Under it all

Evidently unmentionables are trending, uh, to the bright side. In evidence I submit this from the Mountain View Target store. I’d gone in looking for yoghurt and was literally stopped in my tracks by this display:

And once I was distracted, I wandered into this:

Seriously—these colors would keep me awake at night, even if they were stowed in the lingerie drawer.

I’m not even going to talk about the half-inch thick industrially-extruded single-piece Kevlar-like impenetrable form of the things.

(And, after all that, it turned out that this particular store doesn’t have yoghurt.)

Whine tasting

Making a change from my pounding on LinkedIn & the History Channel franchise, here’s a little something I picked up at the Los Altos Whole Foods, on the side of a case of wine:

It wasn’t bad enough that whoever made the sign used the dreaded apostrophe in forming the plural of Pinot Grigio. No, no—s/he had to go further, morphing the Grigio’s to Frigio’s.

& no one seemed to notice.

Except Ms. Language Person, of course. 

Linking Wonder, Part 4

LinkedIn is getting to be as easy a target to hit as the Military Channel as far as ridiculing public displays of illiterate self-promotion.

And I understand that when you deal with UGC (user-generated content—a phrase that could only be a product of an industry that has reduced professional communication to the very lowest common denominator; “common” being the operative term), particularly in an un-moderated global medium, you’re going to find bloopers.

But what I really love is people (or businesses fronting themselves as people) putting themselves forward as trustworthy dispensers of advice—in this case, career/job-hunt advice—when they’re obviously devoid of any quality of either subject matter expertise (SME—another great post-Internet term) or language.

And when you have two or more of these faux-humans spewing the same illiterate appearance-of-content in the same group, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

Examples from a recent posting—interestingly, in a group for jobs in Europe:

Am I the only person who finds it odd that someone thinks a forum for finding Euro jobs is an optimum place for posting how to find US jobs?

Leaving aside, of course, the issue that no one is likely to view an entity that concocts those sentences as a trustworthy source of information on any subject.

I especially like the fact that “James Miller” not only posted the “information”, but he “liked” it and “commented” on it.

That’s because on Planet LinkedIn you’re told that you appear as a thought-leader (again, infobahn keyword) if you post, comment, answer and otherwise put your name and face in multiple public places.

Okay, fine.

Only, just a few pixels away on this forum, here’s what I found:

Like “James Miller”, “Christine Stone” has also “liked” her own post, which has been varied marginally from his. Her “comment” appears to be some unrelated content—but in this universe what counts is that you post, not what you post.

Another very interesting coincidence, to me, is that both “James Miller” & “Christine Stone” are located in…Pakistan:

  

And both work in the “airline” industry.

He cites UTexas (1990 MBA in “business education”) and she SUNY (1997 BBA in travel and tourism management) as responsible for their education. I hope to God neither school would have actually graduated someone (even in business) who would scrape content from sources as ignorant and derivative as these two have done.

But I could be wrong.  

Ending the war to end all wars

It’s getting to the point that I probably shouldn’t even point out when the History/Military Channels screw up their programming blurbs. But I can’t help myself. I’m just hardwired that way.

(I still have trouble remembering how to pronounce that Norwegian playwright’s name, because I have the dyslexic “Isben” of one of my seminar classmates in Modern European Humanities imprinted on my cortex. She did a report on the writer of A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Hedda Gabbler, and called him Isben every time. I’ve actually kept my class notes because I jotted down every one of her unique pronouncements in the left-hand margins against the stuff I thought might be called upon in a test situation.)

Anyhow, here’s the latest, from the Memorial Day weekend. They’ve moved the salient date of World War I up a century.

Pity they can’t do away with the four years of conflict altogether.

A life well lived

I know that on Memorial Day it’s customary to focus on the men and women of our military, and to appreciate the sacrifices they’ve made for us.

There are parades, military cemeteries become seas of US flags. (And, of course, there are furniture sales and backyard cookouts.)

In the past I’ve  posted about peacekeepers in the Balkans, war films and Operation Homecoming, which I still recommend for your reading.

But a few weeks ago I came across an obit in one of the Palo Alto free newspapers, which made me think immediately of the meaning of this day.

David Keller died 1 May, aged 89. As far as I can ascertain, Keller did not serve in the armed forces, but his life was an exemplar of why we (should) take time to pay our respects to those who do.

Keller was a Holocaust survivor—the only one in his family. Born in Poland, he spent years in camps and as a slave laborer for the Nazis.

Following World War II, he and his wife (whom he met at a displaced persons camp) emigrated to the US, and he built a career in restaurants and labor unions. Following retirement, he remained active at his shul, and served meals at a local senior center. He was married for 66 years and raised three sons.

Here's the connection to Memorial Day:

I’ve visited a lot of military cemeteries in France and Belgium from the two world wars. There’s an area in Normandy with three—the American at Colleville sur Mer (above Omaha Beach), the British in Bayeux and the German at La Cambe. Walk through all these graveyards and the thing that strikes you is how young the dead were—19 to 23, maybe, most of them. German or Allied, all those men killed before they had really started out in life.

I’ve often wondered what we missed because of that—not necessarily the great advances in medicine or technological innovations that never happened because a genius took a mortar round in the bocage; but the smaller lives. The family never formed, construction projects never started, soccer teams never coached.

You know—the little pieces that form the warp and weft of society. How many colors are missing from our tapestry because these men lie in their thousands beneath the Calvados soil?

So when I read Keller’s obit it felt a bit to me like we got one back. How many colors have been added to the tapestry because these men gave the last full measure?  His long, productive and mostly (it would seem) happy life validates their sacrifice. 

A life well-lived, courtesy of those who serve.