West Virginia is spending ten grand to study whether schoolkids can be convinced to lose weight through the use of Dance Dance Revolution. Awesome. I love seeing states spend money on harebrained schemes, and I especially love seeing states spend money on harebrained scheme that, strangely, might actually work -- the folks at GetUpMove.com certainly make a compelling (albeit sponsored) anecdotal case for DDR's defattening powers.

Up next: a persistent online roleplaying game based around not getting pregnant. The input device might be tricky to figure out...

The Great Vodka Experiment commences around ten. Ish. I've got scorecards for twenty printed. Depending on how everyone feels and whether it's raining, I imagine we might go out after we finish collecting data.

i don't know what's stupider: that somebody wrote a book called Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, or that people are willing to pay $125 to watch him speak.

well, it's official! or nearly so. i'm about to mail in my intent to register and tuition deposit to the medill school of journalism at northwestern. see how official it is - i even created a new blog category! UBER official.

only problem is that, along with the deposit and intent to register form, you must also send in a "who's who" form - wherein you list your name, undergrad instution and major, and, worst of all, a biography IN THE THIRD PERSON. like, "catherine a. is an unbashed cheese lover who discovered her passion for new media while creating a web site about cheese." or whatever! i hate writing these stupid things. they're intended so that you can write self-congratulatorily about yourself in as one-dimensional detail as possible. like, who's going to care if i write that i enjoy running or am an avid fan of junk reality tv shows? bah! maybe i'll just include the blog URL in the bio and let people assume what they will from it. and what they will assume is "crazy ass materialistic pop culture whore." which is fine by me.

UPDATE: i just wrote my three-sentence bio - it is the stupidest POS you have ever seen, and no one will learn anything about me from it except that i am a tool who's bad at writing three-sentence bios. oh well.