Note to self: I must find out how Darrin/Darren spells his name. Hmm.

Amy and Darrin are here. I very much approve of Darrin. He makes fun of Amy, which is as it should be. Of course, he makes fun of me, too, which is a habit we must break him of. We went out to Mas for dinner last night, which was pretty kick ass. We were at a table in the back corner, and Amy asked if that was all right with us. I've never quite understood the "good" table thing -- as long as you're not being smacked by the kitchen doors and no one is tripping over you, who the hell cares where you sit? I go to restaurants for the food and the company, not to be seen. That's a failing on my part, apparently.

Right now Amy and Darrin are meeting a friend for brunch at She She, which, apparently, does not serve brunch on Saturdays. Doh.

Amy and her boyfriend Darrin coming into town for the weekend. There has been much cleaning. I have a really, really nice place. You just can't really tell most of the time, as there's so much squalor.

It's still not as clean as it should be. Oh well. They're just not allowed to go into my bedroom or into the office closet. However, it's a huge improvement over the last time Amy visited, when she came to the conclusion I was suicidally depressed because I lived in such a pit. After a while, we managed to convince her that either I had been suicidally depressed my entire life, or I was just a slob.

Note to self: Never, ever build a huge, comprehensive, weirdly engineered web site again. Because someday, you might have someone who hates you save it all on a CD, and, as part of a fiendish plot to drive you completely insane, same all the file names as uppercase. In order to get the damn site to work on your server, you will then have to convert, by hand, every single file name to lower case. Then, realizing you missed the extensions, you'll have to go back and do it all over again.

So that was my day. Sigh.

On another totally different note, go see Spirited Away right now. No, I mean NOW. Go. It's worth it.

I need to see it again, except this time with someone who reads Japanese and knows about the culture. I'm sure there's buckets of things I missed, and I can't wait to find out what they are.

(Extended review to follow. For now, just trust me: Go see it. Immediately. Go.)

On a totally different note, does anyone who actually speaks Mandarin watch Firefly? Among the premises about the future that the show uses is that English and Chinese (presumably Mandarin) are the universal languages. So the crew swears at each other in Chinese. I want to know if they're actually saying anything, and if it makes any sense whatsoever, or if they're just making Mandarin-type noises.

Hey Pat (if you're still reading this) -- surely that's a linguistic grant waiting to happen. I'm sure you can come up with something suitably academic-sounding about the speculative take on language in future-based entertainment. Or something. Or do you concentrate on Gaelic-type languages?

Interesting article in Slate on Journalism schools -- are they worth it? Is there really anything J-school teaches you that you couldn't learn anywhere else?

I went to Medill at Northwestern for undergrad. I don't have a graduate degree in journalism (or anything, for that matter), and I don't think I need one. When I was at Medill, we only had a few journalism courses the first couple of years, and they were pretty much about writing fast, accurately and well. (And yes, I was in one of the last classes to use those damn manual typewriters for Basic Writing. Yes, I'm still bitter about that.) Then we had several distribution requirements -- stats, history/poli sci, econ, etc. No language requirement, which I think should have been mandated, actually. I think that was a pretty good way to do it -- specializing in the nitty-gritty of journalism without learning about, well, what you might actually be writing about is pretty pointless. So I have no complaints. I had some great profs, some not-so-great profs, and a good experience overall. Did I learn anything I wouldn't have learned if I got, say, an English degree, or a history degree? Yeah, I think so. If nothing else, it primed me for organizing information quickly and coherently. And that probably improved my grades in other classes -- Amy still hasn't forgiven me for that religion class we took together. (She knew the subject matter better, than I did, but I got the better grade.) So, in that it enabled me to piss off my sister, I'd say yeah, the journalism degree was worth it.

I'm unconvinced about grad schools for journalism. There comes a point where you just have to do it. Probably the most useful part of the Medill degree was the Teaching Newspaper quarter, where we interned for an honest-to-god newspaper (The Macon Telegraph, in my case) and wrote honest-to-god stories. You got actual clips from a real newspaper, and you got to schmooze some actual editors and such. That's what gets people jobs.

And a Medill degree was probably actually a hindrance on my first job -- not in getting hired, but in getting the work done. When I started working for a trade mag company in Hong Kong, I was sooooo superior to everyone there. After all, they were importing me from American, I'd gone to this snooty best-of-the-best j-school, and I knew everything. It took Ian Norris, my boss, a couple of weeks to smack that out of me. He did not have a j-school degree -- he didn't have a college degree, actually -- but he knew those magazines cold. I didn't have a clue.

(I did not, however, make the worst snooty American faux pas. That was for a colleague of mine, who, when we were arguing with Ian about the use of the word "bespoke," uttered the phrase "As a highly educated American....." I'm surprised that Ian's glare of contempt didn't incinerate him on the spot.)

With that in mind, I'm actually a little leery of the a new program Medill is starting that's sending students to do their TN in South Africa. I cringe at the thought of highly superior college juniors descending on South African newspapers to tell them everything they're doing wrong. Most 20-year-olds aren't know for their ability to suck it up and admit that they don't know what they're doing. I want to send a pre-emptive apology to the papers of South Africa. Editors, if you get any "Well, in American..." or "At Medill.." or whatever, you have my permission to smack those snot-nose kids upside the head. Trust me, they need it.