The 100 by 30 project

Holy moly

Why didn't anyone tell me how insanely good "Gossip Girl" is?!? I'm in campy TV heaven, and I will never make fun of the CW3PO network again...

Royalties and bureaucracy

For the past three years or so, my husband has worked on a side project with a friend of his on his own time, under the direction of a PI at the same institution where he works full-time (his boss knows about the project and approves, but this has nothing to do with his full-time job).

By most measures, this project has been very successful. The product has been licensed by the institution, taken on by several producer/distributors, and demand was high for it before it was even available. They've even earned a few consulting jobs in order to assess a company's needs and see how their product might help.

Obviously, my husband and his friend were awarded the right to royalties by the institution. The royalties are laughably small -- about $2/unit -- but it was always more about working on a cool project with his friend than any expectation of a giant windfall (and hey, it's some passive income that the pf blogosphere is so wild about!).

But it's been about nine months since the first unit was sold, and we haven't seen a dime! Because payments were to be quarterly, at the extreme end we could understand a six-month lag. But nine months? My concern is not that the institution will stiff him; I know that they will pay eventually. This is bureaucracy, not fraud. But I believe that this behavior will cost the institution money. Here's why:

This is not a niche project with a few applications: this is a very general product that could sell many, many units with the right support. (Also, the institution makes a lot more than my husband does; more like $20/unit.) But my husband and his friend are not under any sort of contract and they have no obligation to keep working on this project; in fact, my husband is losing interest. Now that we're thinking seriously about having kids, he's thinking hard about ways to bring in some additional income, and when brainstorming yesterday I suggested spending time seeking companies that might be interested in the product and proactively contacting them about its merits. He was not interested in this at all. Now admittedly, primarily this is because he's a tech person, not a business person, and I think he considers hustling a little unseemly. But I think he would have done this a year or two ago because his enthusiasm for the product was so strong. But in the absence of royalty checks to make him still feel connected to the project, he's ready to move on. Most likely he will move onto something that has no affiliation with the institution and will make no money for them. So instead getting his labor to help them sell more units which they profit from and getting their name out (the institution is obsessed with getting press and being thought of as a top institution), they'll get nothing.

Bureaucracy has its costs.

"Deep down, they believe they should be like the Native Americans and use every part of the product or beast they have consumed."

Sure, I'm probably late to the party, but I love "Stuff White People Like" as much as everyone else. A few of my favorites are:

1. "Gifted" Children.
   

   White people love “gifted” children, do you know why? Because an astounding 100% of their kids are gifted!  Isn’t that amazing?

   I’m pretty sure the last non-gifted white child was born in 1962 in Reseda, CA.  Since then, it’s been a pretty sweet run.

   The way it works is that white kids that are actually smart are quickly identified as “gifted” and take special classes and eventually end up in college and then law school or med school.

   But wait, aren’t there white people who aren’t doctors or lawyers, or even all that smart?

   Well, here is another one of those awesome white person win-win situations.

   Because if a white kid gets crappy grades and can’t seem to ever do anything right in school, they are still gifted! How you ask? They are just TOO smart for school. They are too creative, too advanced to care about the trivial minutiae of the day to day operations of school.

2. Japan.
   
   Though there is full white consensus on a number of white things, there is perhaps nothing that draws more universal white acclaim than the island nation of Japan.  It should be noted, that some white people harbor SOME ill will toward Japan because of whaling, killing dolphins or Nanking.  But those are generally considered isolated incidents that do not indict the entire nation.
   ....
   It is a dream for them to go over seas and actually live in Japan. This helps them not only because it fills their need to travel, it will enable them to gain important leverage over other white people at Sushi restaurants where they can say “this place is pretty good, but living in Japan really spoiled me.  I’ve had such a hard time finding a really authentic place.”   
   
   
3. Plays.
   

   It is not known if white people actually enjoy plays or if they are just victims of massive peer pressure from the 45% of white people who have acted in a play at some point in their life.

   The only real advice around this subject is to never accept an invitation from a white person to go see a play.  Often times you will be supporting their friend or cousin and then get stuck with a $45 ticket (at least) and three hours of trying to figure how close you are to the end.

4. Bicycles.
   
   But there is a special category of bicycles that appeal far more to white women, the European city bike (pictured). White women have a lot of fantasies about idealized lives, and one of them is living in Europe and riding around an old city on one of these bikes. They dream about waking up and riding to a little cafe, then visiting bakeries and cheese shops and finally riding home to prepare a fancy meal for their friends who will all eat under a canopy with white Christmas lights. This information can be used to help gain the trust/admiration of a white woman, especially if you can pull off a lie about how your mother told you about how she used to do all of these things when she was younger.

Most of these had me dissolving in giggles, often because of self-recognition (for one, I love plays, or as we're supposed to say, "live theater"); the only really "ouch, truth hurts" moment was the comment about the unused KitchenAid mixer. Why did we let ourselves register for that stupid contraption?

“I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance”

One of my favorite non-pf blogs is Confessions of a Community College Dean. Dean Dad always provides such caring and thoughtful insights into academia, especially the underfunded, non-sexy world of community college. The topic of his most recent post is especially interesting: students who register for classes they have no intention of taking so that they can stay on their parents' health insurance.

But there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards people taking that extra class just to get the insurance. I don't entirely blame them for doing it – they've found a loophole in a ridiculously unfair system – but it certainly distorts what we're trying to do. These folks show up in our attrition numbers, our outcomes assessments, and our (non)-graduation rates, all of which get blamed on us. And they get lower GPA's than they probably ought, simply from spreading themselves unrealistically thin.

Go read it.

I swear I'm not going to turn into a political blogger...

... but because it's very personal finance, I'll mention it here.

I've gotten used to the fact that there's going to be a lot of very public casual sexism directed at the Clinton campaign and if I get upset at every instance I'll go insane. So my new litmus test is what I'm calling the "Robin Morgan rule", based on her comment in her new "Goodbye to All That":

Goodbye to Comedy Central's "Southpark" featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC's vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

I had noticed this very same phenomenon -- I get upset about sexist comment a prominent (often supposedly impartial) figure makes, wonder to myself, "Can you imagine the ensuing shitstorm if someone had said something  analogous about Obama, like...", and then stop because I guilty for even starting to wander down that path.

How perverse is that? Things are being uttered about Clinton every day that I can't even stand to bring myself to mentally construct an analogy to.

Anyway, here's my new rule:

Every time something passes that test, when I feel ashamed just trying to construct an analogy in my head, I'm donating another $20 to Clinton.

(Yes, it'll apply retroactively to Shuster, although luckily he does seem to be facing some the flak he's due for implying that a 27-year-old woman choosing to campaign for her mother is a whore.)

Update: My goodness, I feel like adding another Shuster-related $20 just for his laughable non-apology apology (see fourth video on this page).

"I didn't think that people would take it literally, but some people have."

David, no one took it "literally". No one thinks you actually thought the Clintons were pimping out their daughter. Astonishingly enough, people think terms like pimps and whores are inappropriate even when used metaphorically.

"To the extent that people think I was being pejorative, I apologize. I should have seen that people would view it that way."

Just uggggggh.

I need to avoid Shakesville for the next few months or I'll quickly go broke!

We've been hit by a schoolbus and a runaway ice cream drunk, but this is the first callous drunk...

What an insane week I've had! It started last Thursday, when we began three straight days of entertaining with a "Lost" viewing party, ending with games night on Saturday. Sunday was our nice, quiet recouperation day, and we settled into bed at 11:30 pm, ready to get a restful night's sleep for the week ahead.

Instead, we were woken up at 11:55 pm by the sound of what turned out to be a drunk driver hitting our car!

Almost everyone here has on-street parking and we've been hit while parked so many times that I'm pretty low key about getting crushed at this point. After you've been side-swiped by a school bus, one of the casualties of a run-away ice cream truck, and hit by a neighbor across the street pulling out of their driveway like they have hundreds of times before, you can laugh most things off. It's a giant administrative hassle, but State Farm is my insurance company and they've always been great. But it was a drunk driver which I get even more worked up about than most people. And this person was such a frickin' deadbeat drunk cliche:

1. After we wake up in a panic, look at the window to see her car crumpled into ours, throw on some clothes and shoes and coats, and run outside to see what the hell is going on, she stumbles out of the car and says, "Can we not call the cops? I don't want to get a DUI."
2. Much later in the night, the cop tells us that this was actually her first day of having her suspended license back afer her previous DUI.
3. She only hit our car because she was trying to flee the scene of the car she hit fifty feet behind ours; the car's alignment had other ideas!!
4. I didn't realize it at first because it didn't even occur to me that that's what she'd be doing, but knowing what I know now, I'm pretty sure she was even trying to drive away from our car until she saw us coming out.

It looks like our front right wheel is bent, possibly snapped, and there's pretty major body work that needs done on that side. But financially, it shouldn't be much of a hit. If the repairs go on for too long then we have to start paying 20% of the rental car fee, but otherwise it's all on Miss DUI.

I am really looking forward to a nice, quiet week.