Working on holidays

When I lived in New Hampshire, I usually worked holidays, with the notable exception of Christmas.

At the time, my employer allowed people who worked holidays to save the day off to use whenever they wished, although that privilege was reserved for salaried types. I guess the complication of overtime meant hourly people had to either get a different day off during the pay period or take a hefty chunk of cash, which you will be surprised to learn my employer wasn't thrilled about.

The take-it-anytime policy was snuffed out by a policymaker who later came to be known as the "little dictator," but it was a good system while it lasted, especially for me. Between vacation, comp time, floating holidays and the work-a-holiday-get-a-day-off days, I wound up with four weeks of vacation a year, sometimes a little more.

Those times have come and gone, of course.

Of course, getting excited about four whole weeks off seems pretty silly when you think about how much time people get off in less advanced countries, like, you know, Germany.

Fighting the clutter war

My late uncle, a lunatic packrat, kept his house full, and I do mean full, of mostly all junk.

A few treasures lurked in the shadows:

Here, a dust-drowned set of handcrafted elephants of increasing size from teeny to a few inches tall.

There, cordial glasses in the form of crystal thistles.

Everywhere, undiscarded junk mail, stultifying books, flimsy old tableware, empty hooch bottles.

I do not wish to dispute my uncle's title as Reigning Champion of Junk Retention, so I frequently visit upon my home a flurry of tidying, which usually results in a bag - or several - for the local charities to figure out. I enjoy the process, mostly because I like to rediscover all the stuff that I thought was worth keeping the last time I passed through.

I don't buy much stuff, and neither does the butterfly lady, which leaves me wondering about the ability of my belongings to multiply. I would prefer that when they do procreate, they make something useful that I want, like a table saw or a new motorcycle, instead of five cardboard mailing tubes, 35 pencils and a stack of plastic plates.

A promise that would be funny to keep

Shot by my father, in the Land of Ports.

Deus ex machina

I love to watch movies, even bad ones. Lucky me, because if I objected to watching movies that aren't any good, I would have way fewer choices.

For me, a good ending is the make-or-break element of most movies. I'm OK with nebulous endings, sometimes. But not very often. I'm more OK with those than with the miraculous Problem Solved ending. It seems as though the writers (I think of movies with poor endings as being the work of a committee) said, "Well, we've done everything we needed to do. Got the scene with Nicole Kidman naked. Got the trippy special effect with the electromagnetic pulse. Got the Michael Mann driving scene. OK, let's wrap this up."

Hey, I'm not saying I'd do better, but I'd be OK with fewer, better movies. On the bright side, the prevalance of deus ex machina endings means that a good wikipedia article has been written, or at least one that contains a good for-instance:

(e.g. the rope that binds the hero's hands is luckily chewed off by a rat.)

How much do you make?

A personal question!

But also a public question, if you work for the people. There's been some hue and cry about a Lansing State Journal's move to give readers access to a database of state employee salaries, and the Asbury Park Press has made a similar move, by posting a tool that lets you search for the salaries of most federal employees. I don't know whether they've caught any flak, though.

For your inconvenience

I've made two visits to post offices recently. One was on a Sunday, at Narita International Airport outside Tokyo and to the Walla Walla post office at Sumach Street and Second Avenue.

Although I don't speak much Japanese, I was able to mail a parcel from Narita for a reasonable cost with no hassle in about five minutes. That time included the two postal workers carefully packaging my item in a box, which they sealed, and for me to fill out the forms and pay.

My visit to the Walla Walla post office Monday afternoon didn't go quite so smoothly. One similarity: There were two postal workers in the office. As for me, I had a sealed priority mail flat-rate envelope to send. Twenty-five minutes after walking in, I had my receipt in hand and the envelope was off.

I don't think the postal workers were to blame, but who would ever know? It was lunchtime, so customers were plentiful, and some had what appeared to be bizarre needs: to have an individualized sales pitch about each of the available boxes the post office sells to ship items; to apparently have help filling out the whole! passport application at the counter; to negotiate for the release of a single piece of mail posted by the customer but also the subject of some arcane afterthought.

If ever a post office needed one of the self-service kiosks, it is this one.

Why, oh why

I spent an hour this morning walking laps at the scene of my former triumphs, the college track. This time, I was participating in a fund-raising walk for cancer research. Coolio.

But even though I had an early shift at the track (it was a teamwork thing) I still got the significant disadvantage of piped in music about halfway through my walk, followed by some fairly disturbing live music.

The piped-in stuff was annoying (You'll never know that you're my hero, YMCA, that kind of stuff), but the live music was creepy. The performer, a Christian blues guy, was singing about being ready to head for heaven. Um, no, you know, at a cancer research walk, I'm more interested in a long, healthy life, not a short one, for Christ's sake.

I have to say the creepy singing severely detracted from an otherwise inspirational and moving morning walk.

"Documentary" comes up short

The History Channel had a show Wednesday evening about meat processing: "Modern Marvels: The Butcher."

The show description reads like you might expect from a legitimate documentary, but there was this little question of truth and lies.

The show included a segment on the cutting edge of U.S. meat packaging. And what, pray tell, is on that cutting edge? If you watched the show, you would think meat packagers are adding oxygen to packages to keep the meat looking fresh. Of course, carbon also is being added to the packaging at the same time, because what packagers are *really* adding is carbon monoxide.

The compound isn't supposed to be harmful at the levels being used in packaging, and it is credited with keeping meat looking fresh longer, which retailers and producers say is crucial to sales. But carbon monoxide use in packaging was banned by the European Commission, according to various wire reports, because its use could mask spoilage.

Is it safe? Is it dangerous?

Well, those are good questions, but they went unanswered, and worse, unasked in the History Channel's show. Feedback on other shows at the channel's message boards and the way the packaging segment was reported suggest this oversight was intentional. I'm not impressed.

Minor beef with book dealers

I found three kinds of product descriptions today while prowling the used book shelves at amazon.com for Spanish grammar workbooks.

Exhibit A:

• Comments: Some shelf wear to edges of cover, pages yellowed a bit, otherwise good.
• Comments: Bought but never used. Shelf wear. Shipping from MA.
• Comments: about half the book has writing

Exhibit B:

• Comments: Go with the name you can trust: Thriftbooks has the HIGHEST star rating of ALL high-volume sellers! Read More. Spend Less. Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed!

Exhibit C:

• Comments: minor shelfwear; clean pages Average used book, may have price sticker on front cover, shelfwear. BUY WITH CONFIDENCE: 99% Positive feedback. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!!!!! Compare our prices and service to the competition!
• Comments: Book shows some use, cover is a bit worn, but pages are clean and book is solid. Some writing in first few pages. A great addition to your library!

It's pretty easy for me to ignore the books in Exhibit B, and some of the books in Exhibit A don't work for me (I prefer a workbook that hasn't already had someone write in answers). The listings in Exhibit C annoy me.

I already am comparing the prices. I think that's why Amazon puts them in order. Buy with confidence? Well, maybe now that this is in all caps, sure. A great addition to my library? How would you know? I just want pertinent information, damn it, but these listings leave me doubtful.

"Average used book, may have price sticker on front cover, shelfwear" and "Book shows some use, cover is a bit worn, but pages are clean and book is solid" look like boilerplate, so I am skeptical about "clean pages" and the second listing's bit about "Some writing in first few pages" makes me think "pages are clean" is maybe not accurate. Just possibly.

Grumble.

On my to-do list

I've long since abandoned learning to use a 10-key, but I still think it would be useful. Survivors on one of my get-more-skills lists:

• Finish learning French. I can get by on the road, but that's about it.
• Improve in Japanese and Arabic to the point that I can get by comfortably on the road (and translate my new Japanese-language field guide to Japanese birds).
• Finish learning Spanish. I can get by one the road, if all the road demands is that I order a beer. Or another beer.

So that should be pretty easy, right? I have a plan, anyway, which involves French lessons that start today. Depending on how much time is left in my days, I hope to tackle Japanese through the translation project. It will be an interesting experiment anyway... And Arabic? Man, I need some more hours.

Spanish is kind of up in the air: My employer may offer some sort of kickback on tuition, which could mean actual classroom time starting in the fall. It isn't very expensive, about $1,300 for three quarters, plus books.

Water wise?

I got my utility bill today. Most of the costs are set:

• $34.60 for sewer
• $3.18 for storm water
• $16.81 for trash
• $1.90 for recycling
• 67 cents in trash tax. Why they don't fold that into the $16.81 is a mystery.
• $18.07 for water

So that's $75.26 of my $78.29 bill. The other $3.06 is the charge for our use of 300 cubic feet of water (about 2,250 gallons). That's lower than usual, but we were on the road a lot. We average about 500 cubic feet, so our bill is usually a couple bucks higher. In those monhts, 92 percent of my bill is set costs, and my choices work out to about six bucks.

On Friday in the paper, we published a small column the city is submitting each week to try to get people on board with water conservation.

I think you know where I'm headed here, but I'll just say it anyway.

Maybe it is time to ditch the set fee and switch to a sliding scale for use. I usually pay $24 for 600 cubic feet, so how about:

• $4 per 100 cubic feet for the first 10 units.
• $8 per unit for units 11-20.
• $16 per unit for units 21-30.
• $32 per unit for units 31 and up.

I'm sure a system can be worked out for non-residential users, too.

And furthermore...

I see the wire also carries a story today about how rental car companies, Hertz and Avis Budget at least, plan to add hybrids to their fleets to meet a demand for "green" vehicles.

I'll believe this when I am behind the wheel. My experience with rentals has been pretty heavy on the mandatory free upgrade to a larger car than I reserved. I have been upgrade so often to clunky gas-guzzlers that I question whether the rental companies are getting some kind of deal, either from fuel sellers or car companies that can't find customers for their crappier vehicles.

What's wealthy?

For that matter, what's wealth?

Those definitions surely depend on who's being asked, and how much money/property they have. I'd say wealthy starts pretty low: Maybe $100,000 a year if you live in a town such as mine, maybe $200,000 in a snazzier place, like Santa Monica. But you'd need assets, too, to meet my definition. I'm a little fuzzy on that; I guess if your expenses aren't high and you make $100,000 a year, you can get some assets pretty quickly.

How about $100k a year plus $250k-$500k in property/investments/gold bars under the mattress? Sounds good to me.

The Associated Press and I do not see eye to eye: An Anne D'Innocenzio story about spending on luxury items pegs wealthy at $350,000 and above. I think that's overkill. According to the comprehensive wikipedia entry on household income in the United States, about 1.5 percent of households have annual incomes above $250,000, and just under 16 percent are over $100,000.

Maybe the "real" number is somewhere in the middle.

Or maybe it's better to concoct a non-monetary definition of wealth, or one that combines dough with quality of life. And maybe *that* is just a strategy people who don't have a lot of cash use to keep up with the Joneses.

Another difference

One of Lulu's posts reminded me: In some places, everybody knows who you are. This is weird if you are usually unrecognized. But hey, a few autographs are a small price to pay for the adoration of some friendly school kids :)

The national pastime

While in Japan, I find that the combination of starting the day early (to beat the crowds), not being able to read very well (this makes every non-English or non-Romaji sign a challenge in decoding) and the general onslaught of information conspire to putting a relatively early end to the day.

This is actually very cool, because it leaves plenty of time to enjoy Japanese television. This being my first visit during baseball season, I got my first dose of what appears to be the typical baseball coverage on TV.

Most nights, two or three games were broadcast live. On network TV. In primetime.

Besides the games, all of the nightly news programs had hefty baseball reports, from the Japanese leagues and highlights of hometown heroes in the majors. I think I saw more of Ichiro in the last two weeks than in the previous few years here.

Of course, there are other differences besides in TV exposure. For example, Japanese players show off less than major leaguers. Sure, there's the usual fist pumping after a home run, but there's none of the Albert Pujols/Barry Bonds crap of hitting a home run and standing around to watch the ball go out. Maybe that's because the Japanese players are in a hurry to get to home plate, where the tradition seems to be that they are handed a stuffed animal. Really.

Portion control

The butterfly lady, my father and I spent the past couple of weeks in Japan, mostly exploring in and around Tokyo and Kyoto (with side visits to Matsumoto and Hiroshima). During a short layover in Seattle on the way home, I bought a meal at one of the fish houses in the airport (for the lady and I: My father lives in another city and flew on a different route).

It does not take a food scientist to figure out why Japanese people and American people are not the same size. I ordered a combo meal of fish and chips, which came with clam chowder and a soda.

For $10.81, including tax, we received four hefty pieces of fried fish, french fries (about as much as a McDonald's medium, maybe a large), a large "cup" of chowder and a 20-ounce Diet Coke. The butterfly lady estimated that what we got would have been a nice meal for four Japanese women. She's right, I think.

I know that the first day back is always a huge shock, but this time seemed more shocking than usual. Maybe this is because I have been hungry (but also, thankfully, thinner) for most of the past two years, or maybe our country is just getting bigger...

Happy aspect of long-distance travel

Besides not having to ride on a ship, I mean: The butterfly lady, on our return from Japan today, were expecting a *long* layover in Seattle, but two guys didn't show up for an earlier flight to our city, so we got a four-hour bonus, and their seats. A minor hooray, and a nice positive note for air travel, which seems to have less and less to recommend it (OK, yeah, except for the fact that it is fast) each time I fly.

Needful things

As usual, Japan is way ahead of the rest of us. It is embarrassing to me to hear people say we're the No. 1 leader in all things, because we so obviously are not.

To wit:


I'm trying to figure out what the coolest use would be for one of these ultra-thin, ultra-flexible displays. I mean, there's a whole basketful of obvious choices: A TV you can easily hang on the wall would be nice, but it would have to be pretty big, I think. If the wizards who come up with these things can ever overcome the physical obstacles to making high-fidelity, ultra-thin speakers, we'll be in business...

Categories I could easily beat that Jeopardy guy at

I think his name was Ken, or Kirby, or maybe Kitten. Whatever. He knew everything, right? Well, he didn't know everything about (or would be slower than me at):

• Weaving terminology. Is it a woof or a weft? The world wonders.
• Birds seen by me on Plum Island, Mass.
• Tasks undertaken in the former Strauser Manufacturing plant in Walla Walla in the summer of 1994. Hey, they all sucked.
• Best routes from 2B N. Main St., #212, Newmarket, N.H, to 17 Executive Drive, Hudson, NH. These mostly sucked, too.

I'm sure there's one more out there, but Jeopardy ceases to amuse me...

Pretty huge deal

The butterfly lady got her official sign-off as a Ph.D. on Saturday at the University of New Hampshire, so we rolled out that way with her dad and met up with a couple of pals to hang out for the extended weekend.

This meant lots of chow in our old stomping grounds, tooling around in same, hanging around for hours in the chilly mist (not a warm day for graduation) and other fun activities. I felt a pretty fair amount of nostalgia and homesickness, but that passed Sunday afternoon when I was driving along Routes 107 and 111 in rather unweekend-like traffic. That I do not miss, not one bit.

Nevertheless, the visit was very nice and seeing the doctor anointed would have been worth the trip all by itself.

Awww, yeah

Here comes Kool-Aid!

Speaking of birds

I see the Associated Press, the world's largest news-gathering organization, has misidentified a Steller's jay as a bluebird. USA Today has duplicated the error, too. OK, so both of them have blue feathers, but give me a break.

Here is a Steller's jay.


And here is a Western bluebird.

Laid-back bird watching

I haven't been out much lately, but I like to go bird watching. So does the butterfly lady, who suggested we head out into the toolies Sunday to check out what we could find. Having lived here for most of the 1990s, I've seen most of what the county has to offer (which to be fair is a lot of great birds), so maybe I'm not in a big hurry to rush out on the weekends because a) I have a lot of other stuff to do; and b) I've seen a lot of these guys before.

Among the cool sights:

• A Say's phoebe, on the same stretch of road I was on the first time I saw one, ages ago. They're cute little flycatchers with a pretty song, and they flick their tails to pass the time.
• A great horned owl, perched in a nest in a riverbank. Their "horns" and yellow eyes give them a particularly fierce glare.
• About a half-dozen American white pelicans, moseying along in a lake at the McNary National Wildlife Refuge. I saw a couple pelicans once out at the local reservoir. When I told a birding pal about them, he asked if I was sure they weren't swans. Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure I could tell the difference.
• Ruddy ducks! The butterfly lady's favorite duck - a cute little brick red sort with a spiky, upturned tail and a bright blue bill. These were in another of the refuge's lakes.
• A northern oriole (or if you're a splitter, a Bullock's oriole), along the Walla Walla River. I don't see too many orioles on this side of the country, and they seem to be visible around these parts only for a brief spell.

We were on a very easygoing expedition, so we didn't go to great lengths to turn up oddballs, but it was still a nice way to spend part of a fairly lazy Sunday.

What are you paying me for?

Besides my 40-hour gig I do other things for money, too. The way I see it, the transactions I'm in, the person is buying either a) something I made; b) something I am doing for them; or c) both.

I do not think the buyer is purchasing "my time," and I doubt the run-of-the-mill customer thinks that's what they're getting when they hand over the cash.

Nevertheless, people frequently say, "I'm not sellling X, I'm selling my time."

I suppose. But when a customer says, "I'm not buying X from you, I'm buying your time," I think that maybe reality is being stretched a bit too far.

Call this semantics if you think that'll stick. I call it bullshit. You want to buy my time, you just give me some money, and I'll go read a book.

It's about damn time

An AP story on the wire today suggests LEDs will soon be a viable alternative to incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescents, too.

Incandescents and CF bulbs are of course the most widely available choices for most people's lighting needs, unless, I suppose, you count candles. Both have major drawbacks - inefficiency (while I was writing this post, I had a funny parenthetical - (Who hasn't used an incandescent light to warm a chick?)), aesthetically displeasing light, contributions to mercury pollution and climate change, that sort of thing.

As the story points out, LEDs aren't ready to take over as your garden-variety solution to home-lighting problems, but maybe in a few years, they will be.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I am told one of my earliest responses to that question was "a bear."

Starting in about high school, I thought I might be a: soldier, civil engineer, anthropology professor, restaurateur, writer or weaver, as well as a few other oddball ideas here and there. Maybe some of those I named are themselves oddball...

I did not, until I started working at newspapers, expect that I'd become a journalist. I must like it: I've been at this for quite a while. But even though this is a great job and a valuable/meaningful/significant way to pass the time, I'm not sure I'm sold on it for the long haul.

• The hours can be long, especially if you're a striver (been there, hope not to return).
• The pay is just OK. I am not raking in the dough as a weaver, but I'm also not the only person in my profession who has more than one job.
• The industry's long-term outlook is foggy. Thinking about the future of newspapers is like pancakes, all exciting at first, but after a while you're fucking sick of it (thank you, Mitch). I'm tired of thinking about this.

But it is a lot of fun. I pretty much get to talk, write, read, edit and think for a living - not too bad a deal. I'm still not sure about the answer, though. Maybe pizza critic?

Information and communication technology and you

The Pew Internet Project is running a project that uses a short self-report to slot people into one of several categories based on how they use information and communication technology. You can participate, and find out your "type" here.

Me? Omnivore:

"They have the most information gadgets and services, which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace and express themselves online." (A Pew description)

According to Pew, this slice is about 8 percent of the population, with a median age of 28 (the youngest of the 10 available types), have the most gizmos and the highest rate of broadband Internet access at home.

I suppose, but I know people in this segment who are way more of gearheads than me, and who are way more involved. Maybe the 8-percenters need a special test :)

Where's for dinner?

Lulu tagged me with a places-to-eat meme, so I guess I have to spill the beans about where's OK for food in Walla Walla :)

Here're the rules:

1. Add a direct link to your post below the name of the person who tagged you.
Include the city/state and country you’re in.
Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Lulu (Chicago, Illinois, United States)
Alasdair (Walla Walla, Wash., U.S.)

2. List your top five favorite places to eat at your location.

3. Tag five other people (preferably from other countries/states) and let them know they’ve been tagged.

Well, let's see. Walla Walla is a city of about 30,000, tucked away in the southeastern corner of Washington, near the Oregon state line. It is fast becoming a big-deal wine destination, so the places to eat have changed quite a bit in recent years. One thing we have very little of is chain, sit-down restaurants. We've got Applebee's and Shari's, but that's about as far as it goes.

I'll be honest here. I miss southern New Hampshire/Greater Boston pretty intensely when it comes to food, and we rarely go out around here. I may not be a professional chef, but I'm sorry to report my meals are significantly better than most of what you get in restaurants here. This isn't a complete wasteland, though: Here are some good places for chow, in no particular order:

• Taco trucks: Walla Walla has a whole bunch of these, step vans that carry a kitchen on board and can be found pretty reliably at a few locations around town and at special events (like game days for the regional Mexican Soccer League or over at the alma mater). You gets your basics here - a beef taco on corn tortillas with salsa and lime for about a buck. Tasty, quick and friendly is standard fare, whichever one you choose. There's also a place called Taqueria Yungapeti, which is kind of like a taco truck except that it is a sit-down restaurant. The food's the same, but the venue's nicer on any of Walla Walla's 50 or 60 annual days with rain.
• Whitehouse-Crawford: OK, this is really a place I/we go for drinks, which are pricy, tasty and strong. The restaurant and bar are in a reconditioned mill and the ambience is maybe a third of the reason to go. Besides sidecars and martinis and such, W-C also has tasty fried onions (I love onion rings) and excellent desserts, especially their twice-baked chocolate souffle/cake and flan. Plus, if you spend a lot of money, they'll give you a customized woodworker's pencil as a souvenir.
• Rosita's Mexican restaurant: Besides the taco trucks, we have no shortage of Mexican restaurants here. Rosita's is a kind of quiet, hole-in-the-wall sort of place that's been around for decades. The enchiladas verde are the best Mexican food I've had in Walla Walla by a long shot - spicy, rich in tomatillos and with a good proportion of chicken, cheese and sauce. Most out-of-towers don't notice Rosita's because it isn't near the main entrance to the city and because it isn't flashy. So much the worse for them, but so much the better for the locals, who don't have to wait for a table...
• Fast Eddy's and Ice Burg: Two high-profile drive-ins, both of which are good old-fashioned hamburger joints. At Fast Eddy's, the lady comes to your car, at Ice-Burg you step up to an outdoor counter or use a drive-through. Both places have quality burgers, really good milkshakes (Ice-Burg has fantastic blackberry shakes) and serviceable onion rings and fries. Compared to In-N-Out Burger, these are both highway robbery and just all right for food, but they're pretty damn good for local fare.
• Patit Creek Restaurant: The classic fancy place in the area, this little restaurant is in Dayton, a smallish city north of Walla Walla. Frommer's gives it two (out of three) stars; I've heard someone else offered three (out of what I don't know). I have actually had their signature dish, filet mignon poivre verte, which I would put in my top-five all time for steaks (another meme, perhaps. The others were 1) an open-face roast-beef sandwich at a steakhouse in York, Neb. I think it was at Chances 'R'. 2) a steak at Front Street Steakhouse in Ogallala, Neb. They even give you an ice cream sundae for dessert. 3) lunch special at Suehiro in Kyoto. You cook it yourself on a little griddle brought to your table. Served with some kind of proprietary soy sauce - fantastic. 4) New York strip steaks grilled by yours truly in Newmarket, N.H., bought at the Durham Marketplace meat counter and seasoned with Spade L seasoning. 5) Uh, Patit Creek? Yes, and it was very good.)

So, I suppose I have to tag some people. How about the butterfly lady, mama, MWR, Daphne and Rich. The first one and the last two don't follow the rules for geography, but I like to compare (and I have a limited circle of acquaintance!).

Spring release weekend

One of two big local wine events in town just happened over the weekend. Spring release weekend is a big chance for snooty wine tourists to drop through and spend money in a very impressive but limited fashion. This meant that buses, stretch limos, stretch Ford Explorers and other rubbishy cars - along with some gems, like the Fiat the Butterfly Lady and I saw at the video store - were strewn around town among the usual cavalcade of diesel pickups driven by people who need neither a diesel nor a pickup.

What did we do? Well, we cleaned house some, watched some movies, taste-tested gummy worms (Trolli, Black Forest and Western Family. Only the Black Forest worms were edible - the other tow brands nearly reeked of coconut, which makes sense when you find out they're made with hydrogenated coconut oil - yuck.), and ate crepes (which were of course fantastic).

Also, I bumped off a warp and refit my creel (a spool rack) to make putting on warps more efficient. Wow, what a rockin' weekend!

An amusing pastime

A friend of mine in New Hampshire discovered this typing test online, and being the competitive sort, she badgered the rest of the newsroom into taking the test. Sealed off from the outside world in our reconditioned warehouse in an industrial park in Hudson, we may all have had a skewed perspective, but this was our idea of fun...

What the heck is that?

I do not know, but the radioactive death rays seem to originate in Walla Walla.

Oh man, another missed holiday

You might not have noticed, but May 1 was proclaimed Law Day, U.S.A., by our busy president.

His proclamation included this summons to action:

I call upon all the people of the United States
to observe this day with appropriate
ceremonies and activities.
I also call upon Government officials to display
the flag of the United States
in support of this national observance.

I'm not sure Part A was accomplished, but I'm pretty sure Part B was not a big deal. What constitutes appropriate activities and ceremonies? I'm not sure, and I'm also not sure this big day will hold up under much scrutiny. To wit, check out the creepy theme for this year's Law Day:

"Liberty Under Law: Empowering Youth, Assuring Democracy"

What? Why is liberty *under* law? To keep the militias down?

w e i r d

You know you're not from around here when...

you're watching Saturday Night Live and you are puzzled as to why the show has a note at the bottom of the screen indicating it is taped version of a show that was broadcast live.

The butterfly lady turned to me and said, "but it is supposed to be live!"

Between that and my new Bob's Clam Hut (Kittery, Maine) T-shirt, I'm thinking I'm probably not really from around here yet. I'm not convinced I ever will be.

A piece of the days of yore

One of the zillion annual traditions at the alma mater is a choral contest, this year's version of which was Friday night.

If you think this sounds lame or outdated, you're not alone. A singer from Nashville, who played at a coffeehouse later that evening on campus, did a couple of songs before the contest kicked off. He told the crowd that when he heard he'd be playing before choral contest, he thought that meant about seven people. I think the number was closer to 700 (about half the student body), but it could easily have been higher.

So, my alma mater is typical in a lot of ways of small, private, highly selective liberal arts colleges, with the possible exception being that although it is secular, it is a pretty conservative place, the sort of college you went to in the 1960s if you wanted to avoid all that Vietnam protesty stuff.

Anyway, when the butterfly lady and I attended, choral contest was a really big deal. My fraternity (The Singing Fraternity), like most others, participated every year, and we took it damn seriously. I'm surprised in retrospect that our choral contest officer wasn't on the chapter's executive council.

Unlike some of my other studies, I was diligent in choir practice and we met nightly to rehearse such gems as "There is Nothing Like a Dame" and other "contemporary" tunes. In four-part harmony, of course... Other fraternities, notably Beta Theta Pi, were slackers to varying degrees, usually sending a minimal number of "singers" to belt out, in a loud monotone, some rubbishy version of "Drunken Sailor." Another fraternity, reputedly racist scumbags, did passably well. We were all just in the running for second place, though, because the non-affiliated men's choir always seemed to win. At least we took it seriously back then.

I think you can probably guess where I'm headed here, but I'll say it anyway. Much to my disgust Friday night, none of the three participating men's choirs (Phi Delta Theta, Tau Kappa Epsilon and the Betas) bothered to give a serious effort. The TKEs were at least amusing, doing a parody of Don Giovanni and a fake-o second song. The Betas did their usual crap and my chapter stole a page from old Beta-dom and delivered a crap version of "Drunken Sailor."

As luck would have it, the Sigs were DQ'd for some politically incorrect mumbo jumbo before they even took the stage, and the TKEs and Betas were so awful that the old Azure and Argent won. I couldn't bring myself to applaud.

Places worth going

• Chris Jordan has a cool and somewhat illuminating art project, here. No doubt this would be impressive in person. Reminds me of a guy in New Hampshire who collected 1 million pennies with his kids (I think they donated the $10k to charity), just so he could show them what a million is. That's a cool project, too.
• Not yet depressed about the state of math education in this country? Well, check out a quick comparison of British and Chinese math education in this BBC story. The contrast between problems at the bottom of the story is, alas, stark.
• The Onion's stories are usually obviously bogus, but this one, about RadioShack, seems a little too plausible. One of my friends (the only person I know who extends pronouncing wolf, the animal, as "woof" to what you can do with food, as in "woof down burgers") worked at RadioShack during the 1980s in, I believe, a Lynn, Mass., strip mall. What a godawful dump. Anyway, he said they were paid minimum wage, plus commission, and were instructed to try to upsell every customer. An example: "If a guy comes in looking to buy an LED, steer him toward the three-pack. That'll get you a better commission!"
  

Regina, live

Regina Spektor played Tuesday night at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, and the butterfly lady and I flitted into town for the show. The ballroom is just that, a funky standing-room-only venue on an upper floor of a building near Powell's Books. We got lucky: Only about 120 people were in line in front of us (I think about 1,200 or so were at the show), so we got really good "seats" about 15 feet from the stage.

The show was great - she played alone, with a piano, a guitar and some improvised percussion. I think the best single-word summary for her is adorable. She's got wicked ridiculous skills as a musician, but she also seems to possess a Mitch Hedberg-style bashfulness, which is pretty endearing, and made up for the unreasonable break between her opening act and her set. We were in line at 7:30 and she came on about 10:05 or 10:10... that's a fair amount of time standing around. But hey, what can you do. She was well worth the wait, one of the better shows I've been to. And fortunately for me, I'm taller than a lot of Regina Spektor's fans.

This was one of the few shows I've gone to without a notebook or a deadline. I think I like just going to the show better than covering it.

Here's a little taste of the show:

Forward progress

I don't write much about swimming here because I have another blog for that... But I'm short on ideas and feel like blogging, so...

Since about February or March of 2006, I've had this injured wing, my left shoulder. I think the trouble started with some technical malfunction in my stroke, but who can say for sure? Anyway, I've fixed whatever I was doing wrong, been through the wringer with a massage lady and an acupuncturist and spent a fair amount of time on the shelf. That last part is a real drag. I can't stand being out of commission.

Anyway, all appears to be well at last - I can go hard without hurting, and I can swim when I like without worrying. Thank god.

If only I could sort out the allergy to pool chemicals...

The free market

An Associated Press analysis piece on the closure of a Freightliner factory in Portland (Oregon, not Maine), I'm struck by a couple of details:

• 84 percent of Americans work in service jobs (I guess we have to take that figure on faith; the story didn't cite a source). I like being in the oddball sixth. I'm not saying parts of my business couldn't be outsourced (they already are, if you count wire-service copy, imported software for page composition and that kind of thing), but I'm pretty sure operations that gather local news will always need to have at least a few local people on the payroll.
• "Free trade" is a misnomer. Until I edited it out, "free trade" was used twice in the story to describe certain policies of the current administration. If the trade was truly free (I'm thinking of NAFTA here), I wouldn't have to pay duties to bring textiles in from Guatemala now, would I. Color me a cynic here, but I think "free trade" means about as much as "free market."
  

An elegant drink that can't be bate

The butterfly lady and I stopped off at a local watering hole for a celebratory drink (she just made the last big move in getting her Ph.D.; it is all over now but formalities and ceremonies), where I had a glass of Woodford Reserve bourbon. If it isn't the best of the premium bourbons, I don't know what is. Maybe I need to try more of them...

Anyway, while I was sipping my glass of bourbon, it occurred to me - yet again - that a plausible explanation for the similarity between Scotch and bourbon would be the land of origin for Appalachia's early non-native inhabitants. I recollect Scots-Irish types flowed into the area, perhaps bringing their dark arts with them.

Whatever. It would be fun to do a Scotch/golf tour of Scotland and follow it up with a bourbon/golf tour of Kentucky and Tennessee. I'm not sure why I include golf here, but it seems a natural pairing...

News coverage: The 9/11 effect

I work at a small daily newspaper, one that enjoys high market penetration and little competition. We're not the only local news source, but we're pretty damn close. Our attitude is: If it is local, it's us. If it's not, we're not going to do a whole lot of worrying about it.

Thus, our front pages this week have had some, but not a lot, on the Virginia Tech shooting. We had front-page wire stories Monday and Tuesday and a local story today (I don't anticipate more). I think that's about appropriate. I am in the minority.

A quick scan today of front pages at the Newseum shows a lot of above-the-fold and centerpiece treatments for the shooter-manifesto story. I find it hard to believe that the Contra Costa Times (Torrance, Calif.), the Pensacola News Journal (duh, Florida), West Hawaii Today (Kailua Kona, Hawaii), etcetera, can really claim this is a local story, but they act like it is anyway.

I think this is a 9/11 effect, in more than one regard. 9/11 was for most papers a true local story, not just through tenuous local connections to the "national tragedy," but because the significant changes to daily life were - and continue to be - everywhere. The response from newspapers was to behave pretty much like TV: All 9/11 all the time. For a long spell, that made sense. Not a lot was going on, news-wise, that wasn't related to the attacks, the subsequent war, the onslaught of legislation and quieter rule changes.

Like everyone else in this business, what I learned from 9/11 was how much a news staff can do in a time of crisis. A hell of a lot, as it turns out. At some newspapers, this has become a problem, similar to what faces a nation that has a standing army in peacetime. You've got this kickass gun, so now you need a place to shoot it.

9/11 also liberated designers and editors from a perceived restriction on using the whole front page for big news. When I walked into the afternoon planning meeting that day (a few minutes late; I went swimming before work) at my former employer's paper, I found editors talking about how many stories should be above the fold. "Zero," I said, "just a headline and a photo." After a lengthy debate, I won, and we used the whole page for a big headline (Terror, in all caps about three inches high), a big photo (horizontal, full width of the page) and three blurbs with smaller photos referring people to the stories we had inside the paper. We still ran the god damned lottery results and other useless shit at the bottom of the page, but on all the important points, I got my way. Which was great then, but contributed to today's problem.

Today's problem is that every time something big happens (a tsunami, a hurricane, a dead pope, a new pope), the 9/11 treatment gets rolled out, even at small daily papers that can't make a credible claim to be national news outlets. I'm not saying the stories shouldn't be covered, but that coverage should not overshadow legitimately important local news except in the most unusual of circumstances. Since 9/11, I'd say those circumstances haven't happened.

I back my claim by pointing again to the the Newseum's front-page gallery archive. Since 9/11, the entries are:

• Space shuttle Columbia burns up
• The war in Iraq
• Terrorism in Madrid
• Ronald Reagan dies
• Red Sox win the World Series
• Tsunami hits South Asia
  
• Pope dies; new pope chosen
• Deep Throat revealed
• Space shuttle Discovery lifts off
• Hurricane Katrina
• Rosa Parks dies
• Democrats take House
• Ford dies; Hussein killed
• Virginia Tech shooting

If you're looking for something that matches 9/11 in scale, I think you're down to the tsunami and the war.

But no matter the scale, the tsunami wasn't local, just like the genocide in Rwanda wasn't local. People cared, but only for a little while. 9/11 wasn't like that (of course, I lived near Boston then, so my perspective may be skewed).

And the war? Well, it's not like that came as a big surprise. If you look at the front pages related to the war, it's hard to find a Holy Cow News Day in the lot.

It seems to me that the upshot of the 9/11-ification of papers' coverage of major news is a dumbing down of the industry, maybe not the level of television news, but in that general direction. At least for papers that stick to the tired old model of trying to provide all things to all the people...

Somewhat belated tag fun: Six strange things

And by somewhat, I mean I was tagged in December, but somehow missed the boat. Anyway, Technorati kindly alerted me to Johnny Yen's tag.

Six strange things about myself:

When I talk in my sleep, it's not in English.
I like to learn foreign languages - German, French, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, ancient Greek (yeah, that's handy) - and I seem to have a knack for it. It just seems easy, apparently especially when I'm not awake. I used to speak only German on the rare occasion I'd talk in my sleep, but I'm told I've branched out a bit. When I'm dreaming, I rarely perceive myself to be speaking a foreign language, but who knows?

I can write with my foot.
By which I mean, I can use my foot to hold a pen, not "I can drag my foot in the sand to form letters,'' which I can also do. I'm sure this, too, will come in handy. Especially when I have to communicate with ancient Greeks while my hands are tied.

I like to read the Federal Register.
So should you. Federal rule making can be boring and/or arcane, but this is the semi-hidden way that things actually get done in this country, and there are some true gems tucked away in the pages of this publication, which is published on non-holiday weekdays. When I covered environmental news, the Register was a daily must-read. This is an acquired taste, I suspect.

I can't talk politics with you.
Or anybody else, really, besides my family and others who are sworn to secrecy. A vagary of my job, but also a fabulous way to dodge boring conversations I didn't want to have anyway. I am hyper-interested in politics, just not in public.

I can't stand iceberg lettuce.
I think I am allergic to it. It makes my tongue swell up, but not too badly. Just enough to be annoying. WTF.

My other job is weaving.
Maybe that's not really super strange. But I'm not sure how many people can say they work in *two* rag trades.

Tax time

According to an AP story I read today, the IRS has already issued 73.6 million refunds to the tune of $174 billion ($2,366 per refund, the story says). That's a pretty nice loan program the government has going for itself.

Let's assume that Joe and Mary Taxpayer invested that $2,366 conservatively, in a 12-month CD (rates listed today at bankrate.com suggest they'd get a 4.8 percent return). That'd be a nice little pile of ice-cream money, about $115.

Let's assume the federales had the same idea. Of course, they can't save up for a year and then invest the money, so let's say they put half the money in a six-month CD (I'd love to see that document), for a return of 4.5 percent. That'd be a nice little pile of ice cream money, too, about $3.9 billion.

As I've written previously, the national taxpayer advocate has the annual job of coming up with the top 20 (or more) problems facing the American taxpayer. I notice she (her name is Nina E. Olson) has nothing to say about this business.

Maybe this is all for the best - overpayment ensures the bill will be covered, whereas given our country's deplorable savings rates underpayment might simply lead to nonpayment. Still, I'm not that fond of having Big Brother playing parent with my money.

Pork satay experiment

I had a couple of pieces of pork but no brilliant ideas until the butterfly lady suggested satay. Okey-dokey. I fished around and found some ideas that resulted in this "recipe." I was surprised to find I had all the ingredients.

Pork satay with spicy peanut sauce

Before you do anything else, get

• a can of unsweetened coconut milk

and pour it into a smallish bowl. In about an hour (so they say, I left mine overnight in the fridge), the milk will separate into a thick, creamy part at the top and a thin liquid at the bottom. You will need to skim about a half-cup of the thick part off the top for later. You can mix the remainder in with the thin part to use in the peanut sauce.

Now, cut into 3-inch-by-1-inch, quarter-inch thick strips

• Pork for grilling (12-16 ounces)
  

and marinate for about a half-hour in:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce (nuoc nam, nam pla, whatever you wish to call it)
• 2 tablespoons lime juice
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground cumin
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (or more, if you like)
• 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon sugar (I would omit this next time)
  

Skewer so as to have a flat set of meat on the bamboo (soaked an hour in water) or metal skewer. I made U-shapes, skewering each piece twice. My pound or so of meat made four very generous skewers.

Brush skewered meat on one side with creamy coconut goop and place this side face down over coals on your grill (or toward the hot part of your broiler) and sear for a couple of minutes. Then brush the uncooked side, flip the skewers and grill until done, about 5-10 minutes (I did about 10).

Serve with peanut sauce:

• The rest of the can of coconut milk
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
• chili paste, to taste (I used a tablespoon of sambal oelek)
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon sugar (I would omit this the next time, too, but maybe you will like it sweet)

Combine ingredients in a saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring, until as thick as heavy cream. Makes way more than you need, but I'm sure you can find other uses for this sauce...

This is very tasty, but as I made it, a bit too sweet. As noted above, I'd just ditch the sugar. I also used less peanut butter in the sauce when I made it, and wound up adding some at the table. More is better, I think.

A music meme

Hey, every day is a good day to post about music.

What was the first recorded music you bought?
"Business as Usual" by Men at Work. That album kicked ass, even if nobody remembers anything but that dumb song about vegemite sandwiches.

What was the most recent?
"Big Wheel," the prerelease single off Tori Amos's new album, American Doll Posse. I don't have everything she's ever done, especially now that she's kicking out DVDs and compilations. But I've got all her albums, plus some other covers and assorted this & that. Except "To Venus and Back," which I haven't gotten around to buying.

What was the first professional music show you ever went to?
Oh, I have no idea. Probably some operetta that my sister and I got in trouble for squabbling in the midst of. Hmm. Do Gilbert & Sullivan shows count? Maybe I should just say, a Willie Nelson concert.

The most recent show?
Man, I haven't been to a show in quite a while. Joe Purdy and some outfit I've forgotten the name of, in the fall in Virginia.

What's your desert island album?
Thank god I remembered to bring my iPod when I was marooned. I hope my solar battery charger holds up. Too bad it only had "Live at the Old Quarter" by Townes Van Zandt on it, but so it goes. At least it wasn't Iron Butterfly.

What's your favorite album/song title (not the actual album or song)?
Lulu's friend's band, 7,000 Dying Rats, has outstanding song titles ("The Thought Bubble Above My Head is Filled with Golden Rotating Shotguns"), but I guess I have to come up with something I knew before I read her post. I dunno. "Tecumseh Valley" - it has a loaded meaning.

What's your favorite album art (include an image of it if you can)?


What’s your ideal choice for a karaoke song?
For karaoke, maybe Mozart's Piano Concerto in G major, K. 453. But only if it is performed by a starling.

You hate that song … but it won’t leave your head if you hear it.
Fortunately for me, I don't have this problem. I usually just get fragments of songs I like but barely know. That's pretty annoying, too.

Which is cooler — vinyl? CD? cassette? 8-track?
Cooler? I guess vinyl, because I find its manufacturing process more interesting than the others'. But I think for coolness, downloads are the way to go. Anything else seems like a needless waste of resources (and more potential landfill when you get sick of listening to that Enrique Iglesias disc).

Blogosphere civility code

After reading (and, I'm afraid to say, adding to) the Blogger Code of Conduct that Tim O'Reilly and others are formulating, I am reminded of a column I wrote a few years ago, about beaked whales. Not a whole hell of a lot is know about beaked whales, ironic considering their size (up to 15 tons, I believe) but not at all ironic considering their habitat, which is the deep, open oceans of the world.

My column - written after a species was described in more detail than is common for beaked whales - was a small mourning for the demise of the ocean - or at least that small part of it - as a great unkown. I like the unmapped and uncharted places just because of what they represent: a great frontier.

In the same way, the Web is a place for exploration, a world that isn't fully known and that has many odd corners. Most of the time I spend online, I spend at mainstream sites or at blogs that are written by typical, but interesting, people.

However.

Although I prefer to carry on civil conversations, such as they are, online, and I prefer to spend my time in places that wouldn't raise anybody's eyebrows, I do not think my predilections should be codified for others to fall in line with.

What am I talking about? Well, here's part of O'Reilly's draft of a code of conduct:

Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.
The next time you're tempted to vent your anger or frustration online, imagine you're talking to your mother. Or if you have no respect for your mother, imagine you're talking to a big, mean dude that you met on the street. Or simply imagine the person you're speaking to as a real person, standing in front of you. Would you say what you're saying to them if you were in the same room?

Is he kidding? That's almost as good as "If you didn't bring enough for everyone, you can't share with anyone." What the fuck. Is the Web a fucking grade school?

I understand the serious nature of what has spurred all this talk of codes of conduct, but give me a break. Or better yet, don't. Go ahead, fuckers, spend your time cooking up your little book of rules, and let's just see how many people bother to read it.

One song, two versions

If you are into the folk music scene and Joe Purdy shows up in your town, you should go to his show. He's certainly worth a detour, and probably a special journey. I guess that would make him 2.75 stars. He's also very funny, and he likes bourbon, should you wish to buy him a drink.

Cookie time

I once worked with a woman who could be a world-class grouch. On a bad day, rays of evil radiated from her, turning anyone within about 15 feet into a) a whimpering mess; or b) a similarly grouchy grumpo.

She also happened to be my friend, and after I learned the key to her heart (which up to that point seemed likely to be a very small collection of gravel), she became Janus-like, Mr. Hyde-ing the hell out of the populace but always Dr. Jekyll to me, but only if I was armed with:

Peanut butter chip cookies

• 1 cup (two sticks) butter
• 1 and 3/4 cups brown sugar

cream these in a large mixing bowl and add:

• 2 eggs
  
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 1 and 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract (yes, tablespoons)

make sure this mixture is homogenous (your hands are the best mixing tool here).
In a separate bowl, sift together:

• 1 and 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

and stir into the liquid portion. (I use my hands for this, too) Now stir in:

• 1 and 1/2 cup old-fashioned (rolled) oats
• One bag (10 or 12 ounces) peanut butter chips (I use Sunspire, but Reese's are OK, too)

I drop these in about 1-and-1/2-inch blops onto cookie sheets and bake at 375 for 10-12 minutes, until nicely suntanned. Makes about three dozen...

Cautionary notes: The cookie "dough" is very undough-like, and may seem to be too runny, but do not attempt to thicken it; it is supposed to be that way. And beware of overbaking.

A to Z

A - Available or Single - Neither.

B - Best Friends - The butterfly lady, my dad, sister and mom, Chris... I don't know very many people, but I tend to give freely of my friendship.

C - Cake or Pie - Apple crisp and blackberry cobbler.

D - Drink of Choice - Yegods, the list is endless. Coffee, black.

E - Essential Item - Diamond earring.

F - Favorite Color - Red. That's kind of a bullshit choice. Cinnabar.

G - Gummi Bears or Worms - Bears. But I prefer gummy frogs (There ain't no frog-attack prevention manual. Do not look the amphibian in the eye. This will incite him.).

H - Hometown - I didn't grow up in town.

I - Indulgence - Whiling away the day in the kitchen, or ice cream sundaes with marshmallows, peanuts and maple syrup.

J - January or February - January – it contains my birthday (and my father's, and Robert Burns's, and a bunch of other cool people, too!). February's got its plusses, too.

K - Kids and Names - We don't own any goats, but we do have two dogs, Max (aka Pig or Gristle) and Katy (the Baroness von Roughenhausen).

L - Life is incomplete without - Curiosity. When I stop caring enough to ask questions, I’m done. (I have copied the person whose blog I found this meme at).

M - Marriage Date - Hmm. Not the sort of information I typically divulge. Going on 1o years...

N - Number of Siblings - One sister, plus three sisters-in-law I have known long enough to count without the in-law.

O - Oranges or Apples - Depends. Blood oranges & galas, mikan & Fujis: All of these make me happy. Navels and Granny Smiths? OK, but in a recipe.

P - Phobias/Fears - I'm leery of yellow jackets, wasps and hornets. I worry about things, but I have very little fear.

Q - Favorite Quote - "Let's fix bayonets." - attributed by Michael Shaara to Col. Joshua "Lawrence" Chamberlain during the Battle of Gettysburg, uttered as Chamberlain decided to lead his out-of-ammunition regiment in a (successful) charge down Little Round Top.

R - Reasons to smile - A zillion: The butterfly lady, the weather, our dogs, our home, my interesting job, my other interesting job, a good swim, a good meal...

S - Season - Yes, for sure, with coriander, cumin, ginger, pepper, cayenne, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, turmeric and a bit of salt. I love all the parts of the year, by the way.

T - Tag 3 People - I was untagged for this, and I'm sure the people whose fancy it strikes will tag themselves.

U - Unknown Fact About Me - Oh, which one to choose? I can prove the Pythagorean theorem with only a piece of paper and a pair of scissors.

V - Vegetable You Hate - I hold them harmless for the villainous cooking techniques inflicted on them, so I hate no vegetable. That weird bamboo-like crap in Chinese food can be annoying, though.

W - Worst Habit - I have a very hard time doing certain tasks out of order. If there are dishes in the sink, I can rarely bring myself to cook anything before they are clean. Why not wait until the cooking is in some phase that takes little supervision? I don't know.

X - X-rays You've Had - Ankle, hand, teeth (routine) and a fabulous head CT (which came back negative, har-de-har-har). I am not always accident-prone, but I have many scars that suggest I am.

Y - Your Favorite Foods - We're talking premium versions here: Bacon, olives, peanut butter, licorice, chocolate, waffles, bananas, tomatoes, cheese... I will stop there because this list will never end otherwise.

Z - Zodiac - Aquarius/rat.

That kid needs a record deal

so says the butterfly lady, and I agree. It takes him a little bit to get rolling, but he is pretty damn good.

Hey, remember that time?

Coincidentally, I am, today, wearing pink and green.

Google image meme

Place you grew up.

Place you live now.

Your name.

Your grandmother's name.

Your favorite food.

Your favorite drink.

Your favorite song.

Your favorite smell.

Subtraction by addition

Most people expect their earnings to grow, and not just at the rate of inflation. You're not really getting ahead if you still can't afford to buy a goddamn ice cream cone when you want one.

From a personal standpoint, earnings growth is probably an unalloyed good, although if you look at the schlocky crap that people like Donald Trump and Saddam Insane buy when they have a lot of money, it is hard to see how more money is always better.

On a grander scale, growth can cause a lot of problems, too, but those are largely ignored by politicians and the mainstream national media.

So, what's that got to do with subtraction by addition? Bear with me.

If you run a company that has investors and/or shareholders, you're usually expected to turn a profit, and show growth. If you're not going forward, you're going backward, right?

Well, maybe. It seems to me that there are two ways to make those earnings grow:

• Make something new or better and sell it.
• Cut costs.

In an ideal world, Choice A would predominate, but I don't know many people who live on that world. That leaves cost-cutting.

The easiest way to cut costs is to cut people. The leftovers then need to work harder, not smarter, or maybe do more with less, or whatever. If you're squeamish, though, you don't want to go around laying people off, especially if you don't have a good excuse.

Now your best bet might be subtraction by addition. Keep your workforce static, but add a few little jobs here and there and you'll get more revenue for the same outlay. You may even be able to encourage the workers to participate in this by making the added work fun, engaging or both.

Where's the harm? There might no be any, until one of your key players quits and you realize that all those little extras you tacked onto her job makes her a unique cog who can't be replaced. That old job description you have in your hand pales in comparison to what she actually *does* for you.

Besides that pitfall, I'd reckon that upper managers - who make the decisions about adding the work without adding to the staff - are generally ill suited as judges of whether they've added too much, because they generally have little idea of what each of their worker bees really does in a day. They're looking at the whole machine, not its parts.

Just an odd grumble, or maybe an econ thesis I'll never get to.

Strange routes to Davy Jones's locker

Which, for the record, is at the bottom of the ocean and is the final home for drowned seafarers. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many people want to know "where is Davy Jones's locker?"

You'd also be surprised, if you were me, at how many people (3 in the last day, one from Mass., one from Ohio, one from NYC) got here by searching for Mark McGwire's favorite food.

Other searches that lead to me:

• strep nose infection (really, the No. 1 way people find my blog)
  
• recipe for acorn squash, Indian (yum, but I'm not sure I have any recipes for Indians. Squash, though, sure.)
  
• eggplant and okra indian dishes (also yum)
  
• pse ethical dilemmas pharmacy (What's the dilemma? Lots of drugs have more than one use.)
  
• "Plane Clothes" Lack of Anonymity at the Federal Air Marshal Service Compromises Aviation and National Security (hilarious report)
  
• I like toast too. It is warm and crispy and a perfect (place for jelly to lay. Now stay away from me Frampton, I ain't got shit to say to you!)

Damn, that's a lot of parentheticals.

Tecumseh Valley blog

After reading a post of Lulu's a while back, I found myself surfing in places I do not typically go, or at least places I would not typically acknowledge going. Naturally, I found something interesting.

New loom

I have not yet met her, but I will soon be the owner/operator/caretaker of a new-to-me loom. It is a 36-inch counterbalance loom (translation: Uh, I don't know how to translate that), and it is believed to be handmade. Its recent past is sad, but I am sure that a few hundred yards of cloth can fix that. When she finally arrives, I will a) figure out how to use a counterbalance loom (I have been weaving for 30 years, but on jack looms, a different species); and b) post a picture...

Fortune is fickle, I guess. I wasn't shopping for a loom, but maybe one was shopping for me.

More on bears & frogs

Like when there's a frog around, I don't have to hang my sandwiches from a fuckin' branch... A frog knows they are not for him. Plus, frogs are less likely to carry coins & screwdrivers.

Just below this item in the catalog is a "jerky gun," which looks like a grease gun that you smoosh ground beef and "spices" through to make jerky sticks. Gross.

I like to talk about the difference between bears and frogs

for one thing, frogs rarely race bees anywhere.

On a simple meals kick

My usual practice around dinnertime is to go for the overly complex, which means we tend to eat pretty late. Maybe the butterfly lady and I have been hungrier lately, or maybe I'm just sick of complicated meals.

On the menu at our house lately: A lot of quasi-Tunisian meals (hard-boiled eggs, fruit, yogurt, sausage - hey, I said quasi - and other simple meals (i.e. chops or burgers, plus a salad). Besides which, we've completely dropped soda, unless you count the occasional ramune (a Japanese citrus soda that comes in snazzy bottles).

I'm not sure what it all means. I like to make tricky meals (I think this is another way of saying I like to show off), but I haven't yet figured out how to fold an extra hour or two into the day!

Middle management

Johnny Yen has an entertaining post about middle managers. I'm one of those, although I don't think of myself as a manager (and that word isn't in my title, thank god).

Junior managers are often drawn from the ranks because they are particularly good at their job, or at least some part of it. When was the last time a marginal performer was assessed for leadership and promoted on that basis? So you suck at making widgets. You might be a good leader anyway (Mario Mendoza, namesake of the dreaded Mendoza Line, became a coach after all).

Junior managers are usually left to their own devices to figure out how to be a good manager. Training? Expensive, and usually just risk management wearing a disguise. Role models? A bunch of people who used to be junior managers.

Good luck, fucker.

Now, a very short story: If you read the USA Today spread on Burger King a while back, you know how all the punditry is in gee-whiz shock mode because the new CEO, who has managed to see the company back to prominence, isn't a "food guy." But he is a wicked genius marketer, who realized the company can take one segment of its eatership (the 18-35 guys) and ride it to fame and fortune.

The moral: If you want good workers, hire good workers. If you want good managers, hire good managers. Don't assume that just because you have hired the best workers, you have a latent pool of the best managers, waiting to be found, sculpted or otherwise wrought.

The real moral: Johnny sees junior managers as people in search of a reason for having a job. This means they are often huge pains in the butt to everybody else. I see junior managers as a caste in crisis, a group whose villified performance is partly a result of changes in business culture from paramilitary organization to today's fuzzier system. The culture has changed, but the selection criteria and "training" regimen have not.

Maybe the time for a new system is now.

Observations, etc.

Passed a sign on the local United Methodist Church this morning: "Just because something is legal doesn't mean it is right." OK, that's a paraphrase, but you get the point. I'm not sure what the motivation behind the sign is, but that's a point I have observed some people overlooking. Just because you *can* do a thing doesn't mean you should.

I think the flip side is true, too. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it is wrong.

What else? Spent a fair portion of last weekend pulling weeds, which got an earlier start than the desired plants in the front yard (and back yard, too, come to think of it). This weekend, I was happy to see the Russian sage plants survived the winter and are starting to show signs of life. Other bits and pieces of the yard are starting to show interest, too. The hyacinth (yeah, yeah, only one), is up and blooming, the trio of tulips is on the way, the pussy willows and the two unidentified trees (crabapples?) are budding, and assorted other odds and ends are making moves (what an illuminating clause that is!)...

So I celebrated by holing up in the studio (aka basement) and putting a warp on the loom (eight damn hours for a four-hour job). The warp's pretty, as are all the warps I put on, but the creel (a spool rack) I built has got to go. It is small, which is necessary, but it is too small and poorly designed for my taste. Klein, aber nicht oho.

On the plus side, I had eight hours to scheme a better design. I can also see some application in building a new creel to another project I'm interested in, which is a sauna. You can buy a kit, but they're expensive, non-customized and expose the buyer to a lot of bullshit. For example:

"Some weight loss authorities believe that our bodies use fat to dilute toxins. As an Infrared LuxSauna is an unsurpassed expeller of toxins, it is also a great way to get rid of any fat our bodies are using to dilute toxins we are storing."

Uh-huh. Well, whatever.

Up to my *!@ in alligators

So here's a tide-me-over for all you (and I think I do mean that in the singular :) reader sorts out there. The other two are my paternal Oma & mama.

What a bore

While at the Home Depot on Saturday (I sometimes wish I still went to the Apartment Depot, which is just a big warehouse full of people standing around saying, "I don't have to fix shit."), I got to thinking.

I wanted a 5/8-inch wood-boring bit, which I found, no sweat. But I didn't want to buy a set of bits, so I had only one choice, an Irwin Speedbor spade bit. Fine, whatever. But this is a far cry from what you'd call a self-respecting store in Japan, where I would have expected at least four or five brands, and probably more.

Sure, the Home Depot could claim it limits choices because it has so many different goods. What rubbish. How would you feel if you went to the grocery store and found only one brand of coffee? I wouldn't go there anymore.

Of course, the Home Depot has killed the alternatives, mostly. But I visited the "local" stores before they went out of business, and they were no great shakes, either. To really have a choice around here, you have to go online.

I made this observation a while back, and a commenter remarked that pretty much anything could be found around here, if you just looked.

Uh-huh.

What he meant is, if you want hand lotion, you can find hand lotion. He didn't mean you can find Kiehl's. At times like this, I do not like living in a small city.

more hoarding

Ah, what to do with these? The butterfly lady has her sights set on a homemade cork board. I think that sounds pretty cool...

In heavy rotation

Needless to say, I suppose.

It's not hoarding if it's organized, right?

Really, I can tell you why I kept each of these things.

I'm not so sure about what to *do* with all this stuff, though. Especially the styrofoam. I just can't abide by tossing it in the landfill, and I hear there's a guy recycling styro in the area (by making it part of construction materials of some sort).


As for the glass jars - those are from peanut butter and wind up being used for lots of storage, especially of candy (which the butterfly lady and I have a weakness for, to put it mildly).

I used a bunch of the coffee cups (I got them as insulators for to-go cups from a place that used to double up) during the butterfly lady's convalescence, and the styrofoam coffee cups I got for use in an encryption machine. I guess I'll have to have a party with lots of to-go soup or something. I do actually use the yogurt containers (next to the jar with the red stuff in it) for freezing chicken stock, and sometimes the other containers come in handy. sometimes.

Lastly, I have a bunch of yarn cones. Great for crafty projects, but yegods, I have enough to do.

yarn

I think this is self-explanatory. You might be surprised at how much weaving you can get out of this little yarn. I figure I can eke out three or four more scarf warps with this. I really need to get around to selling more!

Deja vu explained

If you find yourself in Linens 'n Things and everything looks creepily familiar, I have an easy explanation, which is that as might imagine, corporate HQ hands out plans for how to display all the merchandise. I found these sheets amusing:



What do you do for a living? I arrange displays for stores around the country, all in my secret lab at headquarters. Sounds kinda fun...