String of decent luck!

I got an A- on my 10 page Sociology paper!
I got a job at Blue Chip Cookies.

So excited for the job because let me tell you: they bake their sweet goods on-site! And the coffee is fair trade! It's all so much more glorious and authentic than Starbucks ever wishes it could be.

And tomorrow is Friday! Hurrah.

I am currently working on a History paper answering the question 'To what extent is the modern broiler chicken an "organic machine"?'. I got the majority of it finished last night in about 3 hours, because it has to be 700-1000 words -- less than 10 pages by a long shot! I like what I have so far. I have a History discussion in a couple hours so we'll see if I take any pointers away from that to add to my paper, which is due on Tuesday.

That is all for now. :-)

It's unanimous

Reading Break should officially be changed to Reading Breaks.

I have a French chapter test in a couple hours, a sociology midterm tomorrow, and a History paper due on March 4 that I haven't started because I need my TA to return my email! Ugh.

If you want to think about the earth differently...

...read this book! It is fabulous. I will expand upon that thought later, but for now:

Publishers weekly says, "It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "[E]ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of... well, precisely what I don't know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven't yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan's narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I'm not convinced I'd want to go hunting with Pollan, but I'm sure I'd enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota."

I wish I was joking. But I'm not. Clearly I have nothing better to do but think of this.

Not much to take pictures of this week, so words will have to suffice for this lil' update.

This week was relatively boring, minus the whole threat scare thing, which was of course nothing. I don't get people; if you want to get out of a midterm that badly, there is no reason to worry hundreds of other people, create trouble for the university, the police, and give CBC something to do. It's all so annoying and pointless. If someone is willing to go that far, well their karma is going to come back to them really quickly -- how about flunking out of uni because they can't even deal with midterms? Or dying in an actual hostage/bomb/fire/threat situation? Either way.

On Friday I decided to jump on Breakdown Britney's bandwagon and put my Chapters gift certificate to good use, as I made a special trip to buy Rolling Stone's newest issue. Lo and behold, stupid Chapters either did not get their stock out fast enough or they didn't get it at all, but they still had the old issue! I was saddened to say the least, as I had read the intro of the article and it promised journalism beyond a strung-together exposé of her latest and increasingly pathetic escapades. Later that night, however, someone had gratefully typed up the entire article and put it online. On this note I will divulge some (scintillated) wasted brain cells...

My feelings on Ms. Spears have been conflicted as of late. First of all, I hadn't lost complete faith in her up until sometime in the last 6 months. I don't know if that is incredibly naive of me based on, oh the past 4 years of her gradual unwinding, but whatever. For the most part I chalked up her much-documented craziness to her brilliance; was she actually smart enough to look all disgusting and dishevelled just so the paparazzi could run around and look like idiots?

Clearly she was capable of cleaning up well, during and post-Federline years. So I guess I was still under the impression that she was sane and not just sane, but saavy! Ever since she ditched KFed, however, something snapped despite the public's momentum to support her new found freedom and recovery to the svelte lip-syncing pop star we all knew her to be. Sure she was laughable as said identity, but at least it would have left her some room to breath from the tabloids. And yet she completely lost out on the cheering heard world-wide when the divorce news broke. Why? Because she broke.

I just can't process how she became such a mess and no one could help her. She has very clearly hit rock bottom a few times over. Why can't she see that? Why does help seem to ricochet off her bald head?! It isn't fair that the whole thing has to be photographed and videotaped just so everyone else can witness it too. If it pains me this much to see her fall further into a public coma, then can you imagine what the hell is going on in her head?! When the press is guessing how many months before she kicks the bucket, I think everything has gone too far and then some. The Rolling Stone article does a brilliant job of both legitimizing her craziness but also admitting how addicting her "truth" is. It's not just her past that can explain the degeneration, but it's her fault now too --drugs, partying, paranoia.

I just think that if there was some kind of publicly agreed upon deal to stop dogging her for a while and see what ends up happening, then Rolling Stone might get to write the best come-back story this century. It would be fabulous! If there is enough decency from Hollywood to salvage the damaged goods, no matter how much frappuchino covers said goods, there may just be a blue horizon beyond the Hills.

What. The. Hell.

Broadcast E-mail to All UBC Students, Faculty and Staff from President Stephen J. Toope:

For the second time in a week, our Vancouver campus community has received a threatening message.

In this second case, an unspecific threat has been made for Wednesday. The threat does not specify a time, a location within the UBC Point Grey campus or the method of doing harm.

We must take such threats seriously, and we are working closely with senior RCMP personnel to address this new threat.

What can we all do when faced with such a threat? We are taking the advice of the RCMP to treat the non-specific nature of the threat with a higher level of community vigilance but to otherwise continue our normal activities.

However, because of the specific mention of the Biosciences building in the threatening message received last week, and the traumatic experience of the occupants who endured a full lockdown of the building at that time, classes will be cancelled tomorrow (Wednesday) in the Biosciences Building.

For details, see the RCMP news release at: www.rcmp-bcmedia.ca

And please continue to look at www.ubc.ca for the latest information.

Playing football and Nintendo Wii

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