My Citibank Graduate Assist loan just kicked into repayment.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
Ugh…
My two consolidated student loans (a Direct Loan and a NJCLASS loan) are both well above the $50,000 mark. This Citibank loan, though, is about $7,500.
So, I’m going to decimate this one in no time. As a matter of fact, I’m putting off all luxury purchases and unnecessary purchases until this pittance of a loan is paid off.
Stupid student loans…
Remember this hilarious dancing baby?
And to imagine – this thing came out about a decade ago. That baby is hilarious!
By far, the worst Christmas song that I’ve ever heard is “The Christmas Shoes” by NewSong. The song is about a little kid who is buying his Mom a new pair of shoes before she dies later on that night.
What the fuck? Are you serious?!?
Someone actually made a song about a little kid buying his Mom shoes before she dies?! Alright, if you’ve heard the song you know it pulls at your heart strings. You know that it’s well-performed and that it has a nice, loving message (I guess).
But let me ask you: Who the hell is going to play this song? It’s bad enough that it’s on the Sirius XM Holiday station, but what is the intended audience for this song? People in a hospital? Hell no! Nobody wants to hear about some woman dying and her son not understanding the whole thing in a hospital.
Are you going to play this at your company Christmas Party? Absolutely not. What about the informal Christmas gathering at your college buddy’s house? Yeah, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and the song about a woman dying and her son being happy that she’s meeting Jesus tonight.
That’s right, folks. One of the song’s lyrics is:
And I want her to look beautiful, If Momma meets Jesus tonight.
How uplifting!!!
So are you going to play this song in your car while you’re driving around doing Christmas shopping? Good Lord no!
When can you play such a depressing song? When you’re sitting in front of the fire at Christmas and you’re alone (again) and you feel like you’ve got nothing left to live for any more. Congratulations, NewSong. You’ve made a Christmas song for manically depressed people who want to shoot themselves!
What a disaster this movie was! From the very beginning to the very end, there was more chopped out of this movie than I thought was possible! Really, Warner Brothers did a tremendous hack job with this film so much to the point where I recommend NOT seeing it.
The only thing that this film is good for is to put faces with names. Other than the obvious lack of including all, most, or even a majority of the storyline features from the book, there is no contiguous logic in the story. It’s like watching a bunch of scenes from what could have been a much, MUCH longer movie. It’s disjointed and there are not enough explanations in the two and a half hours that the thing tarries on for.
I will say that the special effects and wardrobe are done very well. So was the casting and make-up. Warner Brothers does do a good job of giving you a look at what Hogwarts and the characters would probably look like in real life.
But in terms of telling a story, this movie sucked. If you’re a non-Harry Potter fan, then I would suggest not using this film as a basis to judge whether or not you’d like the series.
The big story with video games these days is how Wii is dominating the competition. Sure, the XBox 360 is selling well and has sold over 8 million units, but Wii was launched only a few weeks ago and has sold over 1.2 million units worldwide.
That’s a crazy amount of Wii’s in a short amount of time!
These numbers, compared to the paltry 360,000 PlayStation 3 consoles sold show a very interesting story. With all of the horsepower and all of the hoopla around the PS3 debut, the system just isn’t that appealing to the gaming masses. But wait, you say. What about all of these people dying over PS3s and what about the fact that they’re sold out? Well, the biggest use of PS3s right now is NOT in people’s home – it’s reselling them. EBay is packed with PS3 packages and the game is sold out in the stores for this reason – people are buying the consoles simply to turn around and sell them.
While this is also happening with Wii, there are many more stories about how much fun the Nintendo system is – which means that people are buying the system and playing it, not reselling it. In any event, the recent surge of Wii sales shows the huge confusion that Microsoft and Sony have about video gamers.
Yes, there are gamers out there who will buy the PS3 and the XBox 360 because of the high definition graphics and the ability to watch high definition DVDs. And yes, there are people who will buy XBox 360 because of their enormous game library and who will buy PS3 just because it’s a PS3. But when you listen to what the marketing guys from Microsoft and Sony are saying to try to sell these systems, they’re completely confused.
Recently, one Sony employee said that the PS3 is on track to become so much more than a gaming machine. Well, that’s the problem! We don’t want to buy a video game system to do our daily e-mailing on – we want a video game machine that is a lot of FUN to play! Hell, we’ll even take graphics that aren’t that great if the game is fun! Don’t believe that? Go to any old-school arcade and tell me that you don’t love playing The Simpsons video game from the mid 1990’s. Or sit down with any PS2, GameCube, or XBox and tell me that playing a good Mortal Kombat or Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy game isn’t sweet.
That’s what gamers want – FUN! You can keep your “home entertainment centers” – we already have a desktop or laptop PC!
