8.16.07

some facts of food:

• did you know that cupcake shops are a trend? well , they are. there was an NY times article a while back about how people were leaving the movie industry etc. to start bake shops. today i tried yummy cupcakes for the first time. quite good--seems to be me mostly frosting. i see why people like them, but i really don't know why they would be so big. why cupcakes, of all desserts? (not cookies, or scones, or danishes?) such things are beyond me.
  
• following the theme of trends of deviating from health-consciousness, it is apparently the thing for girls to emphasize their appreciation of red meat. (there was an article "be yourselves, girls, order the rib-eye" about this in the NY times.) apparently all sorts of women emphasize (truthfully or not) it is still trendy, however, for guys to be vegetarians because it is the women who are judging them.
  
• eau de vie seems like a nice, sophisticated thing to drink.

some facts of life:

• some high schools are now having students pick majors. (read related article here.) the reasoning is that these schools haven't been doing too well on standardized tests, so giving students majors will help keep them engaged and give them an edge in the college admissions process. i am not sure how well it is working--the article quotes students feeling locked in, parents worrying about students not getting exposed to a broad range of things, etc. i think this is a fairly terrible idea because it is patching a symptom rather than getting anywhere near the source of the problem. the fact that students are not engaged in high school is a result of failure in proper education during in elementary and middle school years; the fact that something that seems as meaningless as a high school major could provide an edge in college admissions reveals grave problems in what college admissions are valuing these days. these days i believe the fact that college degrees have come to mean very little shows that this system isn't really working out too well for us; our society forces people to spend (often wasted) years paying money instead of earning any with the threat that if they don't do this, they won't be able to find a decent job down the road. many of these people still end up not making the experience worth real cost + opportunity cost... i don't have a good solution in mind.
• on a similar note, some colleges are now charging different tuitions for different majors, with more lucrative majors costing more. i don't know how i feel about this yet.
  

some facts of jean:

• perfume of the day: davidoff cool water wave. smelled nice, but too generically nice. liked bright crystal better.
  
• today was the birthday of john in my team. his status message was "8 + 16 = 25?" which makes perfect sense given that he turns 25 on 8.16, but i, being too dense to understand this, IMed him about his incredible mental math. (well, it was only an off-by-one error...) to make up for this, i made him a birthday page.
  
• i originally titled this entry "8.16.06." my attention to detail is incredible.