fling93 loves fishies

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Nat and Cat

Yeah, I think I bit off more than I can chew this week. 15 units of classes at San Jose State plus I'm attending another class I'm considering adding (no, I'm not planning on taking 18 units, but I haven't figured out which class to drop yet so I'm still attending all of them), plus working part-time at my last job (well hey, it's a helluva much higher paid position than that of most of my classmates), and then spending a ridiculous amount of time on the silly 2005 Mix CD. And apparently, now I'm also on the photography staff of the Spartan Daily (although they've yet to run anything of mine yet).

So that's why no update so far.

Well, I promised the Top 6 of my favorite kitty photos, so you'll still get a Top 6. I just probably won't finish all 6 within Sweeps Week (“Oh, boo hoo!” you say). And as I have way too many favorite Natalie Portman photos, I'm not going to actually go through the trouble of ranking them. Instead, I'll just upload 6 of them in no particular order. I hope none of you mind (not like you got much choice in the matter).

So, in case you hadn't already noticed, here's a random photo of the hotness that is Natalie Portman. It's not a great quality scan, but I love the picture anyway. And of course, now that I'm obsessed with photography, I now can tell that this is a nice use of depth of field, having her dreamy eyes in sharp focus and the rest of her gradually getting out of focus.

Anyway, here's my number 5 favorite kitty cat photo (yeah, if you've already gone through my Flickr account, all of these will be familiar). Ready? One… two… three… Awwww!

That's all for now! Come back later! How much later? How should I know? That's why they invented RSS feeds.

Happy Birthday!

Apologies to those of you patiently waiting for more political commentary. I still have loads to say, I'm just still feeling a bit burned out from the Poli Sci class (and yes, I got an A, so I guess the prof did like my term paper), and work is still rather hectic. But for now, YANPP (yet another Natalie Portman post — and yes, I've opened a new category for these).

Of course, this is a very special day! And since I posted this back when I was a Winona stalker fan, I think it's only appropriate after my upgrade that I now post one for my new obsession object of admiration and drool:

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear the hotness that is Natalie Portman!
Happy Birthday to you!

Happy Birthday, Natalie! I'm sorry that I was remiss in failing to bring up this topic at yesterday's blogger meetup, but I hadn't yet entered your birthday into Outlook and Palm. That's been rectified now. And we did at least discuss you, as you can tell from the recaps.

Anyway, happy 24th! Feel free to drop by if you have trouble finding somebody to give you your 24 spankings!

(Okay, now to go record this in GarageBand so that she'll be impressed and date me instead of this ridiculously obsessed loser.)

Update 6/13/05

Oh, and happy birthday to my wife, aka my reason for being and the source of all that is good and beautiful in the universe and who is even hotter than the hotness that is Natalie Port… er… I mean Natalie who?

Maxim Gets It All Wrong

Okay, I'm watching the Maxim Hot 100 on VH1, just for… uh… research purposes! Yeah, just in case some important… um… researchy situation where I might need to know who was on it for some science-like reason. Yeah! Oh, and not to mention that I had to make sure that they got it right! Yeah, for that reason.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting but not surprising that Battlestar Galactica's Grace Park (Boomer) was ranked higher than Tricia Helfer (Number Six), and I have nothing against that random chick who happened to be at #1 — but they were just wrong! I mean, hello? Duh!! It's supposed to be Natalie Portman!! Is there anybody who doesn't realize that she's the hottest thing since sliced bread… oh wait, sliced bread isn't hot, I mean… uh… toasted bread! Yeah, bread that you left in the toaster oven a little too long and it's so hot that it… uh… catches on fire and then you try to pull it out of the oven but then the toast is so hot that it burns your fingers and you say to yourself, “Don't Panic!” and so you think for a bit and then run to the fridge to put butter on them and then you remember that butter actually isn't good for burns and then you lick it off and it stings like hell but then you go, “mmmmmm, butter!” but then you realize from the taste that it isn't really butter but margarine instead and then you don't remember whether that's okay to put on burns or not and then the smoke alarm goes off and you remember from school that you have to go outside cuz it means it's a fire drill but you're too embarrassed because you didn't listen to Todd Parr and are wearing your clean underwear on your head… um… I mean this is all hypothetical, for illustrative purposes of the hot toast and everything.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Natalie Portman being screwed… uh, I mean shafted… uh… I mean Maxim just got it all completely and totally incorrect by not having her #1. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, there were guys lining up to see her new movie weeks in advance, at the wrong freakin' theatre! I mean, the damn film was so disappointing because she was only in fourteen scenes and really only had that one semi-interesting outfit where she was brushing her hair, but people still keep going to see the thing. You just can't get any hotter than that!

But nooooooo, they don't put the hotness that is Natalie Portman anywhere in the top ten, or the top twenty!!! Or, get this. Not. Even. In. The. Top. Frickin'. FORTY!!!!

Give me a fucking break!

So where did they put her? I kid you not, way down at forty-two! They listed forty-one not-so-hot women… well okay, that Lindsay Lohan isn't half-bad… but still, when there isn't a single hottie that is hotter than Natalie, how can you come up with forty-one so-called hotties to be ranked ahead of the one and only precioussss Natalie Portman!!

Un-frickin-believable!

Well, unless…

Unless, of course, this is Maxim's way of letting everybody know that Natalie Portman is truly the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Yeah, that must be it.

Okay, so never mind! Go back to surfing the net for porn or whatever it was you were doing.

Punchbowl Poetry

Well, look at that. It's May 5th, 2005, and you know what that means!

Yes, that's right! There's only TWO MORE WEEKS until Natalie Portman's new film opens. Incidentally, that's also when my term paper is due, so here's yet another meme to tide you over. Yeah, I'm such a hypocrite (Update 6/9/05: Yeah, not only did I watch Episode III on opening day, I also watched it again on opening weekend. And I also watched Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy twice on opening weekend. Maybe that list of things wasn't so much about things I didn't get but about things that I was in denial about getting?).

While you're waiting for Natalie's new film me to get back to political commentary, check out Will Wilkerson taking on the recent liberal meme of Social Security as insurance, making many points that I had planned to make myself (via Julian Sanchez). And for something a bit shorter and simpler, check out my comments on Social Security at sQurl's newly remade blog, Mythos of a Sorority Geek.

I should take this opportunity to mention that sQurl has been on a roll ever since she renamed her blog and began focusing on her perspective of gender issues. Of particular note is her critique of the notion of equality, and her observations on how different genders present information.

But to get back to the meme, Donna B. tags me with Ellison's Punchbowl Meme:

Simply compose a four-line poem and post it on your blog. The first and third verses of the poem should read “Turd in a punchbowl.” Verses two and four may be about any subject (including turds!) but they must rhyme with each other.

Okay, that's simple enough. No rules about meter, so I can sprawl a bit. Here goes nothing…

I just don't get it

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling… but nice.”

I saw this meme in several places. I was directly called out by Elke, but I also saw this from Amanda Rohn, Julian Sanchez, Gene Healy, and Matt Yglesias. Since work and my Poli Sci class are conspiring to keep me from blogging very often (and that probably won't change until I'm done with my term paper in late May), I guess I might as well participate.

As Elke said, “I know he loves fishies…” (as well as the hotness that is Natalie Portman) “…but what does he not care for?” Well, it took me a while, but here's the answer:

My Top Ten Films of 2004

Well, I know the Oscars are long over and 2005 is already more than a quarter over, but here's my belated top ten list of the best films I saw in 2004 (I have no idea how some bloggers do weekly features, since I have trouble with just a yearly one!). This wasn't one of my heavier movie-watching years due to my night classes, so I'm not separating out “Films That Everyone and Their Grandma Has Already Seen,” like I did last year. So this will be a true top ten list, just of a smaller field than usual.

Comparative Advantage and Opportunity Cost

I've noticed lately that “comparative advantage” (especially Ricardian comparative advantage) is one of those terms that people throw around if they want to sound like they know about economics (another one being “Keynesian”). As this was a concept taught on the very first day of my economics night class and is fairly easy to understand, I kinda figured a lot of people were already familiar with it, especially since the Wikipedia entry on it isn't half bad.

But I was wrong. In the past couple of weeks, I found myself correcting several people on this relatively simple topic. Since it has a nonintuitive conclusion, and since it's very important to understand before tackling the issue of trade and outsourcing, let me attempt to explain it here. I know that economics can be an intimidating and/or boring topic for many people (partially because a lot of writers will write about economics in such a way as to make it sound complicated — presumably to make themselves seem smarter than their readers), so I'll try to keep this as straight-forward and entertaining as I can.

Absolute Advantage

I said comparative advantage was nonintuitive because it teaches you that trade between two partners is beneficial to both even if one of them has an absolute advantage over the other. Absolute advantage meaning that one of them is more efficient at producing everything. To help illustrate this, let's imagine a simplified economy with two people, let's say Lisa Simpson of The Simpsons and Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

Review: Closer

Okay, I watched Closer for the same reason I watched Garden State, namely to drool over the hotness that is Natalie Portman. In that respect, Garden State was more enjoyable because it was easy to pretend to be Zach Braff's character and enjoy watching Natalie fall for you. In this film, everybody is really nasty to each other, so it wasn't as satisfying on that level. But she still has plenty of screen time, and as a bonus, her character is a stripper! Unfortunately, you don't really get to see her naked. But hey, just the idea is still pretty damn cool.

Of course, as a film, Closer is much harder to judge, as it's pretty different from most other films. It revolves around two couples whose lives intertwine in complex and nasty ways. Jude Law plays Dan, a writer of obituaries who hooks up with Alice (Natalie Portman) in a typical “meet cute” fashion. But the rest of the film is far from typical, and I do have to give director, Mike Nichols (Angels in America, The Graduate, and Primary Colors, among many others), and writer, Patrick Marber, some credit for taking chances. For one, there are essentially only four characters, and none of them are particularly sympathetic, except perhaps Alice (although I might be a bit biased there). Secondly, it abruptly shifts in time from scene to scene, which is jarring. For example, when we next see them, Dan has written a novel about Alice and is having his book jacket photograph taken by Anna (Julia Roberts), to whom he is instantly attracted to.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Okay, maybe I was wrong about last week being unusual. I think my general lack of free time may be an ongoing theme for a while, so posting may get a little more erratic. If you're not yet reading this site using an RSS feed news aggregator, I'd highly recommend it. I was hoping to blog on that sometime, but in short, it saves you the trouble of browsing to websites to see if they're updated. Instead, when the site has a new post, the aggregator grabs it for you to read. This is real handy if you follow a lot of blogs and websites and news sources, especially if some of them update irregularly.

I still hope to post at least a once a week, but let me tell you what's been going on so you'll understand if I don't.