Here’s an irony, or maybe just a simple reason:
One of the things that readers and critics consistently say the press needs to do a better job discussing are the nitty-gritty of finances and other numerical issues. “Dig in there and make sense of that budget! Tell us what the reports on school scores actually mean!”
There’s not a lot of accountants writing in the nation’s newsrooms. My math education ended with Algebra II, because my brain just melted when it came time to try trigonometry, much less calculus. (I did take statistics in college, along with everyone on the Virginia Tech basketball and football teams.)
But I agree with the critics and readers. Someone does need to dig into this stuff, if only because we can catch (the more obvious) hanky panky and let readers know how their tax dollars are being spent in general. In the absence of a crusading accountant bursting into the newsroom — Do accountants burst into rooms? I can’t imagine that they do. — it falls to us and our algebra-level math educations.
But, wow, I need an Aleve.
These sorts of things are always pretty subjective based on always incomplete criteria — the fact that they rank working for Electronic Arts as a great job is a howler to everyone I know in that industry — but Money Magazine has listed the best 50 jobs in America.
The top 10 include:
- Software engineer
- College professor
- Financial advisor
- Human resource manager
- Physicians’ assistant
- Market research analyst
- Computer/IT analyst
- Real estate appraiser
- Pharmacist
- Psychologist
Coming in at #195 are journalists, just below librarians and just ahead of sociologists.
For those of you who just can’t wait for kobold goodness (and if you know what kobolds are, odds are, you can’t wait), you can get a jump on the print version of the Koboldnomicon (including spells and the kobold wizard Wikanby by yours truly) and even the PDF version by pre-ordering the PDF version at the ENWorld Game Store.
Woo hoo! Only a few short days or weeks (I’m not 100 percent sure) before the print version shows up at Amazon.com and my nerdiness is enshrined in a hard copy version for posterity.
It’s probably because you got your computer infested with spyware, which then turned it into a remote bot to deluge innocent blogs, like mine, with spam. (You also probably live in Australia, the Netherlands or Urugay, which makes me wonder if this was a trojan on a World Cup site or something.) So, I’ve specifically banned access from your computer to this Web page to stop the spam, which was clogging the filter at the rate of several a minute for the past 24 hours. Enjoy getting 403 errored over to a hamster dance page.
Have a nice day.
If you could read this post.
Which you can’t.
- In an effort to cut down on my need to clean 700+ spams out of the filter at a go, folks posting will not be able to post anonymously. E-mail addresses are only visible to me, but until I approve you once, your posts will be held in moderation limbo until I can give them the thumbs-up. Sorry for the inconvenience.
- WordPress admins: I don’t know why I’ve never done it before, but I’ve been moving appropriate words that automatically flag something for moderation into the blacklist (typically these are phrases relating to refinancing, gambling or prescription drugs) and WordPress is now eating almost all of the spam on its own, since for the most part, it comes in certain themes.
Well, the new season of Rock Star has started, and while it seems awfully optimistic to call Supernova a mega-group (Velvet Revolver didn’t work out that way, now did it?) and it seems kind of charitable to call Gilby Clarke a legend, the show’s off to a good start.
As always, everyone on this show is as good or better than the finalists on American Idol, with the added benefit that none of them seems as lost on stage as many of the winners on AI do. That said, we could probably skip forward a few weeks and drop a bunch of these guys right now:
- It’s one thing to be ballsy and sing Axl Rose-style in front of a former Guns N Roses band member, but when even the normally kiss-up Dave Navarro (what happened to him?) tells you your arrangement sucks, it really sucks. I’m speaking, of course, not of Australian Toby Rand’s taking on “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in the GNR style — he did quite well, actually — but Chris Pierson butchering “Roxanne” to no end that I could fathom.
- Likewise, Jenny Galt is gorgeous, but she doesn’t have the range to pull off a relatively unchallenging song, and she’s destined to be gone before long.
- Josh Logan and Ryan Star seemed to have gotten lost on the way to American Idol: Too squeaky clean, not enough oomph and, frankly, unimpressive voices.
- Magni may be the biggest singer in Iceland, but I’m the biggest singer in my shower, and it doesn’t make me any more likely to front Supernova than him, I’m sorry to say.
- Jill Gioia and Zayra Alvarez are both interesting, but I’m not sure either has much of a long-term chance. Their voices so far haven’t been there and their performances haven’t been anything terribly exceptional.
At this point, after a whole one episode, I’d say Dilana, Lukas Rossi and Storm Large are the ones to beat. We’ll see if that ends up being true in a couple of weeks.
If Storm doesn’t win the whole thing, here’s hoping she ends up hosting next season. Not only is she just as beautiful as Brooke Burke, she’s much more believable on this show than Burke, who is the equivalent of dressing up Malibu Barbie as Rock Star Barbie and pretending it somehow has changed said plastic figurine.
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