Our boy went to Chicago on a business trip . . . I was talking to him on the phone when he texted this picture from a Cubs game.
“That’s a nice ring,” I said.
“It’s a World Series ring.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“One of the ushers let me wear it for the picture.”
“Ushers get World Series rings?”
“Everybody in the organization got a ring.”
I guess if you only win a World Series every hundred years or so, you can afford rings for the entire organization. Although I suspect the rings for the actual players have a little extra bling . . .
The Sleepwalkers is one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read, very close to the edge of what can be accomplished with the written word.
I had never heard of either the book or the author — neither seems to have any following here in the States — but Amazon for some reason started recommending me post-WWI Austrian modernists.
I don’t know who to compare Broch with, in terms of language, wit, psychological and historical insight — maybe Nietzsche, if Nietzsche had decided to write historical fiction.
The book chronicles, via multiple overlapping narratives, the moral history of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the disintegration of values that led to fascism.
And in his fear of the voice of judgment that threatens to issue from the darkness, there awakens within him a doubly strong yearning for a Leader to take him tenderly and lightly by the hand, to set things in order and show him the way; a Leader who is no one’s follower and who will precede him on the untrodden path of the closed circle and lead him on to ever-higher reaches, to an ever-brighter revelation; the Leader who will build the house anew that the dead may come to life again, and who himself has risen again from the multitude of the dead; the Healer who by his own actions will give a meaning to the incomprehensible events of the age, so that Time can begin anew.
Man reading news story from his phone: “‘A 4-year-old boy is among at least 29 people shot in Chicago this weekend as violence across the city left two dead and more than two dozen others wounded.'”
“Twenty-nine people shot and only two dead? Thank god black people can’t shoot straight.”
The jobs report for May contained discouraging news: continuing low labor-force participation, now below 63 percent overall. About 20 million men between the prime working ages of 20 and 65 had no paid work in 2015, and seven million men have stopped looking altogether.
In the meantime, the jobs most in demand — like nursing and nurse assistants, home health care aides, occupational therapists or physical therapists — sit open. The health care sector had the largest gap between vacancies and hires of any sector in April, for example.
We hear a lot about a shortage of women in technology jobs but we don’t hear about a shortage of men in traditionally female jobs.
It’s really two sides of the same problem. Unless a lot of women suddenly appear out of nowhere, the only way to get more women into professions where they’re currently under-represented — like technology — is to get them out of professions like health care, which they seem to prefer but in which they are significantly over-represented.
In theory, nursing should appeal to men because the pay is good and it’s seen as a profession with a defined skill set.
But the NYT cites a study from UMass Amherst, showing that not only will most unemployed men resist taking a “feminine” job, but that those men who might have been willing to consider it encountered resistance from their wives, who urged them to keep looking.
So much for diversity . . .
Speaking of which, here is a screenshot of the current board of directors of a nursing organization that I used to work with.
Nursing is a white female dominated profession, much more so than technology is a white male dominated profession, but I worked with this organization for about five years and never heard word one about a lack of diversity in nursing.
It’s hard to imagine an organization in 2017 having a 15-member all-white, all-male board of directors without drawing a lot of negative attention but all-white, all-female is okay.
I see a tremendous number of proposals for “empowering” women to get into technical professions that they may just not be interested in, but if the number of women in technology is considered problematic, then the number of women in nursing (and other over-represented professions) has to be considered equally problematic.
Where else are the additional women in technology supposed to come from?
I’ve always wondered why white people who use the defense “I have black friends” to defend their “I’m not a racist because” arguments, never seem to tag their supposed black friends. Where are they?
Fresh take! Now I’ve always wondered why some people think they have the moral authority and supernatural power to look into the hearts of others and label them racists.
I’m all about tolerance and love and anyone who doesn’t think the same way I do is a racist, sexist, homophobic Nazi!
We seem to be living in a time when the first person to call “racist” is ceded the moral high ground.
I’m not a racist because I called you a racist first!
I get that. It’s easier to work with people in the same room than with people at some distant point in time and space.
But I can’t help noticing that there are more companies willing to hire hordes of itinerant trainees in a foreign land to write important software (i.e., “outsourcing”), than to let employees write software 15 minutes from the office in their own home.
I paid my debt to society by reporting in for jury duty today. Jury duty is worse than losing a limb. In my experience, if you pick 12 Americans at random, you get nine good, clear-thinking citizens and three people who are like, “Well, anything’s possible.”
For example, the last time I served on a jury, the case involved a defendant who was driving drunk and crashed a car with passengers into a tree. There were photos taken after the crash showing the defendant pinned behind the steering wheel of the car.
His defense? He wasn’t the person driving the car. He didn’t testify himself but that was the defense presented by his attorney. And three of the jurors were like, “Yeah, that’s possible.” Hung jury.
Today I survived three rounds of random juror calls in the morning and by lunchtime they started calling names of people to go home, including mine.
The people still left in the jury assembly room didn’t appreciate my exuberant fist pumps on my way out.
In the hallway, I crossed paths with some actual jurors on their way to the cafeteria.
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall!” I exclaimed. They didn’t appreciate me either.
Acquisitive yuppies who, instead of holding their infant, wear the child in a harness on their chest, thus keeping their hands free for grabbing more stuff . . .
I’m walking through the parking lot at Kohl’s when all of a sudden, the rear hatch on an SUV pops open next to me, even though there’s no one in or around the vehicle.
Then I notice several cars further down is a similar-looking SUV and a woman with an armful of parcels trying to figure out why it won’t open.
The dialogue is awful and the characters are trite — the criminal mastermind in his secret lair, the beautiful but deadly femme fatale, the trigger-happy psychopath, etc. — but once they stop talking and the action kicks in, it’s terrific!
Also: great soundtrack!
Rating:
Baby Driver
Coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver must face the music when a doomed heist threatens his life, love, and freedom.
Director: Edgar Wright Cast: Ansel Elgort, Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm
In the age of Trump, it’s acceptable for reporters to claim they “never wanted to be part of the story,” while waiting in a green room to go on TV and talk about themselves.
Why are store receipts so damn big? I bought a couple of 3V batteries at Office Depot and got a receipt as long as my arm. (The receipt is shown upside down to discourage you from stealing my identity.)
Why do chip readers have to honk at you when your transaction is approved? I get that they’re reminding me to remove my card but why not remind me via a pleasant jingle?
And I can see the sun settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
Goodnight
There can be no grosser example of privilege than that set before us as an ideal by certain socialistic writers the ideal that . . . the man who is vicious, foolish, a drag on the whole community, who contributes less than his share to the common good, should take out what is not his, what he has not earned; that he shall rob his neighbor of what that neighbor has earned. This particular socialistic ideal would be to enthrone privilege in one of its grossest, crudest, most dishonest, most harmful and most unjust forms.
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Mike J. Smith, Ellison S. Onizuka. Image credit: NASA
Once upon a time there was a startup, and the president of this startup, like a lot of people in the early part of the 21st century, celebrated failure — as a learning tool and as a precursor to success.
He encouraged employees to celebrate failures on the company Slack channel, using the hashtag #fail.
Legend has it that the president called one employee on the carpet for suggesting on the Slack channel that it doesn’t make sense to celebrate failure without factoring in the cost of failure.
That is simply a truism, is it not? Obviously the value of failure can be swamped out by the cost, e.g.,
Blew up 7 astronauts but learned that O-rings don’t function in sub-freezing temperatures. #fail
You can think of other examples yourself. You can probably also think of people and/or companies for whom failure was merely a precursor to more failure.
Working for startups is risky, but the president of this startup told all the employees that he would give them a six-month heads-up if the company were ever on track to run out of money.
Then one day, due to the failure to retain a key client, the staff was cut to around 15 people (there were close to 100 at one time) with zero notice and a one week’s severance check.
You could make a case that the “six-month” promise didn’t apply because the company didn’t actually “run out of money,” but most people felt that the spirit of the promise, if not the letter, had been violated.
Was this a failure to be celebrated? It probably depends from which side of the exit door you’re looking at it. Sometimes a pivot looks a lot like an implosion.
Was it celebrated with a #fail hashtag in the company Slack channel? I don’t know.
Lost our key client. Laid off all developers but kept the company chef. #fail
This is a fable and like all fables it has a moral: Failure is good, except when it’s bad.
Resemblance to persons or companies living or dead would be a coincidence.
