Category: Uncategorized

For the 10th anniversary of the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American movies, they allowed re-balloting and added movies from the last ten years. It is important to understand how the ballot worked. First, they limited the nominees to 400 movies, including 45 movies that came out since the last list. You could write in a movie, but I don’t know what chance a write-in would have. Instead of having people rank the movies, they just had people pick 100. Then you would rank your top 5 which was used as a “tie-breaker”.

Some of the criteria for selection were cut and dry. There had to be significant American involvement and it had to be feature-length (60 minutes or more). The rest of the criteria are more flexible:

Critical Recognition

Major Award Winner

Popularity Over Time

Historical Significance

Cultural Impact

Note that liking the movie supposedly has nothing to do with the decision. Even some of these criteria could be ranked objectively, like critical recognition, award winner, and popularity.

Continue reading “AFI’s 10 Most Overrated”

I was planning on redirecting my Amazon links at the end of the month so that I would not get more than $600 in payments this year from the Associates program. Amazon reports earnings of over $600 to the IRS, meaning I would have to put that down as income and lose a third of it in taxes. Even if I earned another $300, I would only break even. There is a chance that in July, August, September, and October I could get a little more than $300, but I didn’t think it was worth it.

What really got me close fast was someone ordering a $200 book yesterday for which I received a $13 commission. That puts me at $581 on the year and I still will have a few more items ship before the orders dry up. That also put me at $1,000 from Amazon since I started.

I wanted to find some non-profit organizations that have Amazon programs, but it wasn’t easy. I did pretty well when I searched on “Amazon” and “portion of the proceeds”. In addition to the Opossum Society and American Cetacean Society, that I already knew about and would use when I ordered things from Amazon (since I can’t receive money from my own purchases), I discovered the San Diego Natural History Museum, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Rainforest Alliance.

So tonight I updated my web pages to use those different organizations’ links (I also used Movable Type’s search and replace to fix links I have on the blog). The only thing I don’t like is that I won’t be able to monitor how well my website is doing in terms of sales. But in November I can switch back since payment for November won’t come until January 2008.

I planted some balloon flowers several years ago. Though they don’t always come back, in general they will in Atlanta at least. Mom has some by her mailbox that have done great and Susan planted some at her house that have come back strong this year. Unfortunately I had some mums and lamb’s ear that overtook where I planted my balloon flowers, so they have gone away for the most part. But I got a couple of stalks that came up this year (the mum having obligingly died, and therefore no longer in the way) and I noticed they were a perfect example of why they are called balloon flowers. On the left is one that is puffed up and the other has already burst open. They are also called by their scientific name platycodon (or platycodon grandiflorus) and Chinese bellflower (on wikipedia).

I recently got another payment from Google (my seventh). They pay after the end of the month once you surpass $100 in earnings. This payment was my fifth quarterly payment in a row. While earnings have been down a little lately, taking 3 months to earn a payment seems pretty consistent.