Wedding terror

I think this story has moved way beyond the Royal Wedding; I’m talking, of course, about the millinery confection that Princess Beatrice wore to the nuptials.

She—or her hat—has become an Internet meme. It’s even made an appearance on the heads of the Administration team monitoring the Abbottabad raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Where else but the Internet are you going to use “Princess Beatrice”, “hat” and “Osama Bin Laden” in a single sentence?

And now the hat (original, I presume) is going to be auctioned on eBay to raise money for charity. 

Super food

Well, hmm—I knew this was probably cued up: a new epidemic in the post-gluten, all-kale-all-the-time world that we face.

Yes, an epidemic of youths (or, in some areas, youts) facing another ten years in their parents’ basements, desperately trying to obliterate their anxieties about college entrance exams and failure to secure Series A investment in their app that’s the Uber of grunge bands with…

Well, just watch. If you dare.

This trend may have begun in the UK, as you can tell from the language (helpfully subtitled), but so did the fascinator.

Do you want to see either of these things in your subdivision? I mean—what happens when they start wearing the kale on their heads? We may indeed be looking into the face of Armageddon.

Mapping the year

Still on the theme of starting the year, but without anyknown tsarist involvement, here’s my wall décor in my dining room:

It’s my hardcopy mind map for what I want 2017 to include for me. There are major categories, subset nodes and sub-subsets.

I like using colored stickies for this function. For mind-mapping, stickies are about equal with a big-ass whiteboard. (The last time I did mind-mapping, for a class assignment in the Valley They Call Silicon, it was an extremely frustrating effort, due to lack of whiteboard, big-ass or otherwise, and no inspiration to use the stickies. The results were less than stellar.)

In fact, this time around, I actually started with a big-ass whiteboard, in my office, and transferred all the nodes to the stickies so I could erase all evidence at work of attempting a personal life and transport the information home.

Since then I’ve transposed much of it online using a mind-mapping software package that’s a bit of a kludge, but easier to manage because I already have the visual notion of what I want included and in what hierarchical structure. Back at Stanford, I was trying to do it all online from the get-go, and there was a lot of resulting blood in the vicinity.

Anyhow, I now have some shape for dealing with 2017. Let’s hope I end it better than my Romanov relatives.

From the tsar's mouth

My office door is basically Snapchat IRL: I tape pictures on it, and after some period of time, I take them down.

Since yesterday was the first work day of 2017, I put up the meme from my post here; just the photo with the Russian text over it. There aren’t that many of my colleagues who'd recognize the tsar (which I find rather sad—there are Ph.D.s on every floor), much less be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet (about which I am less judgmental).

There is one, however—as it happens, my manager. After he earned a degree in Russian Studies, he went to Moscow to bring democracy to the Former Soviet Union. It didn’t stick, of course, but I don't hold that against him, because apparently democracy didn’t stick here, either; it just took us longer to realize it.

Anyhow, he looked at the photo, translated the words in his mind and asked, “Is that an actual quote from him [Nikolai]?”

“I found it on Twitter, so probably yeah…”

The year ahead

I thought this meme, making its way around the Interwebz, is apt:

The approximate translation is: I am convinced that ’17 is going to be a better year.

As it happens, whether 1917 was a good year depended entirely upon who and where you were. From my perspective, a hundred years on, it was actually pretty awful all around. Although the Bolsheviki probably considered it more of a win than Nicholas II when they looked back on it.

Yeah—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Gratitude Monday: The wild, wild web

As we head into this new year, I believe that this advice from one of the great 20^th Century role models for smart and self-confident women will serve us well:

So today I’m grateful for the resources of the Internet that allow people to explore a range of views, find information, debunk lies, share ideas and find entertainment.

These resources, in short, that rational and compassionate humans can use to stand up to would-be dictators of all stripes.

Because it's going to be a bumpy, bumpy night. All year long.