Wal-Mart heir John Walton died Monday when his ultralight aircraft crashed after taking off from an airport in Jackson, Wyoming.

Continue reading Dead and Loving It

A lie repeated often enough becomes truth.

— Lenin

As the GOP drifts further to the right, and becomes more starkly the party of the wealthy, it is gaining support among the working class.

I have never seen a wholly satisfactory explanation for this trend, which now spans two generations. . . . Republicans, of course, will argue that it’s simply the working man’s understanding that the GOP has the better argument, i.e., that the best way to help the working class is to shower the rich with tax breaks. But the Bush administration has been showering the rich with tax breaks for more than four years, and the working class has nothing to show for it.

— Timothy Noah, “Conservatism As Pathology”

Continue reading Often-Repeated Lies

Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing BS, a.k.a. Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, gets a good skewering . . .

ME: You’re a real wise guy.

HIM: You’re lamentable.

My son’s hockey team won the TORHS West Coast Conference championship. They got jerseys and a trophy.

I took some team and individual photos.

We’re having a fundraising event at the office today. Executives will race around the parking lot in office chairs. Wagering is permitted, with proceeds going to the United Way.

Here’s how I handicap it: The CFO is pretty fit and looks like a winner. On the other hand, the Sales VP is a Snidely Whiplash type who’s probably loosening the wheels on the other guys’ chairs as we speak, which makes him a dangerous guy to bet against.

No one else in the race looks remotely capable of winning any sort of athletic contest. It would be fun to run a side pool on which fat-ass will be the first to go down with a torn ACL or other crippling injury . . .

My son is doing a “generation gap” essay for school, in which he contrasts my life as an 11-year-old with his.

Continue reading Pre-Automation

Pat Metheny was asked in a recent interview what advice he would give to younger musicians:

I have one kind of stock response that I use, which I feel is really good. And it’s ‘always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.’ If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well.

George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as ‘the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.’ Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. ‘It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,’ Murray avers. ‘With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.’

— CBC.ca, “Automated Storyteller”

A family member had surgery recently and had to sign a consent form:

I have been advised that all surgery involves general risks, including but not limited to bleeding, infection, nerve or tissue damage and rarely, cardiac arrest, death or other serious bodily injury. I acknowledge that no guarantees or assurances have been made as to the results that may be obtained.

And so on . . . Don’t say you weren’t warned!

Medical professionals are very good at setting realistic expectations with the customer. Software professionals are not. We take customers into projects with glib assurances and wishful thinking.

If you work in IT, as I do, your project risks don’t include death or bodily injury, but how may times have you heard a project manager say to a customer even something as simple as this:

This project — like all projects — has a number of possible outcomes, and not all of them are good. Let’s go over some of the more likely scenarios . . .

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it, other than when I was saying it myself.

I’ve never seen a really good explanation for this . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Fitzgerald had to kill off his own famous striver because, to the author, Gatsby represented a dying American dream based on making it the hard way. But no such grim fate awaits today’s little Gatsbys. When they peer out at the universe, they don’t see a green dock light blinking from an unbridgeable distance where the Establishment folk live. This is the age of the red camera light, where everyone arrives sooner or later, if only for a moment, and nobody ever dies of ambition or shame.

— The Wall Street Journal, “Gatsby’s Heirs”