pick me, PICK ME!

My applications have been sent in to UIC and NIU for the fall semester. Now the waiting begins.

double-u tee efff

it's just WRONG when your mom gets to reminiscing and ends up telling you where and when you were conceived. it's nice to hear that they 'planned' for me and did specific 'things' to have a boy... very flattering to the ego to not be an accident. however... places and dates?!!!!!

For the disenchanted

So... Valentine's Day got you down? All the schmoopy people making you feel like a worthless single loser? Check out the anti-valentine's day site.

Tell me it ain't so!

I just ran accross this movie... it made me think of Katie and of all her bicycle woes overseas...

Half Life of Pop Culture

No where is the half-life of pop culture better measured than at the used media store. I spent some quality time there today, selling old vhs tapes and dvds. It took them about half an hour to sift through what I was dropping off, and that left me plenty of time to peruse their selection. Walking down the aisles and looking in the bins it really jumps out at you when you can see a bazillion of one movie or cd stacked together.

There's some kind of relationship between how popular something was, how crappy it really was and how many of them will be in the bins. Take, for example, P.O.D. and Creed and Revis (whoever the hell they are) all had tons of their stuff in the bins. And not just one album, but a lot of each. Enough so to merit a card with their name on it to separate them from the jumble. Or, a couple handfuls of Total Recal on VHS... One hit wonders and the over-hyped seemed to be available in great volume.

Then I noticed that the 'classics' and 'greats' seemed to have enough volume to merit a card with their name on it too... Is it possible that everything popular gets rejected? Not to be hasty, I lent further examination to our boring halftime star and bruce springsteen and bon jovi. It seemed that while a lot of their discs were available, great numbers of any one album weren't apparent. Though, the boss seemed to have the largest section of any other artist there.

I think it would be an interesting measure of the decay of popularity if we could chart sales of media to the resale stores. How many copies of legally blonde 2 were sold back today/this week/this month? Create a ratio of originally sold vs traded in vs bought again. Compare that to the ratio of other 'popular' movies or cds.

It would be a great indicator of 'real' popularity and also give an idea of whether you really wanted to buy something.

Maybe Amazon could give an indicator based on how many used cds/movies they have available to sell? Though i can't imagine that they would want to give you a reason not to buy something based on the idea you might want to eventually sell it back.

Further, maybe we could convince radio stations to pick the music they play based on the ratio... Then we wouldn't be stuck hearing the same crappy songs pushed at us, but instead get to hear music that we've deemed popular by the default action of hanging on to it.

The major flaw I see in the plan is that used media stores tend to get a certain volume of something and refuse to buy anymore. My ratio would effectively be frozen at one value or under valued because the ratio could only change in favor of the artist. In the radio case presented above, we could just ban those artists outright. ;)