By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Preseason college football poll release dates announced: USA Today August 7, AP August 22. (RT @pollspeak) Let the arbitrariness begin!

By Brendan Loy

You’ve probably already heard about this story:

A recent college graduate is suing her alma mater for $72,000 — the full cost of her tuition and then some — because she cannot find a job.

Trina Thompson, 27, of the Bronx, graduated from New York’s Monroe College in April with a bachelor of business administration degree in information technology.

On July 24, she filed suit against the college in Bronx Supreme Court, alleging that Monroe’s “Office of Career Advancement did not help me with a full-time job placement. I am also suing them because of the stress I have been going through.” …

As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record. But Monroe’s career-services department has put forth insufficient effort to help her secure employment, she claims.

“They’re supposed to say, ‘I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right — can you interview this person?’ They’re not doing that,” she said.

She suggested that Monroe’s Office of Career Advancement shows preferential treatment to students with excellent grades. “They favor more toward students that got a 4.0. They help them more out with the job placement,” she said. …

Asked whether she would advise other college graduates facing job woes to sue their alma maters, Thompson said yes.

“It doesn’t make any sense: They went to school for four years, and then they come out working at McDonald’s and Payless. That’s not what they planned.“

Some may condemn Ms. Thompson for having unreasonable expectations during a deep recession; for asserting facially frivolous legal claims; for making obviously absurd statements, like how it’s shocking that students with A averages are “favored” over those with B- averages; and for generally failing to understand that, regardless of what she may have “planned,” the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley — i.e., life isn’t fair, welcome to the real world.

But I say, forget all that. This woman is an American hero. Why? Because, especially now, during a time of economic gloom, we need simple morality tales populated by straightforward, obvious villains. And that’s exactly what Trina Thompson is. She’s a cardboard character whom we can simply plug into the age-old “damn kids today and their sense of entitlement” storyline, without any alterations or complications. And that’s not all! Oh no, it gets even better, because she merges that old chestnut with the equally appealing “damn lawyers today and their litigious bulls**t” storyline. That’s two instances of righteous outrage for the price of one! Not since the A.I.G. bonuses has there been a story this delightfully outrageous! BRING THE HATE!!

In an odd way, Trina Thompson serves a similar purpose in our nation’s psyche as Chesley Sullenberger III. At all times, but especially at times like these, we crave not just straightforward heroes, like Captain Sully, but also straightforward villains — people we can unabashedly look down upon with disdain. The world is complicated, but these narratives aren’t, and we like that. As simple and straightforward as Sully’s heroism was, Ms. Thompson’s anti-heroism is equally so. There’s no complexity to it, no nuance, just a glaringly obvious example of somebody being obnoxious and contemptible.

Somebody give this woman a medal. She has, in our nation’s hour of great need, selflessly offered herself up as the sacrificial lamb whom America can castigate without guilt or caveat. And so I salute you, Trina Thompson. By being a complete idiot and jackass — but, more than that, by being a complete idiot and jackass in a completely formulaic, predictable way — you’ve made us all feel better about ourselves, and made this crazy world seem a little more simple and understandable. Well done, madam. Well done.

Now shut up and get a job. :P

By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Amazing NYTimes infographic showing how different groups spend their day: http://bit.ly/lxTqy (RT @planetmoney)

By Brendan Loy (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Congrats to @annalthouse, who married one of her commenters yesterday, here in beautiful Colorado. http://bit.ly/MPwyj http://bit.ly/15NJoK

By Brendan Loy

Many years from now, when historians look back on this decade, which day will they say “changed the world” more: 9/11/01, or 9/15/08?

Perhaps the answer is 9/11 simply because it was more of a self-contained event, which, all by itself, set enormous changes into motion — whereas the collapse of Lehman Brothers was merely one catastrophic event among many in the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009. On the other hand, Lehman’s collapse was the specific event that had the near-term effect of virtually shutting down the world financial system, which in turn led quite directly to a variety of medium-term and long-term consequences, notably the passage of TARP, a variety of changes in the way Wall Street does business, and, quite possibly, the election of Barack Obama. (Though, of course, no one will ever be able to definitively prove that last one.)

A broader — though to me, slightly less interesting — version of my question would be: which series of events changed the world more, 9/11 and the foreign policy events it helped trigger, or the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 as a whole and the changes it caused (and will yet cause)?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but they’re the sort of thing I’d love to hear a bunch of smart people argue about.