I’m up to my eyeballs in studying for the GRE – I take it Wednesday and I think I’m close to running through every goddamn GRE math prep question on the internet.

So, in lieu of an actual post, please enjoy this TV/Movies mashup Casey found that kind of melted my brain:

I’ll probably have something up on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down later this week – Today’s the actual anniversary but I just don’t have time to write up everything I’m thinking.

If you would, I encourage you to buy it from this dude, because his commercial is fucking awesome.

via Gawker.

Having scraped change out of the couch, sold off my possessions on eBay, and been given some extremely well-timed birthday gifts of cash money, I finally broke down and bought an iPhone.

Part of me wanted to wait until I got an actual job, but the Sprint network in my neighborhood was crapping out so badly that my crackberry would drain at least once a day. It was damn near unusable, so off I went to the Apple store at the crack of dawn yesterday to fulfill my iNerd destiny.

The iPhone is predictably awesome. Substantially easier to use, save for needing to get used to the virtual keyboard. Apps (and I’ve downloaded nothing but free ones) are a great enhancement to the included programs. Having the full internet, and having it at a damn fast pace, is a substantial improvement over the primitive Crackberry browser.

Making ringtones in GarageBand is a fun time killer. Trying to figure out exactly what little snippets of a song will be fun rather than annoying, then trying to time the loop exactly right so the rhythm holds up over repeated rings is an entertaining challenge. Current ringtone: The first eight seconds of Cake’s “Opera Singer.”

There are a few things that bug me: The iChat outgoing text message noise can’t be turned off and bugs the shit out of me on the phone (oddly, it doesn’t bother me as part of iChat); I really, really wish there was a 64GB version so I could have my entire music library on it; for some reason it refused to mingle contacts I’d initially synced from my computer with MobileMe and I had to hand-delete several hundred duplicates; and the glossy back is the slipperiest thing I’ve ever touched short of a live fish.

Overall, however, I’m mighty pleased with my decision so far. I love that I now only have to carry one device for phone and music, and I’m very, very happy that I have a phone that gets decent reception at my apartment.

As a sidenote, the most ridiculous aspect of this entire process happened when I called Sprint up to pay off my final bill. Their billing system bills a month in advance, so I wanted to pay off my final bill since I was only about a quarter of the way through the month.

Sprint’s rep, of course, told me that I had to wait until after my billing cycle rolled over on the 12th. Which is all well and good, except my payment is due on the 6th. She swore up and down that I wouldn’t get dinged with a late fee unless I was more than 10 days late, though she didn’t seem too surprised when I expressed some skepticism towards that promise.

So we’ll see what that final bill winds up costing me, but frankly, I was ready to pay just about any price to get the hell away from Sprint’s craptastic service.

In an update to my earlier post, now that I’ve tried it out….I am DEFINITELY never leaving the house again.

Because then I’d get to participate in unbelievably awesome stuff like this, from the voices behind Spongebob Squarepants:

via Dave Barry’s blog and BoingBoing.

Almost a month into the season, I can now declare an official winner: Pushing Daisies.

I’d absolutely loved the first two episodes, with their bizarre hyper-techincolor acid trip set design, extremely strong acting, and cute (but without crossing the fine line into too cute) stories.

I was worried, however, because both episodes were directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Men in Black and The Addams Family, and whose excellent, ebullient visual storytelling leaned heavily on what turned out to be an absolutely obscene budget.

You saw every penny of the lavish spending on the screen, but in the world of television, that kind of outlay over 22 weeks becomes simply unsustainable.

So unsustainable, in fact, that ABC actually took the draconian step of banning Sonnenfeld from directing future episodes and slashing the budget to the bone. I worried that without the wild, inspired world they were able to paint with all that money, the whole house of cards would fall down.

I’m pleased to report that the writing of this week’s episode was inspired enough that I barely noticed the more drab and dimly lit surroundings.

Trying to explain what actually happens in the show is a bit of a mess. The basic premise is moderately understandable (though is annoyingly reiterated in every episode thus far): The main character touches a dead person once, they are resurrected. If he touches them again, they die, and stay dead.

If he does not touch them again to re-kill them in a minute, however, someone or something nearby will die in their place. He uses this power to help solve murders, and collect rewards. Oh, and he also revives dead fruit to make delicious pies at his awesomely named pie restaurant, the Pie Hole.

But trying to capture the texture of this show in words is totally impossible, other than to say it’s the most wildly inventive show I’ve seen in some time, and it’s clear that both the writers and the production designers have found themselves some truly excellent hallucinogens.

If you’re willing to read some spoilers, professional TV critic Alan Sepinwall sums up why this ridiculousness works a lot better than I can. Even he can’t capture the true level of weirdness, so if you haven’t seen any of the episodes yet, you should try and get the ABC.com streaming to work for you, and watch whatever episodes they have up.

Pushing Daisies‘ weird, wild house of cards could still all collapse in on itself. I’ll certainly admit to some misgivings about how long they can sustain the delicate balance they’ve struck. But until it does collapse, missing it would be a real shame.

I really want to find out if this awesome contraption is actually a viable alternative to crutches. Because if it is, I’m totally getting one if I have to have surgery.

If I do, I’m totally reusing it at Halloween and being a pirate. Arrr!