The Loehdown

Being a musician, especially a successful one, is no easy feat. You’re always remembered for what you did first to make it big. Being able to overcome your first hit track or album is something many artists cannot master, and they are cast off into the netherworld of one-hit wonders.

The pressure to continue success is multiplied by a thousand when your first successful album becomes the “tenth best-selling album of all-time,” as Jagged Little Pill did for Alanis Morissette. [Wikipedia] Most everyone over the age of 10 can recognize a couple of the tracks off the album, as nearly all of them made their way onto the radio at some point.

13 years later, very few people could recognize a track off of any of Alanis’ other 8 albums in that time. The most notable of the tracks being Uninvited and Hands Clean. But none of the albums could compare to Jagged Little Pill’s blockbuster success.

The reasons behind this are many. When you sell 30 million albums, do you really need to continue making popular albums? The answer is probably no, and many people, after such a big success, choose to head in a more artistic and personal direction, shunning the popular media and making “art.” While the first few albums after Jagged Little Pill stayed more on the side of pop music, the latest few have a decidedly Eastern sound to them. Flavors of Entanglement, Alanis’ latest album, follows this trend.

Flavors of Entanglement is edgy, artsy, and definitely not Jagged Little Pill. Unfortunately, this works against Alanis, as the expectations coming into the album are entirely different from the result. Flavors of Entanglement, taken from the view of a single album, is not a bad album. It may not win 10 Grammys, but it is a solid effort as judged on the scale of regular artists. Versions of Violence attempts to hint at the anger and bitterness that enshrouded Jagged Little Pill. Some tracks, such as Underneath and Incomplete are catchy enough, but you can’t help to feel like you’re missing part of the puzzle that is Flavors of Entanglement.

The rawness that existed on Jagged Little Pill is gone, replaced by a variety of instruments and studio effects. The heart-wrenching lyrics are replaced with a smattering of tales, from eco-awareness to playful love. For any other artist, this would be the norm, but we’ve come to expect more from such a star as Alanis.

Incredible success is something that haunts many a musician, and Flavors of Entanglement only slightly moves Alanis out from the shadow cast by Jagged Little Pill.

It’s hard to go an hour without hearing about oil prices and the pain they are causing. Few people understand how oil prices are set, how speculation in the market has lead to a massive bubble, and how supply and demand plays a role in the whole thing. While many people will tell you the price of oil is only going to increase, one thing we know about bubbles is they burst. Look at the housing market.

A CNN Story is reporting the second largest oil price drop in history today. Not increase, but drop. If you ask me, it’s just the beginning of a downward slide. Expect gas to be back at $2 a gallon or under and oil to be at $40 a barrel this winter.

Why? Look at it from an oil company’s perspective. High prices are good in the short term, but they lead the consumer to seek alternative energies (hybrid, solar, electric) which rely less on oil, which pushes demand down. Lower demand means lower prices, and since prices right now are artificially high thanks to speculation, lower demand is only gonna make the bubble burst that much faster.

From a speculation standpoint, you run up the price because you fear demand will increase. When it starts to decrease thanks to alternative energy, people using alternate transportation, and the move towards more economic methods, you want to sell as soon as possible.

Also, there are reports that oil supplies here in our country are at some of the highest they have ever been. Still think demand is what drove up gas prices?

January seems a year away. Here in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer, many of us forget our New Year’s resolutions: lose weight, be nicer, spend more time with your kids, or watch less TV. Few of us can even remember what we set out to do. However, if you’re looking to take control of your finances, resolution or not, mint.com can help you.

Mint.com has a great potential that requires a lot of trust. It gathers all your login credentials to your various financial institutions, and pulls in your transactions, balances, and debts. Fear not, however, all credentials are encrypted, and the site has been VeriSign verified and TRUSTe certified. The service also does not allow you to manipulate your accounts, and the logins are never stored on their servers, so even if someone logged into your mint.com account, they couldn’t do much but see your transactions.

Mint.com is free, paid for by the offers it recommends to you by other banks.

Once you sign up for Mint, you can fill in your credentials for any financial institutions you are a part of, be it checking and savings, credit cards, loans or investments. The more you provide, the more it can accurately track your spending and budget.

As you fill in your credentials, the transactions supplied by your institutions (usually the last 30 days) are downloaded to your profile. It is then viewable in a variety of ways: as a pie chart of spending, bar graph of savings vs spending, or a simple history. Transactions can be edited to apply to different categories, such as groceries, utilities, automotive, and countless others. You can then set a budget for each category, and mint will pace you along each month, and even alert you via sms or email if you choose when you exceed your budget. This is a great tool for those who don’t realize how much they spend each month on clothes or lunch, or if you just want to see how much our oil prices are really costing you.

Now for the downsides: Mint.com doesn’t have every institution possible, of course, so if you bank with some lesser known institutions you may not be able to get a complete record of your transactions. When I personally signed up, it was telling me my account was closed, which seemed to be an issue for quite a few people across differing banks. And of course, there’s a the question of security overall, even with verification and the promise that the information couldn’t be used against you.

Overall, Mint.com is a greatly useful tool for nearly everyone; even if you currently track your finances now, there’s no easier way to do it then with mint.com, provided you don’t do a lot of cash transactions (checks usually show up in online transactions). A few kinks are left to be worked out, but look for Mint.com once it exits beta.

I have a very unpopular idea: I don’t think college should be giving out as many breaks as they do.

*Awaits scary emails*

College is supposed to prepare you for the real world. For anyone not out in the real world, let me fill you in. You do not get breaks (minus the teachers, and… well, the teachers). There is no summer break, there is no winter break, there is no spring break. There is work.

And only work.

If you want vacation, you have to earn it, just like everything else. And don’t expect it to be more than a week. No one is going to give you that 3 week winter break like you had in college. You have shit to do and if you’re not there no one else is going to do it. Nevermind the fact you’d actually need to earn 10 or so days off.

Now you may ask what the hell this has to do with anything, and you would be right to ask that. Until you exit college (or high school), your life is clearly divided into small sections. You are in a grade, which lasts a year (or maybe 2…), and then that grade is broken down into quarters or semesters. Unfortunately, there is no such division in work. You are in a job. It really never ends. You don’t get 3 months off after 9 months of work, you don’t finish up subjects and start new ones after 4 months. You do the same thing, forever.

For a lot of people, I think this is okay. It keeps us from thinking too much. In fact, in a weird way I think people enjoy it this way. Americans, out of all developed countries, are given the fewest vacation days, and of those days they are given, Americans use even less of them. [ABCNews] We are pressured into staying because we know no one can do our job like we do, and we don’t want to lose it to someone who can. Besides, work escapes us from reality, in a weird way. When we’re at a job we are working toward someone’s/some kind of goal. We go home, turn on the tv, see what mass media wants us to see, and then sleep and repeat. No one goes home and sits down to think about their life or what it means. We don’t have, nor want, the time. It’s a bleak thing to do. Work, work, work, hopefully retire, then you’re out. Not a lot of prettiness in sitting down and looking at that.

I believe that it is something we should do, however. Do not sit and let your every-now-and-then trip on Sunday to your parent’s church tell you what your life is. Sit down and think about it yourself, you’ll discover a lot more truth that way than any book thousands of years old.