert ticket and CD sales support the charity.

I like to keep a dash of French pop music in my music collection to keep up my French language skills, and I've found the albums released by Les Enfoirés usually have a nice mix of listenable, popular tunes I can live with.

But obtaining this music outside of France is a challenge.

In a perfect world, I would be able to buy the album online — though iTunes or another digital music distribution channel — from the comfort of my desk. I wish this were possible not only because I want to compensate the artists for their work, but also because the proceeds support a worthwhile cause. For whatever reasons, though, the music never appears in the iTunes Store outside its French flavor. (Probably something to do with licensing, but that's another story.)

In theory that would leave me with two options: buy an imported CD from France or download an illegal copy of the music from a seedy corner of the Internet. Frankly, I would prefer the latter method, despite my obsession with following rules and regulations. Amazon.com, for instance, charges almost $56 for the group's 2009 compilation, Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma — the same product that sells on iTunes France for about 15 Euros.

Strangely, though, I have not been able to find a high-quality pirated copy of the album, even after months of searching. When it first occurred to me that I would never find a pirated copy of the album, I was nonplussed. Now I am in awe.

People in France, it seems, realized that putting pirated copies of the album online would deprive a laudable charity of money to do good, and they thus decided not to put pirated copies online.

As an example, I found one low-quality copy of Les Enfoirés font leur cinéma on a BitTorrent site that will remain unnamed. In the comments area on the download page, commenters fell into one of two camps. Those in the first group chastised the person responsible for posting the file for depriving the needy of food. Those in the second group implored people who downloaded the album illegally to buy a copy of the album to avoid depriving the needy of food.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw about this, but I thought it was something worth mentioning.

For years I have mocked and derided a certain television program called The OC. I watched one episode a few years ago, and I couldn't understand what everyone loved about it. Now I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I was wrong. As it turns out, The OC is a reasonably good program. (If we exclude Mischa Barton's insane suicidal character.)

Before I offer my critique, I should explain the circumstances that led me to watch enough episodes of The OC -- and I have now watched more episodes than I care to admit -- to change my mind. After an oral surgery on Tuesday, I had a mandate from my periodontist to take prescription painkillers, which rob me of my ability to do just about everything. So I pulled up Hulu and looked for something to watch. What made me decide to revisit The OC I don't know, but after I watched the pilot, I realized I had made a grave error in judgement.

The show has wonderfully witty dialogue and a healthy dose of humor. It's clear the writers don't take the genre or the format too seriously. The characters' frequent references to "The Valley" -- a fictional television show about wealthy, attractive teenagers in California -- demonstrates a laudable level of self-mockery. In the series finale, when one of the characters comments, "You know these teen dramas go on forever," I laughed out loud. High praise indeed, given how rarely that happens when I'm watching TV.

I also found the characters far more personable and down-to-earth than the standard cast of run-of-the-mill vapid socialites on most such shows. While not everyone I know owns beachfront property in California or has an infinity pool in their backyard, at least none of the characters had valets or a helicopter at their beck and call.

And to all my classmates in high school who compared me to Seth Cohen: you were absolutely right. I doubt whether anyone would be surprised if I developed a color-coded holiday cheer scale using shades of beige. The outright overlap in our wardrobes makes me wonder if the show's producers had people tailing me at Urban Outfitters.

That said, the writers could have toned down Marissa Cooper (Mischa Barton's character). As I moved from season one into season two, I found myself fast forwarding through the scenes where she has a profound emotional breakdown. Once in awhile would be tolerable, but it seemed to me she was on the verge of leaping off a cliff in just about every episode.

Certainly, the quality of the show took a serious dive in season three -- I only sampled the third and fourth seasons -- but it is a pretty good show nevertheless. It's not on par with with a Victor Hugo novel by any means, but it's leaps and bounds better than the bulk of the garbage networks air. (And far, far, far better than the creator's current project Gossip Girl.) To all those I mocked and teased over the past six years, I apologize.

Followers of popular culture no doubt associate Joanne Rowling's Lord Voldemort with the pseudonym "you-know-who." Over the last 48 hours, I have adopted the sobriquet to reference a certain recently deceased pop star without actually mentioning the aforementioned pop star's name. (I don't want to give this person any more direct attention.)

But to the real issue. Earlier today the US House passed a monumental — if imperfect — piece of climate change legislation by a narrow margin, just 219 votes for the bill to 212 votes against. Yet, if one visits The New York Times website or the BBC News homepage, articles about you-know-who continue to take center stage.

This really, really bothers me. On the one hand we have a story about a piece of legislation, which represents a monumental step forward in the US policy toward climate change. Moreover, the legislation, if enacted, would have an enormous impact on citizens and corporations. On the other we have the death of an relatively influential person. I don't see how the later trumps the former in terms of its importance.

I'm not a big sports person. But I've always wondered why a) Americans do not like soccer as much as people in other countries and b) why America has such a terrible national soccer team.

I was in France for the bulk of the 2006 World Cup, and, upon learning I was an American, few people missed the chance to mock the performance of the US team in that competition. (Recall that the US only managed to tie in its match against Italy when one of the Italian players inadvertently nudged the ball into the Italian goal for the Americans.)

So I must take this moment to congratulate the US team for their remarkable 2-0 victory against top-ranked Spain at the Confederations Cup in South Africa yesterday. It may compel me to actually watch the final round of the Cup later in the week.

As if featuring Alan Colmes as a co-host were not pitiful enough, apparently Sean Hannity — on his new program creatively titled Hannity — will now feature a segment for irate viewers to call in and express their frustration with Sean Hannity's stupidity. To quote Broadcasting & Cable:

That Mr. Hannity complains about the "liberal media" sullying the nation's political discourse is ironic.

For whatever reason, I decided to start using Facebook in French. While I'm not a native French speaker, I at least like to believe that I know enough about the language to spot glaring grammatical problems.

At any rate, I noticed that the whizzes at Facebook have yet to write the code to adjust adjectives to the proper form, masculine or feminine. Take, for example, a person tagged in a photo. If the person tagged is male, then the notification should read, "Robert a été marqué dans un album." On the other hand, if the person tagged is female, then the notification should read, "Marie a été marquée dans un album." (Note the extra e at the end of "marquée.") Instead, Facebook just splits the difference and pretends it knows nothing about the gender of the person in the photo: "Albert a été marqué(e) dans un album."

Facebook's approach is not incorrect per se. The whole parenthetical e maneuver is commonly used in situations where the gender of the person mentioned is unknown, such as on a signup form on a website. But, given the huge amount of information users willingly give to Facebook, I feel like they should (and can afford to) pay someone to leverage the gender information each user provides to remove the parenthetical e!

I'm sick. And I have been for the last three days. As someone who firmly believes recovery and stress do not mix well, I've spent most of my recovery time sleeping or reading obscure 19th century French literature. But as much as I enjoy dreaming and struggling with dead verb tenses, I have also caved to popular culture and watched a few episodes of Gossip Girl on the Internet.

Admittedly, Gossip Girl would not have been my first choice. Digging through the iTunes Store, however, it quickly became clear that I have already seen all of the "good" television produced in the last decade. I also feel uncomfortably pretentious, judgmental and elitist whenever I comment on the television adaptation of the Gossip Girl novels with, "I've heard the books read like one giant product placement." Thus I spent a few hours in the company of Blair, Dan, Serena and the rest of the melodramatic, judgmental ensemble of fictional Manhattanites.

While I doubt I will become an avid follower of the series, it has some merits. The costume design is nothing short of incredible. Everyone looks very sharp, though not at the expense of conveying their personalities. I only wish there existed a real college campus where everyone looked so sharp. People should at least change out of their pajamas to attend class.

I have also become a great fan of Blake Lively's voice. It reminds me of a chocolate-covered sea salt caramel. It's sensuous, smooth and sultry, but with a pleasant bite and a wonderful, unquantifiable playfulness. If Ms. Lively ever narrates a documentary, I intend to be the first in line for tickets.

Above all else, though, Gossip Girl makes me question the influence of mass media and popular culture on today's — shall we say — young adults.

Teen-oriented television brims with female characters who have their cake and eat it too. Gossip Girl's Blair, for instance, sits at the top of her fictional preparatory school's social hierarchy and manages to maintain an implied high level of academic achievement. Likewise, Serena, the program's protagonist, seems assured a fictional place at Yale College and garners the attention the the series' namesake Gossip Girl. (A brief aside. Gossip Girl has a particularly sophisticated method of disseminating her blog posts. No blog I know of sends multimedia messages with pictures, video and sound to all of its subscribers whenever something new goes online.)

The male characters, however, seem forced to choose between social smarts or book smarts. Serena's love interest, Dan, never displays any real mastery of social skills, though he undoubtedly comes across as intelligent. On the other side of the coin, Chuck, the chauvinist playboy and occasional antagonist in the series, has a clear mastery of social skills, but never really displays any intellectual ability beyond a knack for scheming.

Similarly, NBC's The Office — arguably a more male-oriented program — portrays the male characters as irresponsible, oblivious, negligent, or simply all three. Based on the one episode of The Office I've seen, I would not hesitate to call Steve Carrell's character an idiot.

How hard would it be to pen a popular television series featuring Blair Waldorf's male twin as its protagonist?

While women still experience some level of discrimination in the workplace, my personal observations suggest that the young women of America's schools, colleges and universities, work — on average — much harder than their male counterparts. Obviously, a number of factors play into this lack of motivation, but I feel like popular culture reinforces unfortunate stereotypes and something need be done.

Apparently unschooling is the new schooling. Apparently intellectualism has become so repugnant to some parents that to simply not teach their children at all has become popular in some circles. In fact, the movement has spawned its own hideous green-and-white website where interested parents can read all about the merits of not actually educating their children. (There's something mildly ironic about that last sentence.)

The idea, as I understand it, is that by simply aiding their children in exploring the wonders of everyday life — albeit in more depth than one might traditionally do so — children will learn by some kind of mysterious osmosis. As the unschooling.org home page says about math and unschooling:

Sure. Because the average parent would look at a quilt and immediately leap into a discussion of non-Euclidian geometry, or because the average parent will look at a can of paint and start babbling on and on about algebraic rings. Math, and really the bulk of traditional education, will, as the unschooling.org folks correctly note, have little use in a person's everyday life. Learning about algebraic rings, however, does serve a purpose; it exposes people to complicated ideas, which — if understood — lead to real learning.

This whole plan depends upon the motivation of teenagers, the intelligence of parents generally and sheer happenstance for presenting the right context for a learning experience. Three very capricious variables indeed. The mere presence of the question, "Is this legal?" on their FAQ page should be enough to kill the movement.

Though I don't think anyone put it better than Harvard College Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath in a recent interview: "Having no academic experience is a profound disadvantage for students applying to college."

Earlier this evening, as the newly crowned Webmaster of the Bates College Student Government, I sat in on a mostly uneventful meeting of the Student Government's RA, or "Representative Assembly." At one point, however, my attention was piqued by a complaint raised by one representative unhappy with our dining commons' breakfast offerings. He complained that, after he spent many months moaning and groaning, our dinning commons still serves meatless sausages — for the apparently large, or perhaps just influential, vegan population — at breakfast.

I generally object to faux-meat products. If I'm going to cook something vegetarian or vegan food, I don't want to imitate beef or chicken. At the same time, however, I have no problem with vegetarian food or vegan food per se. I frequently skip the questionable corn dogs and fried fish on offer for a heaping plate of chickpea curry and rice.

Nevertheless, I see this representative's question as a brilliant example of one of America's fundamental nutritional problems. People seem to think, or have been brainwashed by large agribusiness, that protein is the only food capable of providing "energy" and the only "real" food. First, if it's energy people want, they should be eating food with lots of sugar, for a quick spike of energy, or, for sustained energy, something with a low glycemic index number, such as whole grains or pasta. Second, most of the protein produced in this country contributes to global warming and the inhumane treatment of animals.

More importantly, though, while there is nothing wrong with protein, people who eat lots of protein tend to substitute protein for other food. In other words, people eat protein rather than whole grains or vegetables. And that's not good.

Americans need to redefine the place of protein in their diets. There's nothing wrong with meatless sausage. (Though I would argue there are better ways for vegans to have protein at breakfast.) But there is a big problem with the perception that we need to consume so much meat; that we need protein at the center of our diets. We don't. It's not healthy. Something needs to change.

For whatever reason, I decided to join Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that allows people to broadcast the mundane aspects of their day-to-day existence to the world. But as much as I love the concept, I have realized that Twitter is more or less useless without more than a few people to follow.

Apparently, my friends are just too cool to use Twitter. Arriving at that realization was really quite comical. I exported my 300 or so contacts from Address Book into my Gmail account so Twitter would be able to access all of their email addresses. Then I clicked on the "continue" button and waited. I could not and cannot believe that, of the 300ish people in my Address Book, only one person has a Twitter account!

Anyway, for those people who have a desire to read about the mundane aspects of my life, I can be found at twitter.com/josephkibe.

The President of the United States may not command the same salary as Fortune 500 executive, but it would be difficult to argue that the nation's head of the executive branch has any less responsibility. Thus my argument. No corporation would ever hire Governor Palin or Senator McCain* as its CEO, therefore it's laughable to even consider either of them becoming, effectively, the CEO of the United States Federal Government.

Now imagine my surprise when former HP CEO turned senior McCain economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, made these comments on a radio program this morning:

* I can, however, imagine a corporation hiring McCain as either a lobbyist or some kind of political consultant. He would be very, very good at either of those jobs with his CV and Rolodex.

On my recent trip to the Bay Area, I poked my head into more than a few shops, looking for this, that and the other. Two stand out because they present such a paradoxical contrast. I speak of H&M — the IKEA of clothing, as I like to call it — and Theory, the ultra-minimalist high-fashion label. One offers oodles of clothing at shockingly low prices, while the other peddles a much smaller assortment with much heftier price tags. For a culture that usually equates wealth with the mythical concept of More, this seems weird.

For anyone not familiar with H&M, the fast-fashion label has its roots in Sweden. It made a name for itself largely by offering fashionable clothing at obscenely low prices. More recently, the company has co-opted everyone from Roberto Cavalli to Madonna to design everything from chic dresses to lurid velour jogging suits.

The principal H&M shop in San Francisco, located just a few blocks off Market on Powell, is a feast for the senses. Enormous video monitors cover the walls, flashing H&M propaganda at regular intervals. Loud, pulsing music gives the shop the air of a European discotheque. But, above all else, the store brims with clothing in every imaginable color, shape and size.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, entering the Theory store on über-fashionable Maiden Lane might be compared to entering a prison. Aside from floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, the store's interior has no color whatsoever. The walls, the floor and the ceiling are all neutral gray concrete. Neither dark, nor light. Dull, neutral gray. Only the small army of smartly-dressed salespeople, the smattering of mostly monochrome clothing, and the conspicuous absence of dirt and dust offer any indication that Al Capone isn't lurking in a dark corner.

But how on earth did our society arrive at this point? Five hundred years ago, had I presented the average Genovese sailor with one store selling oodles of brightly colored clothing in every imaginable shape and size, and another peddling a sparse assortment of black pants and simple shirts, the average Genovese sailor would have insisted the former, not the latter, was the province of the well-to-do. Only the aristocracy could have afforded such abundance!

Yet here we are. I can only suppose that minimalism appeals to up-market shoppers precisely because more down-market shops, like H&M, have such exuberant wares on hand, in much the same way that utensil-free eating has become so popular in the nation's most exclusive restaurants. Not to say that makes much sense to me either.

Engadget just posted a hands-on evaluation of a new Dell laptop, which, in and of itself is not tremendously remarkable. But I noticed Dell decided to take a page out of the Obama handbook with regard to marketing:

Image courtesy Engadget

Look familiar? As Senator Obama's campaign has gained more and more momentum, more and more organizations have decided to parrot its innovative marketing, the use of Gotham included. At the very least, it reinforces the perception that his political juggernaut has made more than a few good decisions.

Image courtesy rich115

NBC seems to think Americans still live in the pre-Internet age. I can understand, after paying as much as they did for the broadcast rights to air the Olympics in the United States, that NBC would want to arrange the most popular events in such a way as to give its advertisers the most possible eyeballs. At the same time, however, NBC acts as if the Internet and World Wide Web are still the exclusive province of research universities when it tape delays its primetime coverage of the Olympics for viewers in the United States' two western time zones. The results of every event show up live on any number of websites, be they the pages of domestic media operations or the foreign media outlets who air the games live.

I might have more sympathy for NBC if they were tape delaying some of the more popular content because of the time difference between North America and East Asia. This year, however, NBC managed to strong arm the Olympics organizers into holding popular events early in the morning, which happens to correspond to the evening here in the United States. While people in the United States' two eastern time zones do see those specially-scheduled events live, those of us lucky enough to live in Pacific or Mountain time see the primetime coverage at a three hour delay.

What's more, NBC further insults its viewers in the Pacific and Mountain time zones by keeping a gigantic aston reading, "LIVE," in the upper right corner of the tape delayed feed. The geniuses at NBC, of course, would claim that, by briefly flashing a tiny blob of white text reading, "pre-recorded," in the upper left of the screen for half a minute, at the top of every hour, everyone can still sing songs together around the campfire. On the other hand, I see it as an insult to viewers' intelligence. I know of no other media outlet in today's world of instant information who would be so idiotic as to keep the "LIVE" badge on pre-recorded footage. Someone should sue.

And, while I tear apart NBC's coverage of the Olympics, let me pose this question: why must American media lace its coverage of sport with cloying personal interest pieces before the athletes performance? Have we become so addicted to reality television?

I have no problem with a commentator slipping interesting tidbits into the program. That someone broke her ankle just two months before the games makes her remarkable performance all the more exciting and noteworthy. But I have no need to watch a ten-minute feature backed with swelling violins to explain how much Marie-Cécile Smith worried about her chances when she broke her leg.

Yet again, I wish I could receive the BBC.

For what seems like my entire life, NBC has used the same Wagnerian piece of John Williams' music for all of its Olympics bumpers and promos. I couldn't find any of the NBC Beijing promos on YouTube, but I did manage to track down the promo spots used by BBC Sport and France2, who air the Olympic Games in the U.K. and France, respectively. I find the contrast between the three nations' presentations quite curious.

From France2:

From BBC Sport:

If I can find a decent recording of NBC's material, I'll append it.

Image courtesy casasroger

Of course, Ms. Hilton's brief foray into the realm of politics was meant as a joke. Nevertheless, those battle-hardened soldiers over in Camp McCain leapt at the chance to use the socialite's latest stunt to score a few points. McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds commented: "It sounds like Paris Hilton supports John McCain's 'all of the above' approach to America's energy crisis - including both alternatives and drilling. Paris Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Barack Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan."

Meanwhile, in Florida, Barack Obama softened his opposition to the idiotic offshore drilling proposal McCain never ceases to extol. From a political standpoint it makes sense. The American people seem to like this ill-conceived offshore drilling idea and Senator Obama would rather not lose the election. Naturally, the media — and the McCain brigade — took the opportunity to label Senator Obama a "flip-flopper."

These two incidents have pushed me over the edge. Why must politics in this country consist of nothing more than the exchange of petty insults? Is it really too much to ask the two candidates to have an intelligent debate?

Of the three presidential debates scheduled to take place between now and November, not a single one allows the two candidates to speak to one another. Instead, two will feature some hopelessly dull moderator and the other a cast of undecided voters who pose the questions. Ugh.

I remember watching the 2005 pre-runoff debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal with some fondness. The two candidates sat, one across from the other, at a table. They had no "moderator" per se, just a timer and a charming television personality to make sure neither one hogged the limelight. While their exchange veered off course on a few occasions, they managed, for the most part, to have a serious discussion of the issues. One would bring up his or her proposal, give a basis for it and the other would respond with a logical rebuttal. No one cared about flip-flops or expensive loafers. Instead, they raised concerns about the cost of certain projects, or the moral issues surrounding providing a set of services to one group, but not another.

I have no doubt Barack Obama and John McCain could have that kind of discussion. And, to both of their credit, they have both made at least a minimal effort to move in that direction. At the same time, however, both Camp McCain and the Obamites have stooped to crying "flip-flop" on at least one occasion.

The issues have nuance. None of the proposals put forth by Senator Obama and Senator McCain have no merit whatsoever, nor do all of their proposals have no demerits whatsoever. Given the job of weighing an idea's merits against its demerits, and a changing temporal, political, economic and social climate, it seems perfectly reasonable and perfectly natural that both candidates would change some of their positions in the course of this unbelievably long campaign. I wish our politics better reflected that reality.

I'm in the middle of planning a trip to San Francisco. San Francisco, unlike Portland, has at least one of those lovely United Colors of Beneton shops. They have nice stuff. Anyway, poking around the Beneton Group website, I noticed they sort their clothes into "Man" and "Woman" rather than "Men's" and "Women's" as might be more typical.

As I considered the oddity for a moment, I thought back to Paris. The three Zara shops I visited in the City of Lights also divided clothing into "Man," "Woman," and, in the case of Zara, "Child." And, as I gave it more thought, I realized a whole lot of fashion enterprises forgo the plural possessive for the singular: Armani and Versace to name two more.

But why do this? I figure the fashion people have one of two reasons. On the one hand, given the global reach of some of these companies — the Beneton Group has stores in nearly every one of the world's 195 or so countries, including four in Iran — it would be a logistical nightmare to localize "Men's" and "Women's" in every tongue from Hindu to Portuguese. On the other, English is very much en vogue in other parts of the world, so perhaps this is not so much a supply chain story as it is one of trends.

People who develop addictions to high-strength prescription pain medications must be very bored, very stupid or very depressed. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to.

This morning I had the third of five or six gingival grafts. The procedure itself, thanks to local anesthesia, causes little discomfort. The post-op portion, though, drives me crazy. Not only does the procedure restrict my diet to soup, mush and porridge, I also spend two or three days taking an extremely potent pain killer.

I would have no trouble tolerating the mild post-graft pain without the dose ketoprofen prescribed to me. It's really not that bad. But, from what I understand, ketoprofen also helps to reduce swelling, which apparently aids the body in recovering from a surgeon's well-intentioned brutality. Given that faster recovery means real food sooner, I take the medication.

Yet, as I sit here — hunched over my keyboard in a stupor, correcting more spelling and grammatical problems than I care to admit as I type this — I have difficulty understanding why anyone would take these super potent pain killers for fun.

I struggle to stay awake; to think critically; to quip. I feel as if I have become some kind of inert vegetable, incapable of doing no more than napping or staring blankly into the glossy pages of interior design magazines. It's debilitating.

It almost surprises me that the Rush Limbaugh radio program did not improve after the commentator finished his rehabilitation program. Almost.

When I signed up for facebook a little over a year ago, I had two complaints.

First, as a constant advocate for the active voice, I could hardly contain my rage to see facebook restricted my facebook Status to the verb, "to be." To be ranks, at least in my mind, as one of the most dull verbs in existence. A very useful verb, to be sure, but quite dull. I mean, "Bob is thinking the sky looks amazing," sound a lot more kludgey than, "Bob thinks the sky looks amazing." Fortunately for me, and for the ghosts of William Strunk and E. B. White, the facebook folks changed that. I can now list my status as, "Joseph bangs his head against the wall in frustration."

Second, facebook seems to have failed, at least in a grammatical sense, in its efforts to remove gender bias from certain elements of the site. Whenever a user changes some element his Profile, for example, facebook's magic feed-generator slips a little notice, such as, "Joseph added 'Alphabeat' to his favorite music," into my "News Feed."

Sometimes, this is not a grammatical problem. When users have specified their gender, facebook generates a grammatically correct sentence: "Sean added 'Casablanca' to his favorite movies" or "Gwen added 'L'Amant' to her favorite books." But, when the user, out of cowardice, laziness or indecision, leaves the gender box blank, facebook spits out a message such as: "Elizabeth removed 'skiing into trees' from their activities."

I suppose the previous sentence could be correct, if Elizabeth were a team, organization or some other multi-person group or organization. Suffice to say, however, "Elizabeth" usually refers to a single person. As such, it needs a singular pronoun! "Elizabeth removed 'skiing into trees' from his or her activities," would work, and it serves as a gentle reminder to users to step off the fence and declare a gender.

Services like instant messaging and text messaging have done a lot to degrade language, though mostly through their technical constraints. When a message must contain no more than 120 characters, people must make sacrifices. Facebook, however, has none of these technical constraints, and, more grating still, it actively reinforces an error many people already make — substituting "their" for "his or her" — as correct and acceptable. The facebook team, though, deserves kudos for changing the status options. It makes my life read as much less static.

For the last year or so, I have made a concerted effort to buy goods produced in the "industrialized world" whenever possible. My logic being that a scarf woven in Scotland of Scottish wool, while warm, soft and generally wonderful, also reduces my impact on the lives of others. Scotland, after all, has a well-developed, regulated economy that tries its best to ensure workers receive adequate wages, people have access to medical care and the environment does not suffer too greatly at the hands of industry.

Bangledesh, on the other hand, where other wool becomes scarves, does not offer these benefits. Workers toil day in and day out for small sums of money, citizens have little or no access to high-quality medical care and industry has far more scope to exact whatever cruelty it wishes on the environment.

Of course, the reduced environmental and social impact of the Scottish scarf comes at a relatively huge cost to me, the consumer. While someone could buy a warm, soft, well-designed scarf for, say, $20 at Macy's, or some such establishment, that same person could also spend, say, $100 for a Scottish number, in the hope of reducing the social and environmental impact of the purchase.

So I thought.

I just finished reading Jeff Scahs' excellent book, The End of Povery. While Sachs may be one of the world's foremost economists, as the title of his book suggests, he wants everyone — not just people in the developed world — to be happy, healthy and wealthy.

Yet, according to Sachs, those huge textile manufacturing operations in Bangledesh where workers earn next to nothing are the key to Bangladeshis escaping poverty. He notes that every nation — with the possible exception of India — who has already eliminated extreme poverty, or is currently making good headway toward that goal, has begun with cheap textile production. With relatively higher wages, workers can save more. With the skills learned in the factories, workers enter the modern world with usable skills. Eventually, as we see today in China, people begin to move up the economic ladder.

So we arrive at American Apparel. I have never really liked the company, though for all the wrong reasons. Their CEO is just too weird. Brilliant at doing business — the American Apparel concept is golden — but he is really weird.

Now, however, I have a firm basis for my opposition to the company. In some sense, American Apparel is to the United States' poor as the giant, nameless textile plant is to the Bangladeshis. The American Apparel employees earn relatively meager wages, though higher wages than they might earn elsewhere, and the company provides educational programs for employees.

But the United States is not Bangledesh. As Sachs notes in his book, the increase in the Bangladeshi savings rate has a huge impact, not because, with more money in the bank people in Bangladesh can suddenly afford computes, but rather because it enables the children of those textile workers to go to school. American children receive that benefit free of charge.

No, the kinds of inner-city schools where many of those American children will learn are not the world's foremost centers of primary and secondary education. Nevertheless, I would venture a guess that those schools are a lot better than the average school in Bangladesh.

I have no doubt American Apparel has improved the lives of some needy people. Yet I see a greater need in places like Indonesia, where poverty means a lack of potable water, not a government subsidized apartment and cable television. I will probably continue to buy scarves made in Scotland, not least because Scottish scarves is a marvelous alliteration. I will not, however, feel quite as guilty about the iPhone manufactured in China.

On Friday evening, as I opened my web browser to Amazon.com to check the status of a shipment, I noticed a new banner on the homepage. Amazon.com, it seems, paid nearly $4 million to obtain the only publicly-available copy of Joanne Rowling's Tales of the Beetle Bard at a Sotheby's auction on 13 December.

I, for one, never understood why Ms. Rowling limited the distribution of the Tales to the handful of copies she bequeathed to people deeply connected with the Potter series, in addition to the one copy sold at auction for the benefit of a children's charity. Had her goal been to raise money for children in need, she could have easily arranged something with her publisher. A one-time $4 million donation from Amazon.com will doubtlessly do a great deal of good, but Ms. Rowling could do far more by donating the royalties earned from a publicly available printing.

The restricted distribution of the Tales also seemed a rather cruel act coming from such a benevolent person. I have no doubt that every Harry Potter fanatic would love to take in every word on each of the Tales's 157 pages. By confirming the existence of the book and denying all but a few people access, Ms. Rowling disappointed many.

Fortunately, though, Amazon.com — not a narcissistic, reclusive rare book collector — purchased the one copy available to members of the public with the purchasing power to acquire a $4 million book. Employees of the Seattle-based retailer have also confirmed that the company will take their copy of Tales of the Beedle Bard on a book tour to libraries across the United States.

But, when I gave the matter more thought, I realized the lunacy of the situation. Amazon.com paid four million dollars for a book! Few volumes have ever fetched such huge sums at auction. An original Guttenberg Bible or a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio might garner a $5 million bid, but the average rare book — a first edition of Joyce's Ulysses or Dickens's Oilver Twist — would only muster $20 or $30 thousand, even if it were in mint condition with the original dust jacket. In fact, the expert appraisers and auctioneers at Sotheby's only expected Tales of the Beedle Bard to fetch $100,000, which, in and of itself, would have been an exceptional price.

I enjoyed Harry Potter as much as the next person, and I think its remarkable popularity has earned it a special place in the history of literature. Putting a derivative work on the level of Shakespeare, however, is absolutely outrageous.

But what do I know? Perhaps, 2,000 years from now, Nad Umber will pen The Potter Prophecy, a mystery-thriller about a lost manuscript that casts doubts onto accepted religious beliefs.

Christmas — whoops, "holiday" — music tends to make me sick. Hearing the same overly treacly lyrics and conspicuously upbeat music over and over at every turn should make anyone sick. (Even when Frosty is on the brink of a meltdown, the song stays in major!) But, for whatever reasons, as soon as Thanksgiving has ended and people begin eating turkey sandwiches for a month, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer rears its obnoxious head. Or, in the case of Costco, the ballads and dancing Santa displays come out in August.

Nonetheless, at my family's behest, I began looking for some cheerful holiday music to play on the piano to spare them from the usual classical and jazz compositions I play. Trying to find something tasteful, or, at the very least, not overplayed, posed something of a challenge. After a few hours of auditioning songs in iTunes, though, I stumbled upon the only Christmas album I genuinely enjoy listening to: Lee Mendleson and Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Thrilled at my discovery, I rushed to sheetmusicdirect.us — my favorite source for downloadable compositions — and bought a few pieces from the Charlie Brown songbook.

Whatever the difficulty label may have said to the contrary, playing "Christmas Time is Here" is no walk in the park. I could not play some of the chords, like the C13 that requires the player to stretch his or her hand an eleventh from C to E flat.

Fast forward a day or two to this morning. Reading The New York Times Magazine, I came across this article about the Guitar Hero-Rock Band phenomenon sweeping the United States. I have never understood why someone would rather pick up a dinky plastic guitar-cum-game console controller and press a series of multicolored buttons instead of picking up a real guitar and playing real music.

Of all the impossible, fantastic places a video game could take a person, the land of Playing a Guitar seems very unimaginative. It is not legal to carry a machine gun through a deserted part of the American heartland and engage friends in a kill-to-win game of tag, nor is it possible for a plumber to fly through interstellar space and engage whimsical robots in an intergalactic epée. On the other hand, guitars of questionable quality can be found at any big box retailer.

But, as I continued to contemplate "Guitar Hero," I realized that it can and does take people somewhere they would not ordinarily go: to a place where they can play the guitar.

I find it incredibly depressing to think that a sizable chunk my fellow countrymen have grown so tired of physical and mental exertion that they must now resort to a simplified method of playing the guitar. I cannot play the instrument, but given the relative simplicity of most popular music — like the rock and roll anthems immortalized in Guitar Hero — I doubt it could be that taxing for the body or the mind to play on the guitar.

It seems to me like attaching a gyroscopic stabilization system and a motor to a bicycle with training wheels.

Of course, some people will probably write me angry emails asking me why I have never made the same statements about other "simulation" games, like Madden NFL of NBA Live.

Those games, however — unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band — take the player somewhere fantastic. Few people ever have the chance to play football for the NFL or manage a professional basketball team. But anyone with an instrument and a desire to learn can play a rock song. Even The Sims — in which players do nothing more than tell simulated people whether or not to laugh at another character's joke — allows a person to transcend reality and live life as a werewolf or a crazy cat lady.

Sorry Lou Dobbs. We need to mend our broken minds before we even begin to contemplate (if indeed we would even dare do that before taking action) our broken borders. Some have compared our current era to the Dark Ages, with people questioning sound science — intelligent design, anyone? — and demanding our politicians provide easy-to-comprehend sound bites. If people require their music spoon-fed to them via a series of multicolored dots, I may be inclined to agree. For my part, though, I will go back to the ivories and try to master "Christmas Time is Here."

Nigella Lawson — the slightly hipper, more down-to-earth British equivalent of our Martha Stewart — has long been mocked for using uncommon ingredients in her recipes, among other peculiarities. (This article from the Guardian does a particularly good job). Granted, I tend to watch Nigella Express more to hear how she communicates than anything else. Ms. Lawson has a preternatural ability to extemporaneously devise incredibly witty phrases. Or, perhaps, she simply has a very good team of writers and an excellent cue card holder.

But back to the ingredients. On this week's episode, for her ice cream cake, Ms. Lawson made use of some newfangled chocolate-peanut butter swirl chips from Nestlé's American Toll House subsidiary. According to her, the chocolate-peanut butter chips have come to market so recently that one cannot purchase them anywhere in the United Kingdom, save the Internet.

Something about that proclamation impelled me to do a little research and, after a few minutes of sleuthing, I stumbled upon VeryBestBaking.com, the online home of Nestlé's US food products branch. I clicked on the "Toll House" page and, lo and behold, there were the "all-new" swirled chocolate-peanut butter morsels.

Having tracked down the hybrid morsels, my curiosity led me to investigate Ms. Lawson's claim that the somewhat off-putting mixed chips could not be found in the UK. But before I managed to track down the Nestlé page for the UK, I stumbled upon the French food products, at nestle.fr.

The difference French and American websites speaks to what is wrong with American diets. Visitors to VeryBestBaking.com can select from a wide variety of absolutely revolting recipes, ranging from Tuna Casserole — complete with condensed cream of mushroom soup and a potato chip topping — to a baked Dijon Chicken that would make someone in Dijon very sick and very unhealthy. On the other hand, Nestle.fr features dishes like pan-seared salmon with potato gratin and hazelnut-pancetta-Mimolette risotto. Delicious!

Before people have liposuction or a gastric bypass, they might consider spending a little more time in the kitchen, preparing real food, instead of loafing on the couch and eating some disgusting pile of sludge that took five fewer minutes to prepare. Pharmaceutical and medical research dollars ought to go towards something that might make a real difference, like cancer research, not an effort to find a fix for a problem that already has a solution.

As I write this, I am watching the second half-hour of some absolutely ridiculous self-help program on Rupert Murdoch's new Fox Business Network. I hate to sound patrician or snobbish, but I can only describe the Fox Business Network as the "low-rent" version of CNBC. Candy coated, easily to digest business news for the flag waving set, one might say.

Their 5 PM programming epitomizes the difference between the two networks' philosophies. At the same time the Fox Business Network airs its peculiar self-help program, CNBC is airing "Fast Money." Put concisely: two shows, one time, worlds apart.

Whereas Fast Money features a panel of four or five investment gurus, the Dave Ramsey Show (as I just discovered this strange program is called) features one somewhat overweight pundit who barks out advice to his audience. And, while Dave Ramsey groans on about the best way to eat an elephant — as some kind of perverse metaphor for escaping from credit card debt — the folks on CNBC are probably discussing the best way to put $10,000 of disposable income into a risky, but potentially rewarding stock.

This must be what Mr. Murdoch and the network's executives meant when they said the Fox Business Network would make business news "more accessible." Instead of providing business-related investment advice to the tiny group of people who have tens of thousands of dollars to invest for fun, Fox Business offers helpful hints to the growing segment of America's population in serious debt. Very attractive.

Network executives also like to say Fox Business is not "CNBC-lite." Nevertheless, the style employed by the Fox Business Network makes me think more of its sister channel — the Fox News Channel — than it makes me think of CNBC.

Like its sibling, Fox Business features lots of gold and red, as if to put its viewers into a state of readiness for some vaguely threatening disaster. The Fox Business Network also seems to enjoy featuring headlines with a decidedly sensationalist flavor. "More Treats, But Fewer Seats: Who Pays?" reads one about trends in the entertainment industry. "CEOs with Extreme Hobbies Should Give Investors Pause," proclaims another. It makes me think that business scandals will take root on Fox Business the same way strange stories about lost spouses and missing children eat up time on FNC.

Unlike its sister network, however, the Fox Business Channel does not have a niche to fill. When Mr. Murdoch and his ally Roger Ailes launched the News Channel in 1996, the Fox News Channel captured viewers who considered MSNBC and CNN too élite or simply craved news that could be called (perhaps undeservingly) "patriotic." But a business channel caters to people who do business. And, as far as I can tell, CNBC is the most pro-business network on air. Each and every one of their anchors and pundits has a very pro-trade, anti-tax ethos.

Alas, I see the Fox Business Network succumbing to the same fate as TimeWarner's failed CNN Financial Network. Their programming tackles rather mundane and unimportant topics, rather than focusing on subjects that impact people who do business. Instead of adopting a clean, corporate, business-oriented editorial philosophy, the folks at Fox Business have chosen to take the more Joseph Pulitzer-esque sensationalist route. And, most importantly, the Fox Business network has no niche to fill. I give it two years, at the most.

Saving the Planet,
One Shoulder at a Time

But, in its journey from niche-market to mass-market, a radical change has taken place in the world of green products. Unlike the Prius die-hards who immediately sought to purchase the first mass-produced hybrid gasoline-electric car in 2001, the Prius buyer of 2007 views the car more as the automotive equivalent of a Fendi clutch than as an instrument of social and environmental change. Today people buy green, think green and do green to be "Eco-Chic."

Solar power firms regularly outfit the curb-facing gables of drab suburban McMansions with a smattering of cells. Celebrated handbag designer Anya Hindmarch launched the "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" tote bag — a white leather tote emblazoned with the aforementioned phrase in highly conspicuous brown script — to great success. Even NetJets Europe, the company that pioneered the idea of fractional private jet ownership, has announced plans to be "carbon-neutral" by 2012.

It is fitting to see the same forces that popularized the gas-guzzling Chevrolet Suburban ignite sales of more environmentally-friendly vehicles, like the Toyota Prius. At the same time, however, I cannot help but wonder whether the Eco-Chic phenomenon detracts from the true goal of green products and services.

After all, it would be far more environmentally sound for someone to travel aboard a commercial jet than to charter their own Glufstream V through NetJets, regardless of whatever "carbon-offsets" NetJets intends to offer. And the idea that a leather tote bag — which requires a cow to be raised, killed and skinned before the hide is treated, dyed and fashioned into a bag — has less of a carbon footprint than one two-gram plastic shopping bag seems perfectly ludicrous.

I have no complaints that the environmentally-sound practices of 7 for All Mankind and Paul Smith add a touch of Eco-Chic to my wardrobe. But people should think of the environment first and their vanity second. Offsetting a flight from Dallas to Milan on a private jet with the purchase of an acre of protected wildness still dumps an extra ton or two of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere.

The Lord and Savior?
Image courtesy Scholastic

When first I saw those statistics, I reasoned that the drop off in impressions stemmed from a sharp decline in Facebook usage during the weekend. That prognostication, though, was without any evidence. So, I set about running a few Google searches.

I never found a dossier or white paper detailing the day-to-day usage patterns of Facebook users, but I did find a very interesting informal study written by a PhD student that examined Facebook trends at his college. Among his finds, the vast majority of Facebook users who categorized themselves as "liberal" considered Harry Potter their favorite book, whereas those who called themselves "conservative" listed the Bible as their favorite. It also seemed telling that the self-described liberals tended to list George Orwell's 1984 as a favorite, while the celebrated dystopian novel did not even make it into the top ten among self-labeled conservatives.

Also according to the study, the Facebook users surveyed were less likely to share their academic concentration than their relationship status. The former strikes me as far less personal or revealing than the latter.

All in all, an interesting read for anyone with any interest in Facebook trends.

All the hubbub surrounding shoddy manufacturing in China, whose latest twist saw a New York Times reporter trapped in a toy factory, has reminded me not to stray from my goal to emphasize quality over quantity. Admittedly, I do have a difficult time sticking to that principle in the realm of gadgets and gizmos, but I like to think that my zealous adherence to the quality over quantity credo in every other aspect of my life compensates, at least a little. So, to keep the spirit of quality alive and well, I present my ten favorite purveyors and manufacturers of high-quality goods. Granted, their products probably cost more than similar wares from less quality-centric manufacturers, and this list is highly capricious. But one must remember that these products will likely last far longer than some inexpensive Chinese knockoff. And the list's volatility does not, in any way, dilute the quality of these manufacturer's goods.

1. LEGO Toys
   The iconic plastic building blocks adored by everyone from children to engineers (and manufactured in Europe to boot)
2. Designer Furniture from Design Within Reach
   An American chain specializing in beautiful, well-designed and functional modern furniture
3. Muji
   Purveyor of everything from diaries to dinnerware who stresses quality and simplicity above all else by making excellent use of materials and minimizing waste
4. Uniqlo
   A Japanese clothing brand which has earned a reputation for making simple, high quality basics at very reasonable prices
5. 7 for All Mankind
   A brand instantly recognized from Seattle to Strasbourg; expensive, yes, but you get what you pay for, as the old adage goes
6. Waterman Pens and Pencils
   Superb French-manufactured fountain pens at a variety of prices
7. Room & Board Furniture
   More classic than contemporary, with lots of pieces that can be tailored to specific demands
8. Knopf Everyman's Library Books
   Well-made, well-bound hardcovers to be read again and again of the world's most notable literary works to round out any bibliophile's collection
9. Caran D'Ache Pens and Pencils
   High-end, but extremely high-quality Swiss manufactured pens and pencils
10. MoMa Design Store
    Furniture, artwork and household goods from world-renowned designers; some pieces come directly from the art museum itself

You're Both Ugly

The Crocs people have also launched a series of absolutely idiotic advertisements modeled after Apple's PC and Mac campaign. But, as anyone who has watched the advertisements has realized, the cuddly, cute and Crocs-sporting character on the right looks even uglier than the extremely ugly uptight businessman on the left. What has our society come to?

The Right Book
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink, is one of the most interesting and insightful books I have read in months.

Unfortunately, finding something to meet my demanding standards was next to impossible. For starters, I didn't want to buy anything too expensive, as I could have found the same item on Amazon at half the price. And, because paperback books infuriate me, the book needed to be hard-bound.

I looked for half an hour before I realized that the hardcover criterion needed to go. Eventually, I settled on Daniel H. Pink's A Whole New Mind after reading the mildly intriguing description.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I began reading A Whole New Mind. It blew my expectations out of the water like the HMS Victory bearing down on a French battleship.

The book argues, quite persuasively, that, in a world where computers can crunch numbers billions of times more quickly than any human mind and corporations can so easily ship jobs overseas, the most successful people in our new globalized economy will be able to think logically, with the left side of their brain, and creatively, with the right side.

But more than just that, it offers some really interesting insight into how our brains have been conditioned to think in a very logical, left-brain way. I never realized, for instance, that, because most of the Western world has been reading left to right for the past five millennia — a task that moves the eyes and neck rightward and, thus, involves the left side of the brain — natural selection has conditioned us to be left-brain people.

Like The Lexus and the Olive Tree — and quite unlike Silent Spring — I will be talking about this book for months. For once, the high praise quoted on the back cover actually reflects the pages' content. A Whole New Mind is a must-read for anyone under the age of seventy.

An Overused Clue
The crossword compliers seem to think that I cannot remember that Putin once worked for the KGB (Image courtesy antonis)

For the most part solving the crossword is fun. Today, for instance, I read the clue, "Home of Notre Dame" and mistakenly filled in "ILEDELACITE" — the part of town where the famous Parisian cathedral is located — when, in fact, the correct answer was "SOUTHBENDIN" — the home of Notre Dame University — both of which have the same number of letters. In general I can complete the puzzle Monday through Friday, but the excessively cryptic nature of the clues on Saturday and Sunday usually prove just a touch to difficult.

But while Will Shortz usually ensures the clues are both witty and fresh, I have really become irritated with the frequency with which three clues have appeared in the last two weeks:

1. Former Putin org. (KGB)
2. Egyptian viper (ASP)
3. A kind of support (BRA)

As they demonstrate every week in the Saturday and Sunday puzzles, the people who dream up the crossword can bend words in the same way that Superman can bend a bar of steel. So why can't these people dream up some other, more creative three-letter clues?

I despise American Idol. This, however, is magic. I heard about Paul Potts on NPR while sitting in traffic this afternoon. For a mobile phone salesman, he really can sing. US reality television needs a Paul Potts.

Discovery Channel mini-documentaries can either enthrall me or put me to sleep. In a very Les Misérables-Inspector Javert way, there is no middle ground. But, fortunately for me, I have developed the System, which has proved itself to be remarkably accurate. For instance, the System correctly predicted that Tom Brokaw's "Supervolcano," which aired sometime in the last two years, would put me to sleep. (I watched five minutes of a rerun and definitely felt the beginnings of a nap). The System also managed to guess — correctly — that the Discovery Channel's "Discovery Atlas" series would enthrall me. (It is, by the way, one of the most amazing television programs I have seen in years).

But to my immense displeasure, the System fell apart on Sunday when I sat down to watch the Discovery Channel's newest series of mini-documentaires, "Planet Earth." I had high hopes for the program. It was co-produced with the BBC, a television paragon, and it had real potential to educate. The beautiful time-lapse photography and the lions, tigers, and bears (Oh my!), however, did nothing to mask the program's soporific powers. It dealt in trivialities, revealing such remarkable facts as, "Sharks swim in the ocean," or, "Tigers walk on land." Not exactly my idea of intellectually stimulating.

I realized, however, that had I watched the show in 1080i HD, I would not have fallen asleep, because the program's pristine photography and sound would have overshadowed the total lack of interesting facts. So, I revised the System and — mostly for fun — devised this lovely chart to help susceptible people everywhere make sound Discovery Channel mini-documentary choices.

(The blue area, of course, represents the area where TV shows can safely be watched and the green area represents those shows only tolerable when viewed in high definition. I must admit that I am particularly proud of the horizontal scale's right-hand label, "Educational for the Braindead.")

Arrivederci The OC
After four unnecessarily long seasons, The OC will finally come to an end in February. (Image courtesy Fox)

While I may dress — entirely coincidentally, I might add — like the "Seth" character, according to several The OC fanatics, I have only watched one episode. I had my TiVo record it almost exactly one year ago today. Watching it only confirmed my every belief that the show featured crazy, but attractive, people who found themselves in the unlikeliest of circumstances during their assorted escapades. In the one episode I watched, the plot made absolutely no sense and the characters behaved very strangely. One scene stands out very clearly in my mind: a woman enters her kitchen, carrying a bouquet of roses, and proceeds to jam them down her garbage disposal, sobbing. It seems more like something that Saturday Night Live would feature as a joke than something that might actually take place in someone's home.

Needless to say, I struggled to watch the entire episode, even with my lovely little "30-second skip" button. How people tolerate, much less enjoy, The OC every week continues to baffle me. Though it baffles me even more to read the comments on television blogs from avid The OC fans, mourning the loss of the show.

On the other hand, I bid The OC and fond farewell. May it rest in peace amongst other television shows rerunning on cable.

(The full, glorious press release from Fox, which details the demise of my not-favorite television show, follows the discontinuation.)

As I am working on my blog, I figured I would post my accursed Junior Literary Analysis Paper, colloquially known as the JLAP. Whether my paper will embarrass me or expose me to more praise, I do not know. However, I feel that, as I spent so long composing this monster, I may as well put it online.

William Goldman: A Pinch to Grow an Inch (PDF; 52k)

(Actually, this paper is about three pages less than my original final draft; I had to pare it down to meet the length requirements. If I can find an unaltered copy, I may post the paper as I intended it to be.)

Today I went to see Howl's Moving Castle, only because it got these incredible reviews from basically everybody. You know it really got great reviews because the ads did not need to take the quotes way out of context. Also, by reading the reviews.

A Castle ?
That image does not come to mind when I think "castle."

Other than that minutely large distraction, the movie was good. However, it did seem as if it was just another Miyazaki cookie with slightly different frosting. All of Miyazaki's films have a very similar sort of base (cookie), which he then tweaks (changes frosting on) to make a new movie. This is not to say the film is bad - it is simply very Miyazaki-ish.

The other thing I noticed about the movie was its striking similarity to World War I. Granted, in World War I there were no crazy talking fires with Billy Crystal's voice, or magical wizard people, but the movie bore a striking resemblance to the first World War.

For one thing, the war which takes place in the film is provoked by the transfigurement of a prince into something affectionately called, "Turniphead," which could be compared to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Then there is the never-ending, very pointless war, which also claims many lives. The movie also seems to be set in a time of railroads and industrialization, just as World War I was.

I was planning to do some research about the book upon which the film is based, however I am quite tired and thought I might do that tomorrow instead. I am curious to see if the book was written during, around, or in response to World War I.