My classes

The Senator Craig situation is a big deal because 1. A U.S. Senator pled guilty to a crime and didn't tell anybody about it 2. Said Senator is now blaming a newspaper for his guilty plee and claiming he didn't do it 3. He's a freaking Senator. Those guys are pretty important. Paris Hilton doesn't make policy decisions that affect this country.

anyways...

Here's my initial thoughts on my four classes this semester

Ancient Greek Religion: For some reason, I thought this was Roman religion. Turns out I was wrong. Class looks easy enough. I've come to the conclusion that the goal of all Classics classes is to make you memorize the Iliad and Odyssey. I'll be reading both for what seems like the 28th time in my college career.

Gender Communication: A very interesting class. First off, our professor has started a blog that everyone in the class must participate in. Part of the class curriculum is to post anything and everything you want on that blog anonymously, if you so desire. I just cut and paste my previous blog into it to be the first non-professor blog entry but I plan on doing some strange stuff and riling up controversy if at all possible. See, the professor has told us we can have multiple personalities and sign up for multiple accounts if we want. It's all anonymous (a very convoluted process I don't want to explain) and the idea is to "see what happens". Apparently this is a way that everyone can express what they really think of other people in the class without feeling threatened. It's a very strange idea, that the entire class must blog about each other, and it seems very dangerous when you get right down to it. Maybe part of the idea is to see if the blog degrades into namecalling and nastiness? We'll see soon enough, I suppose. The other cool aspect of the class is that the final project is completely creative, so instead of writing a paper, I can do a video. Depending on how much time I've got, I may go that route. I was thinking about going around and interviewing all of the homeless people downtown and getting their perspective on things. Who knows, maybe I can be Lincoln's version of Michael Moore :)

Aesthetics: There's a reason why UNL Film Studies majors are always pissed off. The classes offered for our major are completely screwed up. I won't get into it, but basically over half of all the classes we can take are either not available or are in the broadcasting and art departments, of which you either have to have a bunch of pre-requisites to get in or are shit out of luck because the broadcasting and art majors get first dibs. Seriously, it is almost impossible to get the classes you need.

There is only one Philosophy class offered for Film majors: Aesthetics. It's a 300 level course. I was lucky to get into it and the class itself looks fun. Essentially, we'll be reading a bunch of philosophers and their theories of art and how art works. We get to go to a bunch of plays, concerts, and art galleries. Cool. What isn't cool is that the professor comes in and says "This is a 300 level class and I'm sure some of you haven't taken any philosophy classes before". The actual description says you need a 100 and 200 level philosophy class as a pre-requisite. He then asked for a show of hands of who hadn't taken a philosophy class before. Out of the 30 or so people in the class, at least 25 (including myself) raised their hands. They guy was completely taken aback. He then looked at the student roll and noticed that almost everyone in the class was a Film Studies major. Like I said, UNL is retarded.

Anyways, the class sounds fun, but there are 3 papers to write and 7 essay exams. Good lord. I'm supposed to be reading Tolstoy right now, but instead I'm writing this blog. I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to skate through this class...

Understanding World Politics: Now this class is going to be right up my alley! First off, the professor is bat-shit crazy. Secondly, the entire class is about future events. The major project is creating a scenario paper about how we see things going in the future regarding world politics. Now I can finally write down my entire China/Russia/United States scenario I've been claiming is going to happen for years. This class will be fun, I think.

All in all, I like all of my classes. The Philosophy class still kinda frightens me, but at least I'll be having fun (we get to write a paper on any piece of art we want and apply a theory to it...I'm already waiting for the right theory to apply to Big Trouble in Little China). The other classes should be relatively easy.

Another thing I've noticed is that lately, professors have been in open revolt against textbook manufacturers. This semester, two classes have eschewed with required books altogether (the professors just giving info in lecture) and the professor for my politics class has built his entire semester on free articles from UNL's website, thus no books whatsoever. I noticed this change a year ago, as more and more professors I had started saying "Screw you" to the book companies (one professor who had no choice but to get us a $75 book gave us the e-mail address of the company so we could complain). I have no reference so I'm not sure if this is a widespread thing or just localized to UNL, but it seems to me that professors are collectively trying to force the hand of book companies to either drop the prices or risk them not using them at all, especially with the easy access of articles online that can be had for free. It's interesting....

I purchased the latest Metroid game tonight. There is absolutely no way I'm going to be able to play it anytime soon, but I'd rather pick it up cheap at Deep Discount then spend fifty bucks at Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Same goes with the Robocop disc that just came out. Twenty bucks at Best Buy, only sixteen at DD. I'm sure there are cheaper places online if I looked hard, but I don't really understand why people buy stuff at Wal-Mart and Best Buy. I mean, if DD were a store here in town instead of an online retailer, you would definitely buy your stuff there rather than go to Wal-Mart.

The Deadlantern fantasy football draft went well. It took longer than I thought it would, but it was still fun. Now I just have to make decisions, which sucks :)