I found an amazing new online resource for music-lovers everywhere: Pandora Internet Radio.

It's a personal radio station that adjusts with every musical whim you have. Kickstart a station by feeding Pandora any random artist or song you enjoy and then give each song Pandora throws at you, accordingly, a thumb's up, thumb's down, or if you're not swayed toward "like" or "dislike," stay on the fence. Pandora will keep arranging and rearranging your ideal musical playlist based on nothing but your opinions. The more you use it, the more customized your radio station will be.

Pandora's unbelievably awesome and a must-have bookmark for anyone who craves new music. The pickier you are, the more equipped Pandora is to handpick music for you!

So much cooler than asking friends (even those with similar music tastes) for advice.


Ps - I've added a new "about me" page.

I'm normally still in bed by 10 AM.

So it's 9:42 am and a whole lot has already happened by this point. You're probably wondering right now: "WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED, LAURA??!?!?!!? I'm DYING to know!!!!!" Well, okay, fine, I'll tell you then! Jeez.

So I had a one-page assignment due in my 8 am journalism class today. It's an easy one, but it's also a good chunk of my grade. Of course by morning time, it wasn't printed out. Haha, like I'd print something out AHEAD OF TIME. Funny.

So, I checked my UT account to make sure there were enough "Bevo Bucks" to pay to print it out on campus. (Our home printer was out of ink.)

Bevo Bucks are the money parents put into the accounts of UT freshman, typically, to assure they don't spend it on alcohol or drugs, because Bevo Bucks are only accepted at certain stores (mostly on-campus). Parents think that if they give their kids Bevo Bucks, they are less likely to y'know, drink under the age and stuff, but that's just silly, because they can't buy alcohol under 21 anyways, which means they just end up getting it the same way as if they had real-life cash from their parents too. Really, Bevo Bucks are just a clever way of the University convincing parents to give them money, that can't be refunded after graduation, instead of giving it directly to their children. But it's fun to spend Bevo Bucks, as opposed to just conventional dollars! So who cares?

But anyways, Bevo Bucks are also used for printing. It only costs 10 cents to print out a page. Guess how many Bevo Bucks I had? Well, technically I didn't have even just one silly Bevo Buck. And I didn't have as much as a tenth of a Bevo Buck either!!!! I had a measly 2 cents.

FUCK!!!!!

So, I asked roomie/friend/partner in crime/badass motherfucker Marie to give me her UT ID and password, so I could then log in to her account and get her ID and password for her printing account, which hopefully would have at least .10 Bevo Bucks in it. She graciously gave me the very powerful personal information and left for class. I tried desperately to log in, but it wasn't working!!!! So I called her, and apparently she accidentally wrote down the wrong password for me.

WHAT A BITCH.

No, just kidding. Marie's great, and she gave me the right password over the phone. But because I tried to get into her account and failed so many times before, UT thought I was an evil person with malicious intentions and locked me out. It was like that scene in Shaun of the Dead, where the zombies are attacking and the non-Zombies can't get out of the car cuz of the child safety locks. Security is so overrated sometimes. Hear that President Bush?

You know what I mean?

So, anyways, back to the chaos.

FUCK!!!!

But, oh! There's still another roommate in the house. So I get Pujeeta's special, top-secret ID and password and sure enough, she has over .10 Bevo Bucks. We then go to the bus stop; we're both late for class. But hellooooo, it's an 8 AM CLASS. No one goes to their 8 am classes.

Well, let's just say I only go to that class when there is a test or an assignment due. The few days I attended when this wasn't the case, I was shocked that the lecture hall was filled. WHO GOES TO AN 8 AM CLASS?!?!?!!? People are so retarded sometimes.

So anyways, we're waiting at the bus stop and the sprinklers turn on, spontaneously, without any warning whatsoever. I'm not sure what kind of warning a sprinkler should give, but maybe a nice "Hey, people, GET OUT OF THE WAY! I'm about to turn on and spray you and it's like 50 degrees outside, so y'know, GET OUT OF THE WAY!" Luckily, we noticed that it turned on before it rotated in our direction so we did get out of the way. But it was a clooooose call.

If you want to know how the story ends, well it did end happily ever after. Somehow, despite all my procrastinating and extreme slacking, it always ends happily ever after.

How was your morning?

Playing dress up is fun!

Halloween is long gone, but I was just delivered a batch of pictures from the festivities. I was a gothic fairy! >:) We spent the holiday out on 6th Street of course. And it was like no other night downtown -- 6th never disappoints, but on Halloween, it has a whole other energy to it and we had a blast.

If you're a detail-oriented person, you may have noticed that I no longer have a picture page on this blog. I'll post pictures in blog entries (like I'm doing now), but in general, it seems a little redundant, as I've got Myspace and Facebook for photo albums. So anyways, here's a few pics from Halloween 2006.

Whoawhoawewa!

I've seen Borat: Cultural Learnings of America to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan two times already. I happen to think it's an outrageously hilarious satire and goofball comedy all rolled into one.



But it's also a shocking and sobering glimpse into a bigoted, homophobic, and generally stupid population of folks who live right here in America. I'll give most Americans the benefit of the doubt and assume the people who showed their true, nasty colors in Borat are a minority. But if the scene where Cohen's character, a wide-eyed and obtuse Kazakhstani journalist who searches for cultural enlightenment in America, rallies up a huge crowd of spectators at a rodeo, getting them to cheer him on as he exclaims "May George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!" is any indicator, we're not talking about just a minority... but a mob mentality that exists in some parts of the country and is just waiting for someone like Borat to stir things up.

There's one climactic scene in the film, which I don't want to give away, that portrays some radical Christians in an odd light. So I was pretty curious as to how the Christian community was sizing up the star of the film, Jewish comedian Sascha Cohen. I came across this article.

I then preceded to email the author, Dr. Mark Newman, about what I thought of his analysis. While I didn't want to argue with him about the purely vulgar and silly comedy in the film or Cohen's behind-the-scenes tactics, I did think that his complaints about the more satirical bits were strange (scroll down to the final paragraph of his essay).

We've been talking back and forth about the film and I think we've both been enlightened. For me, I came to the realization that unfortunately there are a lot of folks -- even educated ones! -- in which many of the jokes will fly right over their heads. They'll laugh at the "Running of the Jew" because they think it's funny a Jew is being persecuted, not because of the absurdity of racism or ethnic hatred. And thus, Cohen's mockery of all the things most of us agree are offensive might get a good laugh for the totally wrong reasons.

Of course if this is the case, it doesn't change my opinion of the film. In fact, it only augments it because it just makes Cohen's point all the more relevant: that those backwards ideas and cultural misunderstandings in countries like Kazakhstan are still surprisingly widespread here in the States, the leader of the Free World.

Newman writes from a Christian perspective; he believes there is such a thing as appropriate humor and inappropriate humor. I'm not going to try to convince him otherwise. But when it comes to comedy, nothing is off limits. That's the nature of the art. It's the values it expresses that matter -- and I think the values that Cohen promotes are the same values that Newman promotes. The humor that offends me is the kind that sneakily exploits racial stereotypes and thus perpetuates the acceptance of them, not the kind that makes fun of them (i.e. Borat).

I gave Newman the Mel Brooks quote, about comedy being the best way to bring people like Hitler down, as opposed to rhetoric. He didn't buy it, though. All I know is when something I believe is made fun of, I react a lot more adversely to it than if someone tries to debate with me about it or persuade me that it's wrong through even the most well-reasoned argument. Newman thinks the comedy in Borat is more open to misinterpretation than straightforward rhetoric. The thing is though, Borat is R. If there are people over 17-yrs-old who don't get that racism is bad... then we're in a lot of trouble!

As you may know, Borat was yanked from tons of theaters right before its opening weekend, much to the surprise of moviegoers who'd bought their tickets ahead of time. Distributor 20th Century Fox freaked out at the last minute because they did some test screenings and found out a bunch of people knew about Santa Clause 3 coming out (not being gay, just opening up in theaters), but not so many were in the loop about Borat. So despite the massive online hype about the film, it wasn't put in wide release until a week after it opened in just a few, select theaters. It was a huge smash hit, beating Santa Clause during its limited, first run. And apparently, it's still selling out at the Drafthouse. Take that Fox.

I wonder if Newman thinks it's better for America that we keep watching movies like Santa Clause 3. No room for misinterpretation there.

PS -- Had a funky problem with the comments, so the ones from the last entry got deleted (sorryyyy). But they were and still are very much appreciated.

Blog: Take 5

My blogs have evolved with my life. The format of my first online journal changed on a weekly basis. I guess I didn't have much of a grasp on "blogging" back then. I guess I didn't have much of a grasp on who I was, either.

My second blog, and honestly my first real blog, was called Lost in Waco. Cheery, huh? The posts varied from silly to snarky to almost embittered. But give me a break -- I lived in Waco, Texas, otherwise known as "that town where David Koresh and his crazy cult got burned to death by the U.S. Government."

But as I rounded out my second year at Baylor University (and what a painful year it was), I preceded to set up shop at Spoiled American Brat. I wasn't just mad at Baylor anymore, I was mad at the whole country! So I still blogged with attitude, but by this time I had a bigger perspective and more importantly, I had a hunch I'd be moving to Austin and attending the University of Texas soon... because as anxious as I was about how out of place I felt at Baylor, I accepted that year as a year of transition. And somehow that made everything easier.

Blog me sideways, that's a lot of blogging. And it doesn't end there!

After my real-life move to Austin, I moved my blog, again, to Laura's Badass Blog. Boring title really, no theme. Appropriate, I suppose. I haven't really felt there has been a theme to my life these past few years. Maybe this is because I finally made it to the light at the end of the dark, dreary Baptist tunnel and that was all that really mattered.

But now, I get this feeling that change is coming again... some good, some not so good. Fuck: I'm graduating from college in less than a year! People I went to high school with are getting married! My dad has a terminal brain tumor! All those things I used to think were so far off in the distance, like a career and well, let's not even mention other grownup events and obligations and expectations, are like... well, not so far off in the distance anymore.

So, I decided I needed a new blog, a blog that has more intention. Because I'm more intentioned. I don't think this thing will win a battle of the blogs or anything like that but change is good, sometimes.

This was the runner-up, minus photoshopping, to Crazy Lil Thing (Led Zeppelin Song + Annie Hall Quote = Me). Did I pick the wrong one?

Well, it doesn't really matter. I've already put the blog on the fire, so grab a chair, sit down, and relax.