Duking it out

I found this story very interesting: there’s a big legal flapdoodle between Duke University and John Wayne Enterprises over the latter producing a brand of whiskey they’re calling Duke Bourbon.

Duke the university objects to Duke the heirs of the Duke John Wayne using Duke the word on Duke the liquor in any context that could somehow be perceived by Duke the university's donors as a blot upon the escutcheon of an academic institution of wide regard and even wider endowments. They’re bitching (if I understand correctly) about the image of the disputed word, claiming that the font that’s being used can be confused with their own iconic logo, and maybe reduce alumni support. 

(Okay, that bit about cutting into support is an extrapolation. But it's based on an understanding of the priorities of all the universities I've ever been associated with; academics are often secondary to fundraising.)

Well, I’m not, um, seeing that. Here’s the booze:

And here are the search results for “Duke University logo”:

It’s unclear to me under what conditions you might mistake any one of those iterations in Duke blue with the design on the whiskey bottle. But if you do, you should probably take a taxi home.

And Duke the university should just get over itself.

No I (or intelligence) in team

You know, I rather thought that corporate team-building events went out of style before the end of the last century, but apparently I was wrong.

Very, very wrong, as this story from NPR indicates.

The same managers who happily lay off employees and replace them with contract workers at half the rate and no benefits to look fiscally responsible to stockholders are finding money in their budgets for group activities that deliver the maximum of alienation and humiliation to all those taking part.

Well, perhaps the managers—being clearly clueless—don’t feel the humiliation, and of course they don’t care about alienation or else their companies wouldn’t be the hellholes they are.

You just have to wonder who signed off on things like a piñata full of bits of metal, to be bashed open in an enclosed space, or distributing magic mushrooms on the company dime. I don’t wonder who approves paintballing or any other activity involving faux hunter-prey play; they are male, have compensation issues and are poor losers.

The one team-ish event that I ever organized, to get engineers and non-engineers from England, Wales, France and Belgium comfortable with each other, involved assigned seating at the group dinner, and an inter-table competition to match pub-quiz type questions with their answers and deduce the overall theme of all the questions. One of my word processors drove her table to victory in less time than it would take to chamber a paintball round.

And they were playing for bottles of champagne.

Nature studies

My friend JQ shared a photo of a pretty stunning wasps’ nest—really, quite the engineering feat. Except that they built it right above the front door to her house:

(If you've never experienced multiple wasp stings that make you swell up like the Michelin Man, you can stop reading now. You won't care about this.)

This made me think about how our appreciation for, you know, nature is relative, depending upon whether you’re viewing it out in its, er, natural habitat or it’s assaulting your property.

The example I’m recalling involves woodpeckers.

I never saw a woodpecker on the, uh, hoof until I lived in Virginia. Really knocked me out the first time I saw one—stunningly beautiful, really—and I loved having them around in both Virginia and North Carolina.

They actually do make that machine-gun sound when they’re foraging for food in trees and other sources of wood; you know, the sound your average MRI machine makes. And it can be quite loud.

Well, I was at a friend’s house in Raleigh and we heard that rat-a-tat coming from behind us, and there was a pileated woodpecker going full bore on the eaves of my friend's house. He went ballistic—evidently woodpeckers can cause real damage. He was trying to shoo the bird away, yelling at it and stuff, but it was above the second story, so there wasn’t a chance.

I thought it was really funny; my friend, not so much. Which kind of made me think he was being a sourpuss.

Well, fast-forward a few years and move to my townhouse outside D.C. I was working in the kitchen when I heard that rat-a-tat…on the side of my house. I ran outside and sure enough—a pileated woodpecker was bashing away on my woodwork.

Let me reiterate—screaming at one of these things does not work. You have to hope that it doesn’t find your particular wood productive. Unless you can throw pebbles really accurately up three stories.

But that’s what I mean about appreciating nature being relative: critters lose their cuteness when it’s your property or children they’re chomping.

Destination nowhere

Wow—this is a first for me: Encore Classic is apparently so pumped about showing a 14-year-old horror film that it’s running the banner for it right smack across the middle of the screen on the programs that precede it.

So you can’t see what’s going on in the show you’re actually, you know, watching

I find this an interesting promotion strategy. Because what they're actually saying is, "What we're going to show you later is much, much more important than what we're showing you now. Go away and come back then. Maybe we won't run a banner across that one."

Gratitude Monday: Celebrating the nation

On Friday I mentioned that we in the United States do not celebrate our independence with displays of military might, but with community parades, picnics and fireworks.

(Oh, alright—if you want to count the artillery pieces fired during fireworks-related performances of the 1812 Overture, go ahead. But it’s a stretch.)

And I have some examples for you, taken by my friend Chris at the Warrenton, Va., Old Town Fourth of July parade. Such as this demonstration of sheer mechanized power:

Or this exceptionally fluffy dog:

And, finally, the closest they got to a fly-by:

I am grateful to be a citizen of the country where—for all the faults in our government and our society—a toddler in a pink toy Jeep is how we express ourselves as a people on our biggest national holiday.

(And I'm grateful to Chris for sharing her photos with us.)