I want a digital camera!  How do I choose one?  I want to spend about $1000 with lenses and I want to take pictures like this and this.  Am I holding out false hope?  More on this later.

Have been engaging in internet materialism lately.  This dress has so many configurations!  I am compelled by the lo-fi marketing strategy.

Pour out a bottle for Russian ex-President Boris Yeltsin, who died of heart failure today.

I’ve lost faith entirely in my Russian immune system!  I’ve been sick three out of the last four weeks.  Today I’ve given up and am carrying around an entire roll of toilet paper, which will be gone by the end of the day.  My nose overfloweth.

Somewhere northwest of Spokane, a young man attempts to hire a hit man to assassinate his ex-girlfriend’s fetus.  CNN dutifully reports on it.  The young man’s lawyer claims “his client is an intelligent young man who got bad advice.”

I’ve been looking at men’s razor commercials lately as research for a fake razor commercial I’m doing for a class.  The “Razor Wars” are epic and hilarious!  I found this article from 2005, when Gillette’s five(!)-bladed razor, the Fusion, came out.  My favorite bit is when the Gillette CEO gets snide:

“The Schick launch has nothing to do with this, it’s like comparing a Ferrari to a Volkswagen as far as we’re concerned,” Chairman, President and Chief Executive James Kilts, told Reuters.

The razor we’re marketing has ten blades and is called the X-Factor (is your relationship missing the x-factor?)  It will get you the chicks.

Things have changed since I dropped off the face of the earth.  The superficial: I’ve taken up aerobics, which is brilliant.  I’m too busy feeling ridiculous to notice how tired I am.  My instructor favors absurd sequences of flailing movements, which I execute gracelessly but with great enjoyment.  I think there’s some kind of skillset involved in aerobics, some ability to pick up weird, unintuitive movements quickly.  I have made no progress on picking up these skills, but my sense of shame has been eroded entirely.  Otherwise, everything seems to be coming my way: nationals for mock trial are in two weeks, which is terrifying, and my grades need rescuing.  Meanwhile, I’ve developed an impressive and persistent lung cough.  For a while there, I lost my voice and sounded like I’d been smoking for years, which had the unexpected result of people seeming to pay more attention to what I had to say.

A song I like, and where you can get it: Rehab by Amy Winehouse.

I failed the Arial or Helvetica quiz.  I am not a true designer!  I have been shaking my fist from the sidelines of the Arial vs. Helvetica struggle for ages, but though I am squarely on the side of Helvetica, I don’t own it.  I would like to, but the concept of paying for things runs counter to my ideals.