A cou­ple of weeks ago, I was read­ing a food/kitchen gad­get blog, when I came across this prod­uct: the War­ing Pro WM007 Pro­fes­sional Elec­tric Mar­tini Maker. “Cool,” I thought, “it would be won­der­ful to turn a dial to ‘dry,’ press a but­ton, and sec­onds later receive a per­fectly mixed mar­tini.” Then, I actu­ally read the product’s descrip­tion on Ama­zon:

The ulti­mate in con­ve­nience and class, this commercial-quality mar­tini maker allows for effort­lessly prepar­ing a mar­tini at home. The unit’s pol­ished stainless-steel 20-ounce cock­tail shaker fea­tures a built-in strainer, while its touch­pad ensures easy oper­a­tion. Sim­ply add favorite mar­tini ingre­di­ents using the 1-ounce shaker cap, turn the appli­ance on and watch the green olive light up, press Shake or Stir, and voila–a time­less cock­tail is made. The cock­tail shaker and cap clean up eas­ily by hand, and the unit’s exte­rior can be wiped down with a soft cloth. Great for a quiet evening at home or ele­gant cock­tail par­ties, the 60-watt elec­tric mar­tini maker mea­sures 10−4÷5 by 7 by 15 inches and car­ries a five-year lim­ited motor warranty.

Wait… “Sim­ply add favorite mar­tini ingre­di­ents…?” The device doesn’t have chilled reser­voirs for the gin and ver­mouth? And you have to mix them your­self? And pro­vide your own ice? A lit­tle more online dig­ging shows that some sites claim that the machine “shakes or stirs a mar­tini until it reaches the opti­mal drink­ing tem­per­a­ture of 34° F,” while in the same breath say­ing that the “shaker moves up and down vig­or­ously dur­ing the shake cycle and gen­tly rotates in stir mode, meld­ing the ingre­di­ents dur­ing either cycle for 60 sec­onds.” Which is it? 34° or 60 sec­onds? It can’t always be both. Unless you’re work­ing with pre-chilled gin and ver­mouth, 60 sec­onds of either stir­ring or shak­ing would result in a great deal of ice melt­age, unnec­es­sar­ily water­ing down the drink.

Let’s recap. You pay $99.95 (plus tax/shipping) for the machine. You mea­sure the ingre­di­ents. You pour the ingre­di­ents. You add the ice. The machine wig­gles the shaker — either up and down (‘shaken’) or in a cir­cu­lar motion (‘stirred’) prob­a­bly for much longer than nec­es­sary. You pour the mar­tini. You wash the jig­ger and the shaker. You find a place to store the bulky uni­task­ing device. Wow, aren’t mod­ern con­ve­niences wonderful?

One hour on hold
With Cin­gu­lar Wire­less.
No live human yet.

After work­ing for a cou­ple of hours this morn­ing in the Col­lege of Music com­puter lab, I changed into my Jack­son Pol­lock designer jeans with match­ing hat and shoes and headed across town for an after­noon of paint­ing. Upon arriv­ing at the com­plex, I gath­ered up my sup­plies from the apart­ment we worked on last night, and moved every­thing to my next assigned unit. When I opened the door, I was taken aback by the amount of trash all over the liv­ing room floor. A quick inspec­tion of the rest of the apart­ment revealed a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion in every room.

As I began mov­ing every­thing to the cen­ters of rooms (to facil­i­tate paint­ing the walls), I began to notice that only some of what had been left was trash. There was a sur­pris­ing quan­tity of items that were usable shape. Fur­ther work revealed that there were even a num­ber of almost new items and some that, in fact, had never been opened.

Viz:

(1) unused Black and Decker iron
(1) unopened 6-pin to 4-pin USB cable with receipt
(2) unopened pad­locks
(1) unopened 25′ tape mea­sure
(2) used but good con­di­tion ham­mers
(1) unopened read­ing light
(1) per­fectly ser­vice­able desk
(1) large tea ket­tle
(1) reusable res­cue breathing/CPR face mask
(6) per­fectly good 3-ring binders
(1) flask
an assort­ment of dishes, pots, pans, and uten­sils
a num­ber of par­tially used con­tain­ers of laun­dry deter­gent
var­i­ous clean­ing products

This stuff was all mixed in with trash, stacks of body­build­ing mag­a­zines, and what looked to be the entire con­tents of one of the bath­rooms — includ­ing elec­tric tooth­brush. It’s obvi­ous that these peo­ple left in a hurry and didn’t bother to take a bunch of things with them. From the stuff that they left behind, it also seems prob­a­ble that daddy buys them what­ever they want, and they have no qualms about dis­card­ing per­fectly good items. They also don’t have the decency to throw away their trash or find good homes for things they don’t want. This is why the world hates America.

What really infu­ri­ates me though, is that every­thing, from waste paper to the unused iron, will get thrown in the trash. We’re not allowed to take any of it. Most of it, I don’t even want — I just want to take it to Good­will or give it to friends or do any­thing use­ful with it so that it won’t merely take up space in a land­fill. But no, due to the ridicu­lously liti­gious nature of our soci­ety, any­thing left by the ten­ants must sim­ply get dumped in the trash. No recy­cling, no reusing, no pass­ing on items to needy indi­vid­u­als — nothing.

The aban­doned items that puz­zled me the most were found in the fridge. The occu­pants left six unopened bot­tles of beer and half a bot­tle of white wine in the fridge, and a flask of some­thing chill­ing in the freezer. What col­lege stu­dent leaves alco­hol behind? These guys were obvi­ously tro­phy drinkers, judg­ing from the plethora of empty liquor bot­tles adorn­ing their kitchen cab­i­nets. What could pos­si­bly have made them aban­don over 100 ounces of alco­hol? I can only hope that it was some fit­ting karmic ret­ri­bu­tion for their waste­ful natures.

And now, I bring you the sec­ond install­ment in my series on stu­pid things found in my TA mail­box (See the first post here). This time, the offend­ing item is a post­card adver­tis­ing the Sym­phony Con­do­mini­ums. These con­dos are slated to be built across the street from the music build­ing, in a a space cur­rently occu­pied by an active soror­ity house and a derelict frat house. Now, we in the Col­lege of Music have been hear­ing buzz about this for awhile.

<gos­sip and hearsay>
Appar­ently, FSU wanted to pur­chase and use the land. I’ve heard a few dif­fer­ent sto­ries regard­ing the intended use, vary­ing from a park­ing lot to a new per­for­mance venue. In any case, the owner of the land refused to sell. Accord­ing to some sources, the owner has a grudge against FSU, and wants to erect a tall build­ing basi­cally amongst other FSU build­ings so that the school will lit­er­ally be in his shadow.
</gossip and hearsay>

The very fact that post­cards adver­tis­ing the Sym­phony Con­do­mini­ums were mailed to all the TAs (and prob­a­bly the fac­ulty) of the Col­lege of Music seems to sup­port the grudge story. The soror­ity and fra­ter­nity houses still stand on the site, so con­struc­tion can’t be immi­nent. Also, grad­u­ate stu­dents can’t be the tar­get mar­ket for $250K con­dos (the start­ing price given on the post­cards them­selves), unless the devel­op­ers are just plain stupid.

In any case, appar­ently some polit­i­cal strings were pulled to get the land rezoned for mixed use (a multi-story condo build­ing with retail space on the bot­tom floor). Let’s see… in how many ways is this a bad idea? Let’s start with the fact that the site is basi­cally on cam­pus, with class build­ings on two sides and soror­ity and fra­ter­nity houses on another. The streets that would pro­vide access to the Sym­phony are nar­row two-lane roads that are gen­er­ally con­gested for a good por­tion of every school day. Traf­fic only gets worse at night when there are con­certs, espe­cially for per­for­mances at the 3000-seat Ruby Dia­mond Audi­to­rium, which is less than a block from the site. Park­ing around cam­pus is extremely lim­ited, and any new lots (ie. for Sym­phony res­i­dents) would undoubt­edly get unin­vited guests both day and night.

Now, let’s talk about the post­card. The devel­op­ers are mak­ing a big deal about their property’s prox­im­ity to the School (sic) of Music. The fact is men­tioned in bold face on the front of the card, and among the ameni­ties listed on the reverse is “Open­ing Nights at Florida State University’s Renowned School of Music.” So, they’re using us as adver­tis­ing. Great. My favorite part of the entire card is the admo­ni­tion, “Don’t Miss the Grand Finale to Har­mo­nious Liv­ing. Lim­ited Units Avail­able.” The “Grand Finale?” Are these con­dos, or is the build­ing an upscale hospice?

The card points inter­ested par­ties to symphonycondominiums.com. This is where it gets really good. Regard­less of your answer to the ques­tion of your con­nec­tion speed, you will be bom­barded with a loud lo-fi record­ing of a vio­lin con­certo. If you are unfor­tu­nate enough to choose the broad­band option, you will be sub­jected to a slow load­ing process before your ears are blasted off. But, when the music does come, you’ll also get a dumb flash ani­ma­tion with com­posers’ names and bits of printed music float­ing behind adver­tis­ing jar­gon. Here’s one gem: “We invite you to orches­trate your own rhythm and set your own tone for har­mo­nious liv­ing at the Sym­phony Con­do­mini­ums.” Thank God for the ‘Skip Intro’ button.

The con­dos’ prox­im­ity to the (again incor­rectly labeled) School of Music is fea­tured promi­nently on both the ‘Build­ing’ and ‘Fea­tures’ pages. The best part of the site, how­ever, is to be found on the ‘Mod­els’ page. Here we see 8 dif­fer­ent floor plans that will be avail­able, each named after a com­poser. The units are: Beethoven, Bucelli, Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Rach­mani­nov, Straus, and Tchaikovsky. Wait a sec­ond… Straus? With only one ‘s’ at the end? Well, that’s not either Johann or Richard; they’ve each got a full com­ple­ment of ‘s’s. Per­haps the devel­op­ers have a soft spot for Christoph Straus, the renais­sance com­poser, or per­haps Oscar Straus, an early 20^th-century opera com­poser. They’re both so pop­u­lar that I had to do a search for ‘Straus’ just to see if any com­posers by that name existed. And what about Bucelli? He must be one of those obscure Ital­ian Baroque com­posers, right? Hmm, a search of The New Grove Dic­tio­nary of Music and Musi­cians reveals no one named ‘Bucelli.’ The best expla­na­tion I can come up with is that they were going for Andrea Bocelli, the blind tenor. Con­tem­po­rary opera singers, mas­ter com­posers, they’re all the same, right?

Unfor­tu­nately, I’ll prob­a­bly be long gone by the time the Sym­phony Con­do­mini­ums open, if they ever do. It’s a shame that I won’t get the chance to make fun of them in person.

Ear­lier this semes­ter, the FSU School of Music became the FSU Col­lege of Music. Word of this has slowly trick­led down to us stu­dents, since we’re appar­ently not impor­tant enough to even receive an e-mail mes­sage regard­ing the change. Also, many things — includ­ing the web­site — still say “School of Music.” This week marks one of the first times I’ve seen “Col­lege of Music” on any­thing semi-permanent or offi­cial. Unfor­tu­nately, the object on which this appears is not an ele­gant new sign out­side the build­ing, nor is it a stack of styl­ish new let­ter­head. No. Our new des­ig­na­tion is embla­zoned across an ugly-ass pen.
Here’s a descrip­tion of this vari­ety of pen from a com­pany that sells pro­mo­tional materials:

Bic Clic Stic Foil Pens fea­ture a radi­ant, scin­til­lat­ing pris­matic look. They’re opales­cent and kalei­do­scopic… they glit­ter, sparkle, daz­zle, and that’s what gives them such dynamic pro­mo­tional impact!

Here’s my own description:

Bic Clic Stick Foil Pens fea­ture a cheap, gaudy, cheesy look. They’re chintzy and gar­ish… they are ugly, tacky, and taste­less, and that’s what gives them such counter-promotional impact!

As if the pens them­selves weren’t ugly enough, some­one has made a very poor deci­sion with regards to the let­ter­ing. “Florida State Uni­ver­sity Col­lege of Music” is in one font, and “www.music.fsu.edu” is in another font. Not only are the two type­faces totally unre­lated to one another, but one is a serif font while the other is sans-serif.

This is not the sort of thing that should be used to adver­tise one of the largest col­le­giate music pro­grams in the coun­try. This is the sort of thing you’d expect to get from a sleazy used car sales­man. “Car-aaazy Eddie’s Pre-Owned Plea­sure­mo­biles” would be much more at home on this pro­mo­tional trav­esty. What’s next? Will the web­site be redesigned with tiled back­ground images and a bad midi file play­ing on repeat? Will they just put a “Col­lege” sticker over “School” on the sign out­side the build­ing (in a dif­fer­ent font, of course)? I truly hope that this awful pen is not a sign of things to come from the newly chris­tened Col­lege of Music.