Television

Recently I have been rediscovering the joys of flipping through the channels and watching random shows. This is quite new to my life as I mostly watch cable news (CNN, MSNBC, FOX); and movies and tv shows on my computer. I ran across a show call "manswers" last night and as the name implies gives answers to questions that only a man would ask. The one I found most interesting was: How to kill a bear with your bare hands. The show claims there is a martial art called Hikuta in which this can be achieved if under attack. I always assumed if I was in this situation the best thing to do would be to play dead, however "manswers" has actually got me thinking that I can fight a grizzly bear!

As wanted to watch the Obama's Late Night appearance on Jay Leno, but I was so caught up in "manswers", I missed the first part of it. I did catch him making his quirp about bowling in which he alluded to bowling like he was in the special olympics; the moment he said it I new that was going to be a story.

This is is second, that-wouldof-been-a-funny-joke-with-ya-boys-but-probably-not-as-president moment. The first came when he made the Nancy Regain seance joke. Once again, I think it will be a day story, but this in my opinion will be the last one he gets away with. The next one will become statistically significant enough for the media to create a storyline that Obama is an "insensitive jerk". I got to be honest and say that each times he's done this, he had me laughing pretty hard because it's the kinda of loose talk any guy would say around their house; I mean common who hasn't make a "special-ed" joke in their life. Nevertheless, this is not a storyline his administration would like to waste their time defending.

I watched a little bit of Jim Cramer's marketwatch show; I have mixed feeling about Cramer. I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart exposing Cramer's "expertise" in stock picking for the fraud that it is last week, but I do see the benefit in Cramer making his show interesting for the average Joe. He's throws stuff everywhere, presses buttons that make weird sounds, screams and yells incomprehensible stuff and talks as if he's knows every stock personally...it's really intriguing and you can't help but watch sometimes. I feel as if he is capitalizing on a market of 20-29 year old that all grew up watching sesame street, where that characters manipulated us into learning our ABC's and 123's by making funny noises, singing and acting funny. Cramer is now using the same technique to teach us about stocks. Now to the person that understand the stock market pretty well, his advice is very elementary but I can appreciate the effort he put into dumbing down a dull subject; as I teacher I know that is difficult. I thinks it's the stock picking stuff and his creation of false or just unprovable storylines for why stock went up or down that turn me off, not the education on the terminology in finance he teaches. It also doesn't help that he was a hedge fund manager that use to do all the shennanigans he preaches against now; but as I said, I just have mixed feeling about his work.

In other news, I thought my lecture yesterday went really well, probably the best central limit theorem lecture I have given. I want to go back and change some of the direction I gave on the game I assigned them to make but I don't want to confuse them. I think I will just wait to see what sort of questions I get first.