As you all well know, Wikipedia is relatively insane. There are what could be called WikiTerrorists who go around posting misinformation on various profiles just for the hell of it that are hilarious for the two minutes they’re up before WikiWatchers (not really called this) take them down. It happened to Tom Brady’s after the Super Bowl and various other people at various other times.

But Wikipedia is supposed to be there for information. For a mass source of useful knowledge that grows and grows organically from our own minds. Oh yeah, it’s also for checking on the world’s per capita beer consumption by country.

1. I have been to China and back.

2. The Knicks have a three game win streak going (without Stephon Marbury, I might add. Coincidence? I think not.).

3. I learned about the half man, half tree thanks to Deadspin’s NBA Closer.

I feel the need to promote my family for a second here. My cousin was featured in a sketch comedy video of sorts. He’s not one of the comedians, but he plays the straight man to their comedy duo. He’s the one with the dark hair and beard who says he saw them on Valentine’s day.

Funny.

Click, just click and watch the accompanying video and tell me you’re not petrified.

On TrueHoop this morning, I saw an interesting little bit on an apparent feud between Mark Cuban and Bill O’Reilly over Cuban’s financing of the film Redacted (which I don’t know a lot about). I suppose there isn’t much new here. O’Reilly is over the top, unfounded, and all that type of stuff, but I thought there was a good breakdown of it all on the blog and also on Cuban’s blog and Olbermann or however you spell his name (fact check be damned!) does a good job ripping it too. Like I said, nothing really new, but its nice to see Cuban’s response because he understands media and advertising so well that he’s able to thank O’Reilly essentially because he knows that O’Reilly ripping it will probably prompt more people to go see it. Fun.

Or some such thing. The fact that college tuition is on the raise, still is old news. I paid as much for my college education as some people pay for a house. Not a house in New York City, but a house nonetheless. Tuition will keep going up despite the desires of the government to go otherwise and so more people will go to state schools or be mired in debt or both. Reality.

What shocked me a little about grad school applications was the cost of simply applying to these schools. It’s not astronomical or anything, but I’m spending over 500 dollars to apply to six schools. Money that I will never see back. “Non-refundable Application Fee.” This seems a little much to me. In the end, we pay for any printing that’s done, any postage, and every other cost that goes into the application, but I still have to shell over 100 bucks just to have the privilege of you opening my envelope? That the fee exists I’m not surprised by, but that it’s as high as it is concerns me a little. I had to luck of not experiencing this for undergrad as I applied early and got accepted to the school, thus only having to pay one application fee, but I can see how these would pile up. At an open house the other day, one of the students said she was applying to 13 different programs. That’s got to be over 1000 dollars in application fees! This is absurd (well, so is the notion of applying to 13 different programs at least to me), but we’ve been taught in the whole application process to try to cover your bases. Have safety schools and reaches and all that type of stuff. I limited myself to programs close to New York that didn’t require a GRE score and still I had 6. It really just seems like another way for schools to siphon funds out of us, and in this case funds that we might not even be able to gain anything from.

Just stumbled across this little tid bit through my late-day-god-just-end-this-hellish-experience-now-so-I-can-go-home ramblings through Jezebel. Lance and an Olsen? Say it ain’t so.

Many of you may have been saddened (or gladdened - real word!) at the news today that Britney Spears lost custody of her children. Personally, I DON’T CARE, but apparently enough people do that it was printed on the front page of the New York Metro. Seriously, it made the front page of a paper. Now I understand that Metro and AM New York are free papers that have essentially replaced the dime rags of centuries past (well, maybe not centuries), but they are also newspapers and I just don’t know how Britney’s custody battles make it on the front page.

And yet, here I am writing about it. It perpetuates down through the magazines and newspapers into every level of writing, infecting it along the way. We can’t escape it. If not the story itself, then the sensationalism of the news, and even if not that, the sensationalism of the writing style. EVERYTHING IS JUST SO DRAMATIC AND WHAT WILL WE DO ABOUT IT!?!?!? This type of news, the glamourfication (not a word!) of life and celebrity and everything; the TMZs of the world; all of that, while it can be entertaining and some would argue informative, it kills writing, not just news.

These magazines, these “stories” replace every other type of publication as the reading of choice. So it then permeates down to other forms. Writers want to be read, want to please the masses, reach the mob, and this is the crap that the mob reads, so… You see where I’m going with this? I’d go further into it, but Stephen King said it better.

When I first saw the headline that Simon Cowell was quitting American Idol, I was blissful. I think that show and the culture it has spawned are the absolute dregs of society and the entertainment industry. So, the sooner its gone the better. Unfortunately, it seems that soon is three years and that the show might continue without him. Good god when will it stop? Are any of these people getting famous anymore? Is there anything beyond shtick to all of this? Am I the only one that finds this all kind of vomitizing? (Interesting note: vomitizing - clearly not a word - but spell check on Firefox suggests unappetizing which shares few of the same letters but a similar concept - Computers! They’re smart!)

So now I have to suffer through three more years of this crap and its endless spinoffs and Hasselhoffs. Big question: how in the fuck is Hasselhoff a judge of talent? This guy:

It is the strangest thing that I experience, and I experience it almost every time it rains. The New York City transit system just seems to shut down. I really don’t get it. You’re telling me that a major metropolis can’t run through rain? I understand it was a down pour but this is not something new. It has been raining for at least 22 and a half years that i know of, and I’m pretty sure it rained before that. It took my roommate two hours to get to work. TWO. My normal 20 minute-at-most-30 train ride took a full hour and I seriously thought it would take more when they first informed us that the N and W weren’t running to Manhattan (interestingly enough, it actually did). Seriously, what’s going on? I mean, it’s rain. We should be prepared for this.