What a difference a day makes. My last post complained about the hot weather. Now, there's clouds are in the sky, 60 degree temperatures, and wind howling outside my window. Perfect weather in my book.

The roommate search is far from perfect, though there were responses and that surprised me. There's a guy not too interested in the place but burdened me with many questions anyway. There's a map in the ad, but he still asked me where the place was. There's a French guy who's working on a grad degree in sociology. Very bad in English; took me a while to decipher his message. And finally, there's a Spanish guy who works in the labs up in the hills. He only needs a place for a month, so he's eliminated. Yes, that leaves the Frenchie but he hasn't been returning my emails or calls. So it's back to the drawing board. At least Vishnu has extended his stay another 2 weeks.

The VSA date auction was last Tuesday, a far more classier event than last semester's. People were actually dressed up and the place decorated though it would have been better if the place was bigger. Yes, the ladies were attractive but still, I don't understand where people can get the money to bid into the triple digits, sometimes on multiple people.

Yesterday, during 141, Professor Duncan was wearing a suit for some meeting he had that day. Geez, seeing him wear that, it seemed like his body shrunk and his head was just about ready to explode.

I've been watching a little more music lately and there are 4 categories to separate them. 1. Good song, good video; 2. good song, bad video; 3. bad song, good video; 4. bad song, bad video. You rarely see 3, 1 and 4 happen about the same, but 2 happens most frequently. I mention this only because I've seen much more of 4 lately. Britney Spears has a new song out and it seems she wants to follow in Justin's footsteps in trying to black. Just like Justin, she basically repeats the same 3 lines constantly, over and over again, repetitively. And it's awful. Just like her video where it seems she's just walking around in a maze until she hooks up with Madonna and then they dance around a bed frame. Well, at least they don't stop in the middle of moving traffic.

A breath of fresh air would be No Doubt's new video, "It's My Life", a remake of Talk Talk's version from the '80s. This is definitely in category 1. You'll laugh and cry and see death and destruction. And all the while, Gwen is singing her heart out in the courtroom or in a straight-jacket. Gwen actually looks young and pretty even though she's pushing like 60 or 70 right? It's all that white pancake makeup I guess.

Here's something about Survivor. If you hadn't heard, the big twist allowed those who were kicked off a second chance by allowing them to form a third tribe and compete against the two existing tribes. By winning tonight's competition, these outcasts forced the other two tribes to kick off one of their members while the Outcasts would vote two of their own to rejoin the game. On the Morgan tribe, Osten graciously bowed out of the game and gave up without getting voted out, claiming his mind and body were spent. To which a newsgroup poster responded in caps, "BUT HE'S BLACK!" (his words, not mine)

Still, it's called Survivor! What did he expect?

Under the Tuscan Sun
Frances (Diane Lane) is going through some tough times. She's going through a divorce, a move to a singles complex, and now at a crossroads in life. And according to her friends, only a previously planned trip to Tuscany will cure what ails her. When she arrives as part of a tour with gay males, she's the typical tourist until she lays her eyes on a villa that's up for sale. A day later, she owns it. As part of her rebirth, she gets to rebuild her home, meet the neighbors, find romance in all the right places, and intervene on behalf of a young Polish worker eager to win his girlfriend's parents' approval. And all the while, she finds happiness where she hadn't had it before.

The movie is very pretty to look at. The scenes of the Italian countryside are lush with vibrant colors and full of life; a photographer's dream. Diane Lane is very pretty to look at. Few actresses can light up and command the screen with her beauty while dazzling us with her acting abilities. But other than the rebuilding of the home to bring a sense of comic relief as well as revitalization in her life and the support of her best friend (who at first doesn't want to go to Italy because of her pregnancy, yet goes there when she's much farther along), the movie really goes through many hoops to get to the end result with different storylines that either lead to nowhere or simply just aren't interesting. The scenes with the two star-crossed lovers don't exude true love and doesn't convince me as to why her parents would agree to marriage. I really don't understand the point of Katherine (Lindsay Duncan) in the movie. And can someone distinguish which guy is which? Or are they all the same person? As you try to figure it out, marvel at Lane and Italy; they're the things to watch. 2 stars

I'm sorry. I'm just a little steamed right now. That hour that got added on from daylight savings time and forced me to wake up an hour earlier brought things to a simmer. The hot weather brought things to a boil.

I've had my Hotmail account now for 6 years. It's my main email address, not like that crappy junk-mail infested thing that is my email address found on the sidebar. (Though I do check it, the ratio between real messages and junk messages is like 1 in 300.) Whenever someone sends me something interesting worth saving, I save it. So whether it's goodbye notices, important info., or funny stories (the Adventures of Pillow Boy comes to mind), it's kept in one of my Hotmail folders. That's 6 years worth of messages. It reached 400 a couple years back so I whittled it down to about 100. (I had kept some idiotic things.)

So last night, I check my email and find all the messages are blank. I click on all my inbox messages and the ones in my saved folder. They're all blank. I also found it weird when it said I'm using negative 22% of my space. So I sent support an email. Boy, those bastards at Microsoft were prompt. My email was back up and running within a few hours.

Small problem. Where 70 messages in my inbox used to be (I was a little slow in reading the letters and newsletters), now there were 2. Where 150 saved messages used to be, now there were 0. So with memories gone and nothing I can do about it, I'm a bit mad and ticked off right now. But I'll look on the bright side. It's the first time I've ever seen a green bar to note the size of my account.

With the exception of Scary Movie yesterday and tonite's dinner plans, it's a pretty quiet weekend for me. So I used the time to actually list my apartment. If you haven't heard, my roommate Vishnu (or as Hai and Datman like to say, God, as one of the three major Hindu gods is Vishnu) is moving to Indiana because of work (and not because he wanted to be in a place with India in the name. Please, it was a joke.)

Being a senior with few friends below my year, nobody wants to move in with me when it's their last year. Either that or there's something wrong with me personally. And I have no intention of moving out. So I've had to turn to services such as Craigslist to spread the word. At $500 rent and being November when someone could move in, it figures to be tough, but I'll get through it. The landlord's nice enough to let me stay alone at a slightly higher price if I don't find anyone.

Why is it so hot today?!? I am in Berkeley, ain't I? In October! And it was 90 degrees, probably more. Ok, that's it. Time to face the sun. I'm hungry.

To all those reading tonite, time to fall down and change those clocks. Daylight savings time ends tonight and you gotta set those clocks back by an hour or else you'll be early for a whole lot of things in the near future.

Scary Movie 3
Webster's Dictionary defines excellence as the quality of being excellent. (Simpsons joke if no one recognizes it.) Excellence used to be a term that could describe Scary Movie. The first one was a work of genius, a picture that made fun of a picture that made fun of horror movies. By the second one, the trend seriously went the other way with its parody of "The Haunting". To right the ship, they brought in David Zucker to direct, someone who also used to live up to the word excellence with his Airplane! and Naked Gun films. But his latest films of "My Boss' Daughter" and "BASEketball" also show him headed in the wrong direction. With "Scary Movie 3", it's obvious two wrongs don't make a right.

Two years was just enough time to collect enough material for this third movie. The main film to make fun of was "The Ring" with a little bit of "The Matrix", "8 Mile" and "Signs" among others on the side. Our favorite woman in distress Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) is now a news reporter, interested by the story of a crop circle just 20 miles away at a cornfield, owned by Tom (Charlie Sheen), the former priest. His brother, George (Simon Rex), the aspiring white rapper, falls for Cindy when they meet picking up their niece and nephew, respectively, at the school where Cindy's friend, Brenda (Regina Hall from the previous installments), teaches. Soon, Cindy's nephew begins drawing weird pictures and reading secret thoughts while aliens begin landing. And all the while, a videotape floats around where the people who watch it die in 7 days. Oh, what will they do?!?

Laugh all the way home with money in their pockets, that's what. It's a marked improvement over the last installment but still isn't worthy of the first one. Its best moments are given away in the trailer while its other pieces of original hilarity get beaten into the ground with repetition. Haha, he gets hit in the crotch! Let's do it again! So inspired it isn't. You could tell as much from the performances its actors put forth. Most of it looked pretty forced with the exception of Leslie Nielsen and Ja Rule, who looked like they were having fun beating up on handicapped people. The 8 Mile and Matrix skits were downright awkward while having a priest babysit a boy was just wrong. With word that Scary Movie 4 is in pre-production, they should take more than 2 years to make it. 1.5 stars

This can't be good for my career prospects.

Height May Make or Break Your Career

Tall people may the have upper hand when it comes to financial and career success, and not just on the basketball court.

A new study shows that tall people earn more money throughout their lives and are more successful in their careers than short people.

"Height matters for career success," says researcher Timothy Judge, a management professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in a news release. "These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one could argue that height is an essential ability required for job performance nor a bona fide occupational qualification."

Researchers examined four previously published studies in the U.S. and U.K. that followed thousands of people from children to adulthood and tracked details of their career success and personal lives along with their height. The results are scheduled for publication in spring 2004 in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

After controlling for factors such as gender, age, and weight, researchers found that a difference of mere inches in height made a big difference in terms of annual income. In fact, every extra inch added up to an extra $789 in pay.

For example, someone who was six feet tall earned an average of about $5,525 more than someone who was seven inches shorter.

"If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys," says Judge.

Researchers also found that height was most closely tied to success among occupations that rely on appearance and stature as a measure of success, such as sales and management. Height was more also predictive of earnings in blue-collar jobs than in professional-technical jobs such as engineering.

"If height has the social status we think it does, it stands to reason that tall people would sell more cars because they're seen as a more authoritative source on the matter," says Judge.

Researchers say that people's perceptions of tall people may be a remnant of our evolutionary origins.

Judge says that continuing to rely on those outdated perceptions may not only cause unfair discrimination, but it could have serious economic repercussions.

"If we're giving great weight to an attribute like height that's irrelevant to performance on the job, then we're introducing error in our hiring and promotion decisions that causes inefficiencies in our economy," says Judge.

Originally published here.

Sorry if this sounds too tired but I just went through the most boring guest lecture. It involved some stats guy in the Public Utilities Commission, an agency that supposedly regulates all things moving within the state like telephones, power, you know that sort of thing. As a friend of the professor, he got to spend one whole hour mouthing off on the latest report he wrote, a statistical analysis on the performance of local telephone service. Not exactly an attention-grabbing topic. An awkward moment came when he was telling about one of his experiences as a judge and a really bad statistician came up to testify. He mentioned that he used data collected over 25 years and regressed it on a 10 year model, a statistical no-no, so bad that it caused the speaker to laugh his ass off. As the half-asleep audience slowly woke up, we all stayed silent as we watched him and the professor laugh. The TA sitting next to him was still fast asleep.

Even though it's my 4th year of doing this, I'm still surprised by how early Tele-Bears gets started. It's like we just started school and now we have to choose more classes? Can't it wait? Afraid not. So there I was today scurrying around getting advisor codes. The schedule I wrote up over the weekend was all set until the game theory class I was taking got pushed by an hour and a half to 8 am. Then there were time conflicts galore. Out of a possible 5 classes I wanted to take, all 5 happened to be at 8 am. So things had to get pushed around and now it looks like a 3-day schedule next semester.

I was at Oakridge over the weekend and saw a few people including Gurjeet, Ted and Krystal with a K. The funniest part was when the fire alarm went off and everybody continued on their way. The loud sirens and the messages to vacate the building weren't being taken too seriously. Security guards stayed at their posts. The poor Century employee standing guard at the edge of the escalators just stood there. Let's just hope they get their act together if a fire really does occur since that place is way too small for the number of people the mall is handling.

People search for some crazy things to get to this site. Lately though, the same search words have been used. The popular ones include, of all things, trying to find out what kind of Louis Vuitton bag Jessica Simpson carries around on Newlyweds (how the heck should I know?), what song Radiohead performed on Letterman on Friday ("2+2=5", a mediocre song according to my sister), and who Renee Fleming is (the headlining opera singer in New York who sang the national anthem at the World Series over the weekend). And please, there are no torrents here. Does this look like a torrent site?

Cal football is on the verge of being eliminated from bowl contention. They need to win 4 out of their last 5 after a 23-20 loss to UCLA. When you miss 4 out of 6 field goals, you don't deserve to win.

I Love the '80s is back with a sequel. While unneeded, it's much better than going to the '60s. You would've lost way too many people by then. The formula is quite simple. Dig up obscure products, songs, shows, and stories from the '80s and have equally obscure people describe what they remember of it. Usually it's: "_____? I loved ______!!" or "Wow. That takes me back." or they sing along to the theme song that goes with it. Hey, at least unemployed singers and actors are getting to the screen once again. It's already been two weeks since the recall.

One of the reasons my neighbor chose to go to UCSD over Berkeley was the fact that people in Berkeley seemed a bit rushed. They had a lot of things to do and a small amount of time to do it, and it showed by the way they walked and talked. Not even walk he said, run. Sure, we have a lot of things on our minds, but it's such a rare occurrence to see someone running through campus. I was reminded of my neighbor when today alone, I saw no less than 5 people running through campus on their way to class or to the streets or whatever. I was shocked. One ran out of Evans Hall, down the small valley and toward the Glade. Another was running through Sproul like a madman. The most extreme case was a guy running and ran into a girl, knocking her into the grass. He apologized, got her up, and then just like that, started running again. What was the big rush?

Here's a reason from me. CalPIRG. Those relentless environmentalists are at it again, trying to raise money for whatever they spend the money for. I'm sure their cause to protect the environment and open up government is a worthy one, but I don't really don't need another charge on my CARS bill but there they are, seemingly lining my way to class, waiting for me to sign up. Two today, one who wanted to walk me to class, luckily I was already there. Others were trying to convince other unlucky souls. And the only thing that can protect me from them is that little sticker saying I've pledged. If I put on an "I'm poor" sticker, will it have the same effect?

It’s nice to know that old Asian guy who stands on that bucket at Bancroft and Telegraph mouthing off a few lines for a few hours has somewhere to go when he’s done. There he was, sitting next to me on the 51 bus home. Luckily, he didn’t get off on my stop.

On a non-Berkeley note, congrats to the Florida Marlins for making it to the World Series. They beat a very good Cubs team whose championship-less streak will extend to 96 years. Still, even though the Marlins won the World Series in ‘96, it’s strange for me to believe they’ve reached this level. For the sentimentalists out there, Boston is still kicking with the series-deciding game tomorrow night. The Yankees have enough championships, right? Let poor Boston have one; they haven’t won since 1918 but please, no more about the curse.

Kill Bill: Volume 1
Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film six years in the making seems to be the one that’s most like his personality: musically beautiful but on-screen, seriously twisted. Black Mamba (Uma Thurman) is all ready to be married with a child on the way, but the assassin group she just left has other plans for her, namely her death. While the whole wedding party is killed, Black Mamba falls into a coma after a bullet from the crime boss Bill (David Carradine, face unseen), grazes her head. Four years later, she awakens and lays the groundwork for her revenge on the five people that contributed to her attempted death.

Being Volume 1 of 2, she only gets to tackle two of the group, Vernita Green or Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox) and O-Ren Ishii or Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu). Green has settled down in the suburbs with a daughter of her own while Ishii has become crime boss of Tokyo. Both have intricate martial arts sequences lasting longer than 20 minutes in one case. In her heart though, Black Mamba knows she won’t be fully healed until she gets to Bill.

The music is very good, the best being from the trailer as well as in the movie “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” by Tomoyasu Hotei. The rest is a mix of Japanese Pop and cool beats with a little bit of Nancy Sinatra thrown in. The martial arts sequences are exceptionally good with maybe a little bit too much blood being spilled on the floor. Does the human body really spray that much blood into the air when you slice off a limb? But there’s a lot to digest in this film and I wish Tarantino could have made the effort to cut down a little of the film to make it more manageable to fit into one film instead of two and having us wait. But I can understand how much devotion a director has with a film and it would be hard for him to give up any of it, even at the expense of sitting there for 4 hours. Its length and the numerous devices to follow the plot (in a non-linear way, of course, using anime and black-and-white filming) along with a number of pop culture references (Star Trek and maybe even Star Wars if I heard the scene correctly, among others) buries the film’s message that could let us identify with the characters or figure out why this happened in the first place but I sure hope the second part can explain it all. And that Alias-style ending where the last line is meant to surprise didn’t really awe the audience at all. (Coincidentally, Tarantino guest-starred in two episodes on Alias.) As this incomplete film stands, it is one that stands for its coolness to attract people to its second feature and nothing else. 3 stars

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Inspired by the true story, 5 people are driving up to Dallas when they happen upon a hitchhiker visibly shaken by some traumatic event. She mumbles that some people are all dead and screams that they were going the wrong way when they pick her up to try to bring her to some help. Disturbed by these events, she shoots herself in the head and so begins the chain of events. Trying to dispose of the body, the five (Jessica Biel, Eric Balfour, Jonathan Tucker, Mike Vogel and Erica Leerhsen) are led to an old mill where they were told they could find the sheriff. All they find is a mysterious boy, who tells them the sheriff is at a nearby house. So while the group splits off, Leatherface makes his grand entrance, chainsaw in hand. Among the cast of characters is R. Lee Ermey as the Sheriff, in his best tough guy role since “Full Metal Jacket”.

While viewers of the original may be disappointed in this move toward Hollywood horror from its low-budget roots, first-time viewers will be more than scared from this movie. Like any horror movie, the inevitable telegraphing of events is there with people going their separate ways, lots of running, and dumb stereotypical decisions that lead to deafening audience screams of “Don’t go in there!” But this is one of those movies where if you blink, you will absolutely miss something (like that Harry Knowles head you find in Leatherface’s basement). By the end, you’ll be wondering what’s been filled more: your appetite for horror or that tank top Biel wears throughout the movie. The film is crisp, the scenes grotesque, and Leatherface is just as supernatural as ever where nothing ever slows him down in his quest for more bodies to kill. 3 stars

School of Rock
Times are tough for Dewey Finn (Jack Black). He's part of a rock band that hopes to win the Battle of the Bands competition coming up. His roommate, Ned (writer Mike White) along with his girlfriend Patty (Sarah Silverman) frown upon the numerous times Dewey has borrowed money from him and want him to get a job. His dreams of rock stardom come crashing down after he's kicked out of the band in favor of someone younger. So broke in more ways than one, a savior comes in the form of Principal Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack), who seeks the services of Ned to substitute for a class. When Dewey finds out the money he'd make as a sub, he becomes Ned and begins to substitute a class of 4th graders. While he has no business being a substitute teacher, Dewey stumbles upon their music class and soon comes up with the idea to start a band with members of the whole class. In a few short weeks, Dewey has managed to get the class to live and breathe rock and roll, unbeknownst to their parents or the principal. But disguised as a class project, more questions are asked than answered and Dewey must find a way to keep things together until the big day.

Black hasn't reached the levels of a successful mainstream comedian but this movie raises his level significantly. His character is one-of-a-kind and throughout the course of events through the movie, his values stay true to form, treating music like God and spreading his knowledge of it to inquiring minds. And while his means of communicating his message was ultimately flawed, and in some ways a bit disturbing, he gets the job done with a hilarious over-the-top feel. The kids are great co-stars, both in their acting ability and their musical talents. I only wish they could have included Cusack in the movie more, her role highlighted, and basically limited, to a Stevie Nicks performance. But the band School of Rock is the thing to see in the movie "School of Rock" and what we need now is an encore. 3.5 stars

Out of Time
Banyan Key is a small town in Florida where everybody knows your name. Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington) presides over the town as police chief. High on cloud nine after a drug bust but going through a divorce with Alex (Eva Mendes), he finds comfort with Anne (Sanaa Lathan), married to an abusive former quarterback (Dean Cain). Anne soon finds out she has terminal cancer and that her husband has secretly upped her life insurance policy to $1 million. So, she transfers the beneficiary to Matt while accepting his money from the drug bust to flee to Switzerland where an experimental cancer treatment is being developed. Plans for that burn away into thin air as Anne's house burns down with the remains of two bodies, presumably husband and wife. Now it's become a homicide case with Alex coming on board as lead detective. With a witness placing Matt at the scene, $1 million heading his way as beneficiary, an affair with the deceased, and missing drug money, all the clues point to him and he needs to solve who did this before the detectives can put all their pieces together.

Washington is one of those actors whom audiences will come out to see whatever he does. Here, he makes the best out of an average movie by combining two recent performances: playing good guy forced bad in “John Q” and his award-winning portrayal of a corrupt cop in “Training Day”. His work here doesn’t reach either of those extremes but nevertheless, it’s something we’ve seen from Washington before and he’s good at it. Working with director Carl Franklin, the movie looks pretty good, offering a good portrayal of the Florida keys but the underlying tension seems to be missing when for one thing, the whole film is fairly predictable, save for a few details, and the second is the camera sometimes shifts away from the action to other shots of no significance, whether it’s for comic relief or to remind us that hey, Eva Mendes is in the movie. By the end, it’s only a matter of how Whitlock can explain the situation he’s been in, and even that turns out to be a bit muddled. 2.5 stars

Buffalo Soldiers
This review has been lying on the shelf just waiting to be written up, much like the release schedule of this film, which was written before 9/11 and just now, well, two months ago, released to American audiences. Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) chose military service over jail time and now is stationed in Germany as the battalion chief. He’s also the supply clerk and living it up selling his military surplus on the black market, all under the eye of aging Colonel Berman (Ed Harris), whose wife currently has a thing going with Elwood. A new sergeant (Scott Glenn) transfers in and cuts Elwood’s black market ties. Elwood then catches the eye of the sergeant’s daughter played by Anna Paquin, whom he first dates as a retaliatory measure but soon starts to like her. In the meantime, Elwood continues some of his other shady ways including some arms sales and processing drugs.

This dark comedy hinges on the performances of its cast, which is high-quality. It’s amusing at some points and very humorous at others in portraying this rag-tag group as the laughingstock of the area, especially with its military drill gone awry against the nearby military base, its lack of knowledge of the area they’re in, and the antics people take when heroin takes control of some tank operators. This satire of the American military had much potential, but was there a point to the film? None that I could see, and that’s what makes the film not great, just okay. Instead, it throws a bunch of ideas at the wall and sees what sticks, with no care at what message they could have brought. 2.5 stars

Sharks season has started again but they're singing the same tune as they did last year by losing.

Tonight's opponent was the Edmonton Oilers, fresh off retiring the jersey of goaltender Grant Fuhr, who won 5 Stanley Cups with the team. For the first twenty minutes, it looked like a pretty good game, albeit scoreless. They traded goals twice in the 2nd period and into the 3rd period. Penalties though killed the Sharks, allowing the Oilers to score two power-play goals in two minutes with only 3 minutes to go, putting the game out of reach. It became a 5-2 loss and a lousy trip to Calgary for their next game.

One positive to take is the play of Milan Michalek, the 18-year-old rookie, fresh from the draft, who scored the Sharks' second goal. The power play clicked as well. The play of rookies and the power of the power play were strong points in a dismal season last year. It's too bad the weak points from last year are reappearing as well. The goaltending from Nabokov was a bit shaky as he allowed 5 goals. Not all his fault of course; penalties allowed the Oilers the man advantage and with 2 power play goals scored, penalty killing still needs to be worked on. The subtraction of Nolan and Selanne gives the Sharks no go-to guy to give the puck to, making offense hard to come by. Its own 2 goals is a good start but it's nothing to be proud of.

Marco Sturm was injured with a puck to the face but is expected to be okay.

And in the end, it wasn't even close. Arnold won the election by an even wider margin than polls had predicted and even received more votes than Davis on the recall question, certainly a mandate indeed. Inauguration day is in November so by then, we'll see if he is able to create a respected administration right from the get-go with only one month of preparation and a state budget that will be due two months after he is sworn into office.

Clearly, Davis lost since he was unable to bring out the vote of Democratic strongholds in the unions and with minorities, both of which generally voted for Davis, but not by the wide margin Democrats usually garner from them. Davis had never lost an election in his 30 years with the state, a couple of which were come-from-behind wins, and that showed in his refusal to admit defeat until the bitter end.

Most were afraid of voter error due to punch-card ballots. Well, what does this tell you? George Schwartzman was just a simple businessman from Carlsbad who ran for governor and managed to get 9th place out of 135. How? His name is right next to Arnold Schwarzenegger's on the ballot. Other notables were Larry Flynt at 7th, Gary Coleman at 8th, Van Vo, the only Vietnamese on the ballot, at 15th, and comedian Gallagher at 16th. Georgy Russell and Brooke Adams, both of whom spoke at PS 179 at Cal, garnered less than 2,000 votes. In last place was Todd Richard Lewis, who received less than 200 votes out of more than 7 million votes counted. Well, there's still 2 million more to count right?

The propositions went down to defeat. Both had good ideas but bad ways to implement them. Ward Connerly, author of 54, hopes to rewrite the initiative and try again.

Through my time grading mostly freshmen Stat papers at Berkeley, it's obvious the quality of students has gone down in recent years. Sure, it may be just because the subject was math and people just aren't good at it. My friend Nanette bugged me every chance she had because she was terrible at math but had to take a Stats class (congrats to her for getting an A-). But a new study from an UC regent and published in the Los Angeles Times claims Berkeley is actually letting in some pretty dumb people at the expense of some pretty smart people. Yes, the definition of smart and dumb in this case are SAT scores, something UC officials hate so much they forced the test makers to change the test. But SAT scores count for something; if it didn't, it wouldn't be used by so many colleges, right?

According to the statistics for 2002, Cal didn't let in any people with a SAT score of less than 600. But nearly 400 students out of 4,000 students with SAT's of 600-1000 were admitted, more than half of which accepted the offer. At the same time, 641 people were not admitted with SAT's of 1500 and above. The average score was 1337.

Since affirmative action was abolished from admission decisions, UC went to a comprehensive review to study each applicant and take in their entire application before making a decision. The assistant vice chancellor of admissions acknowledges most of the 400 admitted were underrepresented minority students from California's lowest-performing high schools and that they made the most of the opportunities that were available to them. Smarter people were rejected for having lower GPA's with a lower amount of honors classes than students comparable to them, but they still were at a higher level than those who got a lower SAT score and were accepted.

In this study, no race statistics were connected to the scores, so a breakdown by race can't be reached. Even the suggestion that minority students were let in over students with merit should make Ward Connerly mad, the African-American UC regent who wrote Proposition 54, which bans the collection of race data by state agencies with exceptions for extreme cases and federally funded programs.

No test should be the deciding factor of a person's admission to a university. But if someone scores a 600 or 700 on the SAT's, it should say something about the applicant and it better say something truly amazing about that person, not just that they were poor or underrepresented in society, because if it doesn't, they're just taking the space of someone more deserving.

Oh, to the sports teams who lost yesterday. It was a losing cause on all fronts as all of them provided a letdown at some point leading to disaster ahead, some that can be fixed, others a lost cause.

To the Cal Bears, who let down after their upset win last week against USC, losing to Oregon State 35-21. Why Tedford kept Rodgers in the game after a 25% completion percentage at halftime is a mystery since he continued that dismal stat into the second half. They drop to 3-4, 3 more losses away from being eliminated from bowl contention. After 7 games in 7 weeks, they get a bye this week before traveling down to UCLA.

To San Jose State, who led equally dismal Rice 24-14 with a quarter left only to lose 28-24. Kudos to Neil Parry, he of the amputated leg, who actually got to hit somebody on the field. The team dropped to 1-4.

To the Giants, whose manager, Felipe Alou, decided not to go with Jason Schmidt, and instead went with rookie Jerome Williams saw his move backfire. His team trailed 5-1 to the Florida Marlins. Though they came back, they couldn't hang tough with a collision at home being the thing that prevented a tie and a Game 5. As it is, they lost 7-6 in the game, and 3-1 in the series, eliminating the World Series runner-ups from last year.

To the A's, the Bay Area's last hope. Coming into Fenway up 2-0, things were riding high. Tied 1-1, it was when Tejada was called out at home for obstruction that you knew it was the Red Sox night. And wouldn't you know it, at the 11th inning, the Red Sox scored 2 runs to win 3-1 and move closer in the best of 5 series.

Have you ever watched Newlyweds on MTV? On the show, Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey chronicle their lives after being married. But the show just seems like a prelude to divorce, showing every bickering moment they have with each other. The show also seems to have a fun time showcasing Jessica's spoiled past, leading to her cluelessness today. Which makes the questions on this quiz all the more entertaining, a test to see just how clueless Jessica is, courtesy of the Detroit Free Press. A couple are obviously made up but the others are just some of the classic moments from the show. I started watching it but then there were just so many better things to watch that I just gave up on it. I couldn't hear her whine anymore when I can watch 24 or something. Click for the answers.

1. True or false: She refused to try a buffalo wing, explaining, "I don't eat buffalo."

2. True or false: She took her Louis Vuitton handbag on a camping trip.

3. True or false: She thought the plural of mouse was "mouses."

4. True or false: She assumed you can listen to AM radio only in the morning.

5. True or false: She mistook a plastic bag on the beach for a jellyfish.

6. True or false: She had trouble figuring out how to use a garage door opener.

7. True or false: She didn't know how many beers were in a 12-pack.

8. True or false: She asked if she was eating chicken or fish while consuming Chicken of the Sea.

Remember in horror when people gasped at the thought of $10 movie ticket prices? That phenomenon is almost here to San Jose. Good thing there are student discounts at most places.

The highest around I've seen is $9.50 at Metreon and AMC. Century usually charges 8.50-9.50. Tomorrow marks the opening of Century Oakridge and it will boast the highest ticket prices around according to Fandango. Weekend evening shows will go for 9.75. On weekdays, it's a quarter less and matinees will go for 6.75. According to the price list, no student discounts, but that'll probably change. The theatre's at a mall and high schoolers won't pay $10 to see a movie.

Truly, I don't believe anyone else would pay $10 to see a movie. How New Yorkers, who pay $10 and there's no such things as matinees, can watch movies is amazing.

It's just awful and it's hiding the fact that less and less people are seeing movies since box office results are inflated and reflect the increase in ticket prices. I'll probably be at the opening though. You can't go wrong with 50 cent hot dogs and drinks.

Election Day is next Tuesday so everyone should go out and vote or if you're like me and too lazy to go out to the polls should've gotten an absentee ballot. It's a really simple ballot this go-around. One question, one pick from many choices, and two propositions.

Should you vote to recall Gray Davis? Depends on what you believe is more important. If you believe in education and the environment among other things, then you should vote against it. Davis has a strong track record in these issues including increasing school accountability and funding, protecting park lands and wetlands, and extending the moratorium on coastal oil drilling. If you believe the budget is most important, then you should vote for the recall. Davis is simply powerless in forcing the Legislature to do anything substantive in crunch time and that usually means delays in the budget. His slow response to the energy crisis while eventually balancing the enormous power deficits facing the state has pinned us to expensive contracts still years from expiring. A $38 billion deficit this fiscal year is still at least $8 billion next year, even with tripling the vehicle license fees and a hike in UC and CSU tuition as well as countless other cuts to state funded programs. Yes, the whole budget process needs to be overhauled, but under this system where two-thirds approval is needed to pass a budget, it seems Davis needs two-thirds of the Legislature to be Democrats in order for a budget to be passed. Since that won't happen, he's pushing for the threshold to be lowered, instead of working with the Legislature to pass a reasonable budget. In my opinion, the budget is priority one since it would affect eduation and the environment directly. It's obvious Davis can't handle this aspect of the job, especially with special interest money clouding his judgment and his need to fully fund his projects. As a result, I'll be voting yes on the recall.

Then again, that vote may be premature after looking at the candidates to replace Davis. In the 2002 gubernatorial election, voters were apathetic to the choice of candidates they had then (Davis and Simon) and had to choose among the lesser of evils. (Davis, only because Simon was a terrible campaigner.) In this election, a similar dilemma faces voters as all the candidates are flawed. The front-runner is Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's obvious no one's gonna push him around and he's got a host of advisors, mostly from the Wilson administration, to help him. But he's got no experience, broadbased ideas for California's future, and now some trouble with sexual harrassment from his past. Cruz Bustamante has the legislative experience as Speaker of the House in the Assembly and now Lieutenant Governor. But his time as Lieutenant Governor has been eerily quiet and now his integrity is in question from millions of dollars in donations from Indian tribes, fueling his tumble in the polls. Tom McClintock is an accomplished State Senator. But as a truly conservative Republican in a left-leaning state, his ideas may be too radical for a state looking for stability to swallow. Same problem for Peter Camejo, the Green Party candidate, who would have the same trouble moving to the right of his own extreme leftist stances.

Americans have voted for idiots before only to surprise later on with their leadership. Most prominently would be George W. Bush. Here, if you had to choose among these people plus the other 132 candidates for Governor, Schwarzenegger would be your best bet. Yes, voting for either McClintock or Bustamante would be a vote for experience (geez, their names are long), but unhappy voters are craving for someone outside the state system to institute true reform in California and Schwarzenegger, at least on the outside, has that image. Schwarzenegger may have trouble with his wild past and Democrats have denounced these actions, but troubles with their personal life does not mean it can worsen their effectiveness as a leader as hypocritical Democrats rallied to defend President Clinton after his own sex scandal.

Two propositions are also at the end of the ballot and both should be voted against. Proposition 53 mandates that 3% of state funds be set aside for infrastructure improvements. In the 70's, infrastructure accounted for 20% of the budget but today it's only about 1%. Mandating 3% be set aside handcuffs the state into trying to pay for programs from a smaller share of the pie. Sure, infrastructure is important but not as much as the quality of education in the state or other important projects that may be facing California. So vote against it. Proposition 54 would stop the collection of race data in state studies. Proponents believe this will be another step to a colorblind society where merit is paramount. Opponents believe it will leave minorities further in the dust. When even with these studies and special programs, the racial gap can't be closed, it's obvious minorities need more help instead of taking away what little help they have left. I'll vote no.