Friday meditations

1) Today is annual physical=fasting cholesterol=black decaf coffee for breakfast day. My self-deception regarding decaf has reached the point where I almost think it has enough calories black to see me through lunch.

2) Pursuant to advice to support the image of Perky Old People everywhere, I agreed to a Levitra scrip this time. I get along with my PCP quite well, and she pointed out with a smile that some carriers cover only four doses a month. While I agree that women's contraceptives ought to get equal coverage, I have to assume that the Congressional health plan doesn't include this provision. I mean, that's rationing health care, is it not?

3) Early in the week I found a large and growing fracture in my 15-year-old bike helmet, so by today I was able to assemble time and money for a replacement. My abnormally large skull from Powys makes buying any headwear an ordeal, but especially things that don't yield. Further, I'm not a fan of the current style in bike helmets. I gather they are supposed to be more aerodynamic. The style is allegedly post-apocalyptic. To me, they look pretty much like an angry Donald Duck, especially when they're white. So I bought the one that more or less fit, whose sunshade/brim/scoop/whatever it is comes off, and was not white. That is called compromise.

Note: as soon as I find an angry Donald Duck image that isn't riddled with malware, I'll include it.

4) I am not from the seaside town I inhabit; I just sleep here. I draw the distinction because those who know this town also know that many of its residents suffer from an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. This frequently extends to both driver and pedestrian behaviour. Tonight, I discovered another virtue of my spouse's Scion. I went downtown on an errand and found the destination's parking lot totally full, except for the narrow space between two SUVs. They were of course deliberately parked to prevent anything from parking in the space between them: anything larger than a Scion, that is. It fit into the space with abundant room to spare, and I'm only sorry one of the behemoth operators hadn't shown up to see that they'd been shown up.

Then there was the guy who left his piping hot boxed pizza on top of his car while he took his kid to get ice cream. He probably suffers from the pleasant illusion that you can get away with such rash acts in hyper-privileged seaside towns. However, I once lived in a part of said town where, had you done this, the locals wouldn't have left you the crumbs, much less an embossed thank-you note. They might have even taken it as a sign that you also wanted your car stolen.

The end of contemplation

Earlier this year, my wife decided that I have become too decrepit to paint the peaks of our house. While I grant that the front one is a bit challenging (you need to lean a long ladder way out over a bay window), it's one of those chores I enjoy.

One reason is that there is a structure to observe, preparation, and execution. At the end of the day you have visible evidence of what you have done. Risks be damned: it's good for you!

With a painting contractor, you're paying other people to have your good time. Today was Day One, and I found out there's another disadvantage. When I do the job, there's just me doing the necessary preparation, one piece of the house at a time. It's pleasant outside and the inside disturbance is minimal. There are four of these guys, all very industrious, and there was often one to each side of the house. The type of noise, and the decibel level, reminded me of a brain MRI.

Tomorrow, I'm planning to do something elsewhere, lest I go from being in my rocker to off it.

Ur doin' it rong, Bangalore

I'm finding my chief annoyance in modern job searching is recruiters who offshore their resume screening calls.

Logic alone would suggest that the people involved in contractor negotiations should understand the delicacy of the process, and that these people should be exceptionally trained up in an appropriate English dialect. Clarity suffers when a firm overlooks either of these points.

I spent last evening and this morning trying to discuss a gig with "John," who must have flunked the dialect lesson, and certainly was slow on the delicacy. First, you can get away with the American name only with the American accent. Just call yourself Jalal and have done with it, 'K? Second, somewhere in the discussion a recruiter should at least allude to the nature of the gig and the sort of firm that's involved. Third, when you say you're going to email a job description, do it. If there is a problem, say, the message bounces, you can call the candidate back and straighten it out.

I am still not sure what the gig is or if he put me in for it, and in fact I've written it off. That's the third such experience I've had in the last month. If the clients of these firms actually don't want to hire anyone, they'd do better to just shut up, like most American companies. This sort of screening, however cheap, costs more than dead silence.

I do enjoy the unintended comedy, and it's encouraging to have even this much recruiter activity. Along with the offshore wonders, I've had several conversations with articulate recruiters who know how to do their job and pay attention to their language skills. I don't much care where they're calling from, as long as they can make the presentation and help me make a decision that doesn't waste my time, theirs, or their customers'.

More on First vs Third World

I'm riffing off the malevolent one's comments about the spoiled Yanquis. Now and then I have worked with people who rather resemble the uber-spoiled denizens of Rate My Space. One of them thought I was kidding when I mentioned that my present house has just over 850 square feet. She lived in Hotlanta, in a gated community, and said her bedroom was about 850 square feet.

I'm one of two people on my street who spent parts of their childhood, in the US of A, living in conditions that approached third world. We spent the warm months in a two-storey, 10 by 20 foot cottage on a very small island in a much-polluted lake. We had an outhouse; we had a manual pump in the kitchen. We used boiled lake water only for washing. Got our drinking water by making a two-plus mile round trip in the boat to a spring on the mainland that we had permission to use.

That, however, was voluntary, or at least as voluntary as living conditions sometimes were in the decade after WWII. Our friend down the street came from West Virginia. She herself describes conditions in her childhood home town as "primitive". They had the same amenities I just described, except that some of her neighbours also did without internal combustion engines. She's nearly ten years younger than we.

I once was writing part of a grant proposal for a hospital in these parts and I asked J for some background. Among other things, she said that some people had to ride mules to get to the emergency room, thanks to extreme poverty and lack of roads. J is unashamedly grateful for an opportunity and for an education that took her away from that life.

We had one recruit from those parts in my Navy boot camp company. We had to teach him how to use a flush toilet.

While it is very tempting to send the whiny brats of Rate My Space to the Dominican Republic, it isn't necessary: Appalachia will make the point just fine. So will a few other choice spots in our own country where privilege is a little thin on the ground.

More marvels of animal research

So now we have scientists telling us, after extensive studies and lawd knows how much money laid on the table, that cats control hoomanz.

Once again, ordinary mortals, in this case cat people, roll their eyes skyward and say "like you didn't know that cats control people?"

The study spent an inordinate amount of time studying the unique "feed-me" cry. The scientists did not discuss the effect of the basilisk stare, which causes people to run through their consciences, trying to figure out what aspect of the cat's comfort they have overlooked. They did not delve into the feed-me behaviour called "pry open the hoomanz's sleepy eyz and make them wake up." They did not attempt to answer the classic question of why a cat is always on the wrong side of the door. Others have studied the phenomenon by which a cat is instantly attracted to the one cat hater in a room full of strangers, but this study gave that one a pass.

Since the study has obviously barely scratched the surface, I think we can look for this crack team to be back for more. The peculiarities of feline-human relations ought to keep this lot in cat food for the rest of their lives. They just need to hide their tails when they present the next proposal.

Testing, testing, K, 'k?

I heard yesterday that a friend hasn't been coming to these premises because I hadn't been posting or answering his comments. Which was true, because I hadn't been receiving his comments.

All seems well with the settings here, so first, I'm reiterating the policy. If you comment, and it is not excessively snarky, it is literate, and if obscene at least applies creative obscenity, I'll post it. I may post comments of the other kind anyway, just to reply in kind, if I'm in that kind of mood.

Second, I know there are a few at least occasional readers out there. Kindly send me a comment, just so we can test this widget and make sure it's working. Send them over, say, the next week.

If there's something wrong, I can get snarky with blogger help.

One of my tall ships stories

Back when Tetris was a big deal, there was another tall ships visit to Boston. I worked in Salem then. That city, which suffers from a perpetual inferiority complex, decided that it must have a tall ship visit simply because Boston had one.

Channels were pursued and strings pulled. The arrangements led to having a Polish tall ship from the fleet visit Salem. Kewl. Well, sort of. Here we pause for explanations.

In the era of sail power at sea, there was never such a thing as a "tall ship." There was never such a phrase as "tall ship" until John Masefield wrote "Sea Fever" in 1900 or so (it appeared in his first published anthology in 1902).

I must go down to the seas again,
 to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
 and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song
 and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face
 and a grey dawn breaking.

Weekend mariners with more sentiment than sense get all wrapped up in this bit of marshmallow fluff. Too bad for Masefield: he's remembered for this while his other, better work is forgotten by everyone except professors of 20th century Brit Lit. Further, the marketing hype of the Tall Ships Association has convinced people that "tall ship" represents a specific type; a noun, not an adjective. The masses come to such events with a very specific template in mind.

Well, the Polish tall ship wasn't very tall...or very long. As a matter of fact, there were a couple of yachts docked on the Salem waterfront that were larger.

The guys working on the waterfront knew I sat on the committees that had started this effort. When they got tired of hearing, "Where's the tall ship...jeez, that's it?"from visitors, naturally they rounded on me. (That took about an hour.) I suggested they say that it shrank in the wash.

But the tale had a happy and unexpected ending. This was just after the end of the Cold War, and the vessel was so short of everything that it's a wonder the crew got it over here at all. Salem's Polish community took the crew to heart, took them to the old Polish club for a couple of roaring drunks at which broken English on one side encountered rusty Polish on the other. The locals then did their bit to make up some of the vessel's material deficiencies, especially food and alcohol as I heard it. So this piece of silly puffery ended up with a nice bit of international goodwill (kind of the original purpose of these events), a reprovisioned vessel, and several hundred thundering hangovers afloat and ashore.

Who stole the peoples' brains?

My choice would be the Great and General Court, whose latest contribution to Massachusetts' motor vehicle laws is the motto "We don' need no steenkin seatbelts!"

The debate over primary seatbelt laws takes one into an Alice's Wonderland of libertarian double-think. Here we have a device whose lifesaving qualities are demonstrated by a mountain of hard evidence. Two out of three people agree that it saves lives, but don't you dare make me! After all, two of those eight fatalities over the July 4 weekend were wearing their seatbelts, so there!

Certain unnamed Beacon Hill lobbies must be relieved in the aftermath of this bloody weekend, because all the dead were under 30, so therefore we don't need any legislation to keep geriatric leadfoots (or is that leadfeet?) off the roads, right?

Being of a certain age, I won't enjoy giving up my licence if I live so long, but if no one in my family has the spine to tell me I should stop driving, then I want a Commonwealth and a Registry who will tell me before I mistake a laundromat for a parking space, then die with someone's needless death on my conscience.

Likewise, having long since made seat belts a productive habit, I have no ethical objection whatever to laws that tell me to do what I already do. I don't murder people, but I don't object to laws against doing so, or see them as an infringement of my rights. That's partly because I do grasp and support pinko concepts like "commonwealth" and "general welfare."

Seems to me that we need a primary seatbelt law as a backup, just like homicide laws. The collateral benefit of a primary seatbelt law is that if you are too confused, too drunk or too stoned to fasten your seatbelt, it may just be possible that you're in no condition to drive, whether you are 18 or 88. We don't even need a built-in car breathalyser: Are you coordinated enough to fasten the damn buckle?

Long before I reached my creaking years, I understood that people don't become stupid just because they become old, nor do they automatically become wise by becoming old. It's just that the odds favour the survival of smarter youth into old age. Stupid young people--those who manage to survive their reproductive years despite their stupidity--become stupid old people. Or legislators, or lobbyists.

A dip in the political poop--er, pool

So, last week, you weren't a real member of the blogosphere if you didn't have something to say about whatsisname. Now, apparently we have to say something to say about the soon-to-be-former Governor of Alaska.

All right. Those who have either moral or political ambitions should be prepared to take the rough with the smooth. Bailing out of an office made relatively easy with petrodollars, when the bucks stop flowing, doesn't look like a spectacular credential for either moral righteousness or higher office.

Timing, in politics, is all. Bailing out of office immediately after Vanity Fair sucker-punches you violates this principle, leaving you rather far away from the moral high ground. There are other ambitious governors who have been treated just as harshly by the economy and the media. Whatever their other faults, they are still in office, taking the punches. Somehow, those other governors understand that the media spotlight goes with the job; they get on with it and don't whine.

Politics for grownups are a lot like politics in grade school. I remember one grade school playground line that might have been written for Sarah Palin:

"You can dish it out, but you can't take it."

Go back to Wasilla. You can't take it, and you have nothing to offer any of us.