More snakes alive

As we enter the season of Advent, let me just say this: nothing says “holiday spirit” like letting loose a few score poisonous snakes in a tax office to protest officials demanding bribes, as reported in the Telegraph.

The story itself is weird enough; what makes it really striking (so to speak) is the video. I’m not quite understanding why there are still people in the office—I would certainly have beat feet at the first sign of a snake head. And I’m also unclear about the tactics of flapping cloths at the snakes.

I have to say that I see a lot of what we in the software business call “applications” for cobras: IRS offices; the DMV; shopping at Walmart (if you’ve run out of pepper spray). Don’t like the review your boss gave you? Drop a few snakes in her cube. Unhappy with the tip a diner left? Add a little “something” to his credit card receipt.

Why—Congress alone would be worth an entire colony of cobras.

Truly, the world would work a lot better if people packed poisonous reptiles.

And, as long as I’m on a slither, so to speak, the Telegraph has further video of a family jaunt that suddenly included a water moccasin popping out of the windscreen wiper vent.

What I don’t get is that they continue driving for so long after the snake appeared.

Spray art

Another Internet meme hit the global browsers when a University of California, Davis, campus cop was caught on video pepper-spraying Occupy protester, who were seated and not engaging in behavior any more threatening than planting butts on sidewalks.

Barely had the uploads made it to YouTube than Lt. John Pike started popping up in more images than Princess Beatrice’s Royal Wedding hat. Keep clicking through the pages of the Tumblr site to see Pike appear in Picasso’s Guernica, at various iterations of the Last Supper and Hopper’s Diner.

I find this absolutely fascinating—the instant commentary on art, society, protest, police overreaction; in fact, pretty much everything you got going.

A few weeks ago, when the Libyans were closing in on Gaddafi, I scoured the Web, sure I’d find the Colonel popping up in the White House Situation Room, the Republican debates, even the Royal Wedding. It seemed to me that Where’s Muammar? was a natural for this sort of visual witticism.

But evidently I was wrong.

I’m going to have to do this myself—Photoshop? Illustrator? It just looks like too much fun, and you don’t have to worry about coming up with le mot juste.

Flying to hell

I drove into work yesterday morning hearing the news that American Airlines parent company AMR has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It seems that their senior management took longer than anyone has expected to run the business into the ground, although their brand-new CEO blames labor costs, fuel prices and everything in the universe except their own boneheadedness.

What this does is allow them to stiff their vendors, screw their employees and cock a snook at their customers, while continuing to pay themselves handsomely. Legally.

I used to prefer American to other carriers, but I wouldn’t like to think about what the flying experience is going to be with them for the next year or so. The reporter this morning did say they’ll keep their frequent flier program going, but I rather suspect that your miles aren’t going to do much to ameliorate overbooked flights, cumulative fees for every aspect of travel or the risk of an antiquated fleet that’s serviced in Mexico.

(The only good thing I can think of is that at least it isn't United Airlines.)

It’s a strange economy we live in where corporations (which have been declared “persons” by our Supreme Court) can engage in anti-social that in actual persons would result in criminal prosecution.

Some of us are definitely more equal than others in this Animal Farm.

Shedding light

I know times are tough, and businesses are trying to cut costs wherever they can. A my current place of employment has certainly had its problems recently, resulting in not only laying off more than 10,000 employees but also (even worse) senior management embarking on “transformation initiatives” to try to save the corporate bacon.

(You’ll recall that this is the company that needed five layers of management approval to authorize spending $17 on a mouse for me.)

But I do think they’ve hit the bottom: cubes here have a personal light embedded in the cabinet over each desk, which is kind of necessary because the company seems to have rigged the overheads so our floor resembles nothing so much as a mushroom ranch. I don’t use mine a whole lot, but occasionally I need to see something besides my clapped-out laptop.

So imagine my surprise when I went to switch it on yesterday morning and found that someone had removed the light bulb. The one in the lamp over the other desk in my cube was also missing. As were the bulbs in several unoccupied cubes.

Seriously? Are they collecting these things to sell on eBay? Does the CEO need an extra Aubusson rug for his house in Santa Cruz?

(And yes—I did find an empty cube that still had a bulb and I nicked it. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.)

Bulken Balkans

So I’ve been watching this Military Channel series on people who collaborated with the Nazis. It’s called, amazingly enough, “Nazi Collaborators”. And it is actually imparting some interesting information.

There have been episodes about Pierre Laval (France), Chaim Rumkowski (the Łódź ghetto) and the Arajs Kommando (Latvia; their expert was a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina). The latest one I watched was about the Croatian Ustasha officer Dinko Šakić, subtitled “Beast of the Balkans”. 

(And here one would have to specify which Beast of the Balkans, because there are so many from that region who've spent lifetimes earning that epithet. Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić are only two of the most recent.)

As you know, TV networks these days muck up the video with a permanent logo at one corner of the screen (in case you’ve forgotten what channel you’re watching), and often pop up little notices about future shows, because I guess they’re worried that the one you’re viewing isn’t interesting enough to hold your attention.

The Military Channel does all these things, plus splashing a banner reminding you what program you’re watching.

But as I idly noted that, here’s what really caught my eye:

Fine—whatever. Then:

Uh—seriously? All the people processing this stuff & you didn’t catch that?

I checked at the screen they broadcast after every commercial (all nine of them),and they did indeed know what geographical region Šakić was the beast of:

I don’t know what to say. Except that…Well, no—I just don’t know what to say.