sheer potentiality

“I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” —Samuel L. Jackson in SNAKES ON A PLANE (in recently shot added scenes).

I think it’s fair to say I’m an intelligent student capable of performing well in class. At least I like to think I am, and here is why: generally when a professor makes a class easier rather than harder, I’m more disappointed than relieved.

In one of my classes in the College of Business (which will remain un-named), the professor recently went over mid-semester evaluations and granted a popular request to announce quizzes beforehand instead of having unannounced pop quizzes throughout the semester. This disappointed me, and I think I understand why.

In “How to Make Wealth”, one of Paul Graham’s essays, he talks about solving not just valuable problems, but hard problems as important for startups:

 This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they’ll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they’ll take away your market overnight.

Challenging course requirements serve the same function. They allow the more talented, ambitious, and hardworking students to become obvious in their talent. Employers look at your transcripts. They read your grades. The grade in the transcript should accurately reflect the student’s value to the employer, and the best way to do that is by making the class difficult enough that the more talented can get a high grade while the less talented get a lower grade. Trying to give everyone a good grade only puts less talented candidates in competition with more talented candidates while clouding the employer’s ability to tell the difference. It represents a fundamental failure of the university’s duty to provide educated, qualified professionals to the work force.

“Enough is enough. I’ve had it with these snakes!” —Samuel L. Jackson in SNAKES ON A PLANE.

You know what they should have? Along with normal blood donation they should have Extreme Blood Donation. The idea of Extreme Blood Donation is that instead of just taking one pint, they take as much blood as they can until you pass out. If there’s some sort of medical emergency, they feed your blood back into you.

It would make an awesome contest, and if there were doctors and such around it would probably be pretty safe. Still, it would be a liability nightmare. But since when should that stop a fun time?

I’m in class (and late to class) after donating a pint of blood. I feel fine, actually—a bit woozy but not too bad. I will say that I don’t feel as alert and upbeat as I did before, but I’ll still be able to do what I need for the rest of the day.

I just finished the questionnaire. They asked if I was gay, if I was a prostitute, if I was a gay prostitute, if I’ve had sex with a gay man, if I’ve had sex with a prostitute, and if I’ve had sex with a gay prostitute. Among other things.

I guess the best way to disqualify yourself is to have sex with a gay prostitute from Nigeria since 1977 while high on intravenous drugs.

I’m number 62. They just called number 59 to sit behind the blue shield, which is what happens before you sit in the comfy chair and bleed.

Well, I’m here at the Compton Union Building getting ready to donate blood to the Inland Northwest Blood Center. I’ll blog again after I’ve bled so you’ll find out how well I can take it.

(This is my review of the “Conviction” pilot, which I’ve also posted to iTunes.)

Imagine, for a second, that “Law and Order” had around five prosecutors instead of two, that they were all in their mid-20’s, and that the series followed all the prosecutors around all day instead of watching a single case from investigation to trial, and you have “Conviction”. The idea seems intriguing, but is ham-handedly executed. The supposed premise of this spinoff—that of developing the prosecutors as fully-rounded characters—is, as of the pilot, a tragically unrealized ideal. In trying to portray the young prosecutors as overwhelmed by taking their first cases, creator Dick Wolf overshoots and takes the series straight into farce. One prosecutor leaves evidence in the courtroom (evidence which incidentally includes crack cocaine), vomits from sheer stress, and apparently forgets how to correctly question a witness and has to get tips from the baliff.

There are some redeeming performances but overall nothing worthy of note. If you want a legal drama with interesting characters, “Boston Legal” is a much better choice. If you want to watch a realistic, focused, and compelling legal drama, “Law and Order” is still the gold standard. And if you want to watch a compelling character drama, simply look elsewhere.