methodwriter85

My high school principal was a lesbian raising kids with her wife, so it's not that out of my experience.

Well, the interesting thing about this is that it's taking "Rust Belt" brownfield makeover ideas and applying it to areas where the industry is still there. That should have some interesting consequences. They're trying to force it into becoming a brownfield, rather than happening organically. Interesting bit about the cost of living downtown. I know in Philly, there are lots of young people taking over, but Philly is also a city that was built for 2 million people and lost about 500k people. There's going to be lots of empty lots and housing for them, which probably keeps pricing down.

Well, I was kind of being in jest with the first comment. That's why I included the smiley. I don't necessarily agree that it was a huge loss. Interesting bit about the Millennials. I didn't realize Downtown had to be that expensive. I mean, I thought they were trying to revitalize it, which suggested that it can't be that expensive.

The Campus Door loans started off at around 9 or 10 percent, though by the time they got over to Wells Fargo, they were 5 to 7 percent.

Consider yourself lucky you didn't take out any private loans. People in my generation got burned hard by that.

I've now paid off two of the four private student loans I took out from a Lehman's Brothers-based company called Campus Door (which eventually got bought out by Wells Fargo)...many more federal loans to go after that, but it's always a small little victory when I see a loan balance of zero. I made the decision to make postponements on my federal loans so I could focus on the private ones because they often have a higher interest rate and they are able to make rules that federal one can't. Namely, three months before I graduated, I was told I didn't have a grace period because the amount of times I changed school bit into that. I'm just glad I didn't take out from Sallie Mae. Yeesh.

Well, yeah, but the bridge could've been the next High Line, which is pretty cool and about as hip as you can get. I do think Los Angeles, like most cities of the early 21st century, seems to be in the middle of a identity makeover. New York City is seeing Brooklyn and even Staten Island becoming rich, hipster enclaves while the foreign investors are buying up Manhattan and making insanely rich residential towers there. Philadelphia, long known as a rough and scruff blue-collar town with a massive crack cocaine epidemic, is seeing this influx of young, urban professionals that are making places like Fishtown desirable places to live and sparking all this residential and commercial construction around Center City. Meanwhile, it seems like Los Angeles has a lot of competing ideas going on about how to go forward in their future, and what to define themselves as. This guy represents the whole "let's get the Millennial with their bikes and quirky ideals about urbanism to move into Downtown!" viewpoint, I think.

You're still annoyed with Tom for making his plea that Piggyback Yard needs to be turned into a park for the L.A. River, aren't you? I think his videos are cool and beautifully shot, but a lot of them come with a clear slant. He's an L.A. transplant hipster, trying to find odd and historical little bits of fabric pertaining to L.A., with the idea of encouraging more people to take ownership of their town and pushing for the kinds of things that he finds important like historic preservation and parks. Which would probably be annoying to people that have generations of family there.

Yeah. Los Angeles doesn't seem that big on historical preservation of their old buildings. Here's another video from Tom Explores Los Angeles, where he talks about the tearing down of the historic Riverside Figueroa Bridge: Pretty sad. Someone said that San Diego and San Francisco are more proactive about protecting their historical buildings because they tend to have more "core" founding families there, whereas Los Angeles tends towards being a bunch of transplants that doesn't mind tearing things down to make way for the new. That would have been a really cool idea to do something like the Highline in New York City with the bridge. Oh, well. My little hometown doesn't really care that much about saving historic buildings, either. They'll tear stuff down and that make buildings that try to look old. The end result is that our Main Street looks like Disney Town, U.S.A..

Alright... 4. JJ quits figure skating and goes back to Harvard-Westlake for 11th grade.

Yeah, the idea is Emma Woodhouse is a party planner and lifestyle guru who is doing a documentary about her greatness, with Alex Knightly as her business partner. Basically, it's a vanity project set up by her unseen father. It's a very long series that starts off pretty slow, but it managed to get really good in the end. It's not as good as the Lizzie Bennett Diaries (done by the same people), which imagines Lizzie Bennett as a twenty-something grad student vlogging about her life, but I really liked the chemistry between Emma and Alex. Brent Bailey is pretty attractive in that "every man Jim Halpert" kind of way. In a broader sense, it's pretty cool that California is seeing as these alternative web series being made. They have YouTube studios there now, which probably contributes a lot to that. The production values on this stuff is way up from LonelyGirl15, that's for sure. I did have a classmate who moved out to Los Angeles who tried the whole "let's update a classic into the 21st century through a series of vlogs" idea, but of course she didn't have the backing to make something an epic series like The Lizzie Bennett Diaries or Emma Approved. I think she's an accountant now or something. As for the skyline...well, at this point, isn't Los Angeles pretty much built out? There aren't too many places left to expand to. I did have an e-friend from there tell me once that there was a real estate boom going on in the Inland Empire, which was set to be the next big suburban area of Los Angeles, but then the economy bust in '08 so that pretty much got shelved. They've got to start building up at this point.

I'm watching Emma Approved right now, which is the web series that updates the book Emma into 21st century Los Angeles. As part of their multi-media platform, they photographed their characters in multiple locations. Check out this cool L.A. Skyline photo: It seems like the skyscrapers are more in clusters as opposed to one big concentration. I also really like this shot of the Emma Approved cast: I dig the fake pagoda. It does seem like there's a push to try and get more skyscrapers in Los Angeles as seen by the Wilshire Grand, so it'll be interesting to see how their skyline evolves.

Andy Mientus from the Flash: A 20-something Alisdair? I think Andy is the epitome of adorkable: I could also see him as Mouse. I discovered him as a dying cancer patient on ABC Family's Chasing Life, and I think he's just friggin' adorable!

If Private Tim took over writing.... 1. Tony would die a painful death. 2. Will would be shipped off to military school where he would bang some cute military guys. (I'm actually surprised we haven't seen Will hook up with some military hottie.) 3. Then Will and Zach would break up, leaving Will to wind up with a returned Alisdair, who's now grown to 5'10" and is quite hot. Zach would be allowed to find another closeted football player to fall in love with. 4. JJ would be written out of the series with him deciding to move to Tokyo, after realizing that he has a huge fanbase in Japan. Alex and MaryEllen would be shipped off to England. 5. Ryan and Hot Jeff would return as main characters, and there'd be a refocus on Los Angeles as a setting, with occasional glances to Boston for Matt, Wade, and Tiffany's growing brood of kids. Not sure what else would happen in a CAP universe decided by PrivateTim.

And The Streak did basically nothing with the Boston setting save for the hockey team and some history tours. LOL. Although in all honesty, Blue made a very good point that JJ is not a guy who will mix the masses, and it makes sense that only level of social integration we've really seen here has been on Matt's end, who isn't narrating this story. Still, I thought it'd be funny for JJ to fall in love with some blue-collar Southie guy or girl from the wrong side of the tracks. It would be so out of character for him, but still- who doesn't love romantic comedies about haughty rich people falling in love with blue-collar people with a heart of gold? I do wonder if Matt would be getting into the Red Sox. He strikes me as a guy I can see being into baseball. I had a coach who was from Mass that was a BIG Red Sox fan. He gave me shit once about wearing a Yankees hat I had found. I'm also kinda surprised Mark didn't do anything with anti-Iraq War protests that were apparently going on around Cambridge in late 2002, given where the story went.

Over on Reddit, people are currently drooling over this photo of 1976 Lynda Carter on OldSchoolCool. I'm saying this as a red-blooded homosexual male...DAMN, she was hot. No wonder it's been nearly impossible to find someone that can live up to the bar she set as Wonder Woman. 1970's men in general were pretty fucking hideous, but the women looked great. I think there was a lot more natural beauty back then.

Does this mean it'll be 2060 before I know it?

I just got invited to my 10-year high school reunion. Oh my god, I can't believe it went by that fast. 19 just feels a couple of years ago. Does this mean I'll be 39 before I know it? Anyway, here are four tunes I associate with my senior prom. (We're actually having our reunion at the same place, apparently. That'll be a trip.) "Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing Prom theme. 80's nostalgia was riding high in 2005. They played this on the fake red carpet they set up in front of my school for the after-prom, where parents and siblings played fake paparazzi. It was so much fun. "Forever Young" from Napoleon Dynamite Everyone was obsessed with Napoleon Dynamite senior year. Also, the faculty bitched about the fact that the prom for 2004 was basically wall-to-wall contemporary hip-hop. so they forced the playlist to include older stuff that they'd like. I remember slow dancing to this to my good friend Kayla...she was a pretty cool chick. "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani This was the big hit tune that year...it's got a great beat and you can dance to it. "True" by Ryan Cabrera Finally...this was our designated "cheesy slow dance" love song. He was the boyfriend of Ashlee Simpson, who had gotten her own reality show that was running this year. It's amazing how fast it goes by. Man. 2005 really was ten years ago. It doesn't seem possible. The cool thing about my school was that you pretty knew every single person that was in your class, and you had at least one class with them. We started out with 94 class members freshmen year, and graduated with 82. It was nearly impossible NOT to know somebody. There are some people I really hope to see again.

Robin Wright Penn as Claire Underwood from House of Cards as Elizabeth Danfield?

Fifty Shades of Grey Earns 93 Million Dollars Over President's Day Weekend I get the feeling that Jamie Dornan REALLY doesn't want to be part of this, but he's pretty much locked into two sequels now. Dude, enjoy being the fanfic Edward Cullen for the next two years. LOL. Speaking of, it's a shame they can't let Jamie keep a beard in the movie. He looks damn hot with one: Without the beard, he just looks so generic. Oh, well.

This was hellaciously long, but there were some funny bits. Anyway, this is for you Cali people. God, Bradley Cooper is hot. I've always wondered what Mark, Tim's, and Blue's Californian accents sound like. I always kinda pictured Blue having this vaguely Latina accent, Tim having this slurred surfer boy accent accent, and Mark having this weird mish-mash of California and the mid-West. I've found Californian dialect pretty fascinating ever since I saw this E! Special on them back in the late 1990's. That was reinforced a couple of years later, when I fell in love with the movie Valley Girl. A bit of trivia- E.G. Dailey, who played Loryn, did not want to do an actual Valley Girl accent. So she did a Malibu accent instead. I've had people actually tell me that my voice sounds like a Californian stoner dude instead of a guy from Delaware, so yeah. I do think I'm fascinated by accents/dialects because someone who grew up in Northern Delaware, there really isn't much of an identifiable accent aside from the words "on", "phone", "home", and "water."

In honor of SNL's 40th anniversary, I thought I'd post my favorite 10 sketches. 10.) To Love, Honor, and Stalk: The Gillian Woodward Story Senator John McCain kills it as the "personal space infringer" in this 2002 skit of Lifetime movie parodies. It is such a dead-on parody of Lifetime movies. I've watched plenty of those. 9.) Schmitt's Gay Two guys get the best (gay) surprise of their life when they house-sit. This one made me tingle in ways I didn't quite understand as a young boy. LOL. 8.) "Gap Girls" "Lay off me, I'm starving!" Farley. God, I wish he was still around. 7.) "Natalie Portman Raps" 6.) "Peyton Manning United Way" "Spend time with your kids so Peyton Manning doesn't." 5.) "The Sinatra Group" Phil Hartman was great. And Jan Hooks did such a great Sinead. R.I.P. 4.) "Debbie Downer" I had a professor who looked like Debbie Downer, but she was actually quite funny and cool. 3.) "George W. Bush Cold Opening" George W. Bush will always be remembered as a beloved Will Ferrell character. 2.) "Linda Tripp/Monica Lewisky Opening" "That you're a dirty, dirty girl and you had dirty, dirty sex with that dirty, dirty President!" And my favorite is... 1.) Palin/Hilary 2008 This sketch was everything that's good about SNL encapsulated. Social and political satire at it's finest. That's the last time I've seen SNL fire on all cylinders like they did during the '08 election. So what are your favorite sketches?

Philly hosted the Republican Convention back in 2000, and people did fan out from the immediate area, so it's expected to have an economic impact that extends out to northern Delaware.

Yeah. It's really lousy. I was expecting a big trainwreck, but it wasn't really one. Dakota made Ana actually seem like a real 21st century college student, instead of this chick who's somehow never used email,talks like a 12-year old girl, has never had a drink in her life before the bar scene, etc etc.

So in honor of Valentine's Day...here's my mix of sappy love tunes... Love Tunes 2015 Mix List 1.) "Everything I Do" (I Do It For You) by Bryan Adams 2.) (Yeah, I didn't go for the obvious one here.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) 8.) 9.) 10.) 11.) 12.) 13.) 14.) 15.) The bulk of these tunes are from the 80's. They were definitely great at sappy love tunes that decade.