It has occured to me that either the TA or the prof of my News and New Media course may get bored with reading fake AP stories and click on my weblog link when they hit my index page, and thereby end up reading my last post, thereby leading them to strongly consider failing me summarily.

In my own defense, I can only say: [sound of Ellen running outside, locking the door, running down the stairs, leaving the building, starting the car, and peeling off á la the Simpsons]

Beware these words when they come out of a professor’s mouth. They THINK they’re making things easier for you, but nine times out of ten, they’re making your life more difficult.

Case in point: My comm studies prof told us he wanted to “save us some money on coursepacks” and decided to not have a coursepack made this quarter, and to just put everything on Electronic reserve. He said this would be easier than having us all go stand in line at the copy shop (which, I’m sorry, is not that fucking hard).

What “electronic reserve” means, for those unfamiliar with the term, is that everything that would otherwise be photocopied and waiting in a nice little booklet at the copy shop is instead in PDF form online that each person has to print out. Another thing this means, incidentally, is that he doesn’t have to pay copyright fees for using other people’s material.

All this printing took me three hours, several hundred pieces of paper, and half a printer cartridge. If you say that my time is worth $8 an hour (more than Blockbuster thought I was worth and less than what I think I’m worth), and my printer cartridges are generally about $50 a pop, then i just wasted $40, for what in coursepacket form would have cost me $20 or less.

Thanks, Professor!

Mark always used to talk about how everything would be all right if he were an ice cream vendor. But I note a couple of flaws in his logic:

1. The Music. You have to listen to the most obnoxious sound on the face of the earth: Essentially a giant, really loud music box directly above your head, playing what I only know as the tune for Wakko’s America from Animaniacs. If it annoys the shit out of me for the five minutes a day the ice cream man stops at the park across the street for the kiddies, it’d make me homicidal if I had to hear it on a daily basis.

2. Chicago Weather. Our schitzoprhenic seasons have now switched back to winter after two days of summer. Three days ago I had my windows open and was only sleeping under one thin blanket. the last two nights I’ve been sleeping under five blankets and trying to figure out why it’s still so cold. That and the tendency to go from Bright, Gorgeous Sunny Day to Raining, Miserable, Blah Day in 0.6 hours has got to piss you off. You’re out there, all ready to make big bucks selling kiddies ice cream to cool off, and then BA-WHOOSH, mother nature comes and drenches everyone.

Though the smart ones do what a guy in DC used to do: He’d park outside my high school, and give the first couple of people to wander over (we had open campus) free ice cream to go back to the school and say “the ice cream man’s here,” which people would quite happily do, and the guy would make hundreds of dollars, and only have to deal with bratty rich high schoolers instead of small, screaming children.

Which is a much, much better idea in my book.