Loving the HH

Heather Havrilesky is hilarious (that's a lot of H's). Her column "I Like to Watch" gets me through the week, seriously.

She had the occasion to watch "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" (as did I) and here is a snippet from her review:

And even when [Tim Gunn's] being kind of spongy and weird, when he's looking at a really bad pair of jeans with an awful cut that makes your ass look like an armchair, even when he's searching for the right words to describe just how wrong those jeans look, flipping through the many, many words in his enormous vocabulary, even then, he's filled with love and empathy. Even when he thinks you're tacky and, quite frankly, gross, he gets away with it, because he also wants what's best for you, he believes in you, and he just knows that you're going to make it work, somehow, some way!

She is so right, as usual. Love her (and I LOVE Tim Gunn too, btw)!

More on the school loan legislation

The L.A. Times has an update on the education bill I mentioned in an earlier post.

Congress has passed the bill, and W rescinded his veto threat! This may actually go through!

By cutting incentives the government had been paying to lenders, the government can shift the funds directly to students. They will be raising the Pell Grant amount (not that I could get my hands on that anyway) and they are going to forgive government-issued student loans for graduates that work in the public sector or in "high-need" schools. The part that will benefit me is the interest rate reduction - which will reduce the rate from 6.8% down to 3.4% over the next several years. This is great news and means I could end up saving several thousand dollars in interest when all is said and done (if my math is right, and it might not be...)!

Crossing my fingers and knocking on wood....

Polar Bears in trouble

I could be PMSing, but this is so sad. "Two-thirds of the world's polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday," this article begins.

"Disaster Capitalism"

Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is releasing soon.

Here is a snippet from a longer excerpt:

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.

Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages.

By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

3:10 to Yuma!

I loved this movie! I'm not one for westerns - they never interested me. But I love Christian Bale and Russell Crowe (Bale, more, given his incredible range - anyone who can pull off American Psycho, The Machinist, and Batman in one career is impressive in my book).

Both of them are so good in this film... it's suspenseful and emotional (maybe I'm just emotional these days?) and the cast is great:

Peter Fonda
Ben Foster (one of Claire's creepy boyfriends on Six Feet Under)
Luke Wilson, who was probably phoning it in, admittedly
Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly)
Gretchen Mol...

Anyhoo, the trailer's here. Life was really hard for those early Arizonans.

Latte Art

Thought this little video was fun...

Last one for today: The new fall TV lineup

Seriously, wtf.

Yahoo is hailing the Caveman show - you know, the one based on the Geico commercial - as a new show "you have to see."

Geekwatch: iPhone price cut controversy

So you may have heard about yesterday's announcement from Apple, which, among other things, included the introduction of a newer, cheaper model of iPhone - a mere two months after its first release. Well, some of those "early adopters" were angered by the price drop and today Apple decided to offer them a $100 store credit as a thank-you for their early support of the product. Aww, shucks. $399 is still too much for me, sadly. The little suckers are gorgeous and cool, but I can wait.