I know I’ve been talking about it for a while, but I’ve finally made up my mind. Effective Monday, I will officially be an Economics major. After weighing the options and doing a cost-benefit analysis, it was fairly clear to me that a change was not only necessary, but desirable. My reasons for this change are thus:

• The English program at BYU requires 4 semesters of foreign language to graduate. I took a year of Spanish and absolutely hated it. The idea of having to take another year was absolutely repulsive to me. I have never not wanted to take any class so badly.
• The economics program is considerably shorter than the English program, meaning that, although I have some considerable English credit under my belt (enough to minor in English, no matter what), I’ll still graduate earlier in economics. For someone trying to graduate as quickly as possible, this is ideal.
• Most importantly, now that I’ve settled upon business in general and marketing in particular for my future career, a background in economics seems slightly more tailored to what I would like to accomplish.

There you have it, those are my chief reasons for this major change, the changing of my major :P. And those of you who are sad that I’ll no longer be pursuing a course to literary enlightenment, don’t worry. I think I’ll always be an English major at heart.

I stopped reading the Daily Universe sometime last year. Up until tonight, I had forgotten why, but my friend was reading the editorials and I read over her shoulder. Now I remember. The rundown today:

• Two separate letters complaining about how the letters to the “reader’s forum” (more on the name later) always hash over the same topics, day in and day out: modesty on campus (and the related slap at the cheerleaders), stopping for the national anthem, pedestrian stupidity, and “unrighteous judgment.”
• There was a new twist on an old theme with this letter about commecialization of scriptural themes and heroes as evidenced by the products in the BYU Bookstore. The writer’s final line: “Once again, thank you, BYU, for having zero tolerance when it comes to our dress and grooming standards, but making sure to turn a blind eye to priestcraft. Job well done.”
• Another one about the whole stopping when the national anthem is played issue. *yawn*
• This one made me sit up: “Borderline Pornography?” The reader was incensed that anybody could consider too-tight jeans to be pornograpy. She tackled this weighty subject with zest, leading me to conclude that girls wearing tight jeans are NOT pornography. Glad to have that resolved in my mind.
• There was a nice, short one gently castigating those who complain about the Daily Universe. However, being desensitized after reading so many flaming comments written by “appalled” readers, the writer’s subtle rebuke was lost upon me.

In conclusion, there is a war in Iraq, with people dying every day. North Korea is testing nukes. Within our own borders we are dealing with the problems of what we should do about a growing illegal immigrant population and falling graduation rates within our schools. China is set to overtake us economically in less than 50 years. And dang it, those cheerleaders have GOT to be more modest. That is all.

I’ve successfully completed my very first ground-up graphic design. I came up with the concept, did all the coding, and made most of the graphics (I didn’t do our logo, or create the product images. So really, I didn’t do hardly any graphics at all. :P). Anyway, I digress. If you want to check it out, here’s the link:

http://sewelldirect.com/CustomerEmailGeneral061018.html.

Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

I wrote this for my Shakespeare class. I thought it was kind of funny how it evolved, because it was originally supposed to be a rant. It still has some flow issues, but hey, at least I’m done, right?

A Sonnet Deferred

My teacher, oh so cruel, made me write
This sonnet, whose mere specter I detest.
I swear my grade won’t go down sans a fight,
And so I grind these words out, quite depressed.

But as I write this strained and shabby verse,
Content in doing damage to the art,
I realize that the poem’s not my curse;
In truth, the problem lies upon my heart.

For now I find that with the proper time,
Pure fools (complete with bells) could write some lines
That keep themselves within the sonnet’s rhyme;
It seems that stalling blunts the verse that shines.

Perhaps the student (me) should be more meek;
And next time give himself about a week.

OK, in an act of mercy to all of you who read this blog but couldn’t care less about SEO, I’ve started a new blog where I’ll post my SEO thoughts and ideas. You can check it out at JazzcatSEO.com. I’ll continue to post my rants, observations, reviews and the ilk on this blog, so you can keep reading here. It’s just going to be a bit more personal. And if there’s anything else you’d like to see here, let me know.

For those of you who care, Google has what’s called “PageRank,” which is an indicator of a website’s relative importance in the schema of the web, based on a 1-10 scale. Although Google keeps a constantly shifting measurement of each site’s PageRank internally, they only update the external PageRank that’s visible to the whole web community once every 6 months or so. This blog has been a PageRank 3 site for a while, but Google just updated the external PageRank to a 4! Anyway, feel free to congratulate me, if you feel so inclined Regardless, I am a happy man.