New year, new semester

After being with only limited internet access for the past month, I figured I would write a quick entry about various entries that have been accumulating over the past couple of weeks.

In no particular order:

1. The Good Shepherd: I saw this over my break - it's about 2 hours and 40 minutes long, not counting previews. I wouldn't say this is worth seeing in the theater since it isn't a very action intense movie (as opposed to Die Hard Part IV: Live Free or Die Hard may be), but it is a good movie that I probably would not have sat through otherwise. It is very confusing in parts though and if you blink, you may lose the timeline. Moral of the movie: When you work in espionage, trust is a concept you learn to live without.

2. New Years: For whatever reason, I was watching the ball drop on tv at a bar for New Years 2007. Unlike Tara Reid, who apparently never played hide and seek to learn how to count backwards, Fox simply made the countdown disappear with 20 seconds left. Luckily the DJ kept the countdown going. I woke up alone on New Years Day, so that gives you an idea of how well my New Years night went.

3. Mad Cow Disease: As liberal as Boston Legal is, and as much as I can only watch it for the jokes and witty dialog rather than the blatantly left spin it spews out, it did pose an interesting question that I spent five minutes researching. Could alzheimer's disease and mad cow disease have something in common?

Boston Legal attempts to conflate the two into the same disease, which did appear to have some non-scientific backing, but a look into various science websites suggests only that the affliction caused by each could be treated by similar methods. See Mad cow, Alzheimer's proteins are similar - study. Part of me thinks there may be two separate strains of mad cow, one acting very quickly as evidenced by the cases in Britain and North America and perhaps another is much more silent. My scientific background or lack thereof, however, leads me to conclude that nobody is really sure and maybe the vegetarians have it right after all. Of course, you can't eat fish because of mercury and chicken because of the bird flu, so what can you do. I'll stick to my grill.

4. I've begun to waste some time on this Yahoo Answers thing. Although I welcome any forum that allows people to help each other out, there are many more bad questions that beg for a sarcastic response than good ones that would prove this site useful. When you post questions, it shows you other questions that may (and usually do) answer your question. Maybe if these questions were linked a little better to each other, or people would apply various search engines prior to turning to the Answers forum to get some free advice, or scroll down a little more, this site could develop into something much more of a resource. At the very least, it would be easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

5. Let's go ahead and merge XM and Sirius. Whether it turns into a monopoly is an issue to test once everybody buys into the system or when it becomes so integrated into the society that price collusion or costs generally require government intervention. After all, comcast is still pretty much the dominant cable provider and nobody's stepped in to break them up yet. If they have survived this long, why have two satellite radios when one can perhaps make the concept work?

6. My dentist recently found and plugged a cavity. I feel like I let my mouth down.

7. Facebook is better than MySpace. I have looked at both and can state this to a reasonable certainty.

That's it. I'm sure there's more, but I have to enjoy the remains of my vacation.

Tags: the good shepherd, xm, sirius, facebook, myspace, boston legal, mad cow