Whirlwind tour

Let’s close out the week with a few more visuals from the Kleptocrat’s first foreign trip, in which he sucked up to despotic regimes that support terrorism, pissed off our (possibly former) allies and generally embarrassed us in front of the whole world.

We’ve seen him bonding with leaders of Muslim nations in which he has still undivested business interests, and sticking his foot in his mouth in his photo ops with the Israelis. And there was that lovely moment in Tel Aviv where he tried to show the world how his latest trophy wife can’t get enough of him. And that note for those folks at Yad Vashem telling them how lucky they were to have him stop by.

Well, moving on to Rome for a flying visit with Pope Francis I, we had more unpresidented moments. Debarking from Air Force 1 at the airport, we saw another demonstration of how practiced Melania is at avoiding those tiny hands:

Then there was the photo op with His Holiness and the Klepto Family. Social media was alive with bubble captions for this money shot:

My own paltry addition to the genre:

Kleptocrat: “When does this guy give me the gold necklace?”

Melania: “As God is my witness, if he tries grabbing my hand this time, Imma clip him in the kidney.”*

Ivanka: “Wonder how long I have to wait before I put this outfit up on eBay?”

Kushner: “Gevalt!”**

Francis: “Ohmeyn.”

*Notice her hands—they’re clenched, like she’s expecting to have to Take Action.
**STOP PRESS: I understand that Kushner (and Ivanka, but who cares?) has returned already to the District They Call Columbia, possibly to seek legal counsel on account of the special investigation into collusion between the Gauleiters and Russia has named him a Person of Interest.

No little yearbook messages, but the Pope gave Donnie Two Scoops a copy of his encyclical on climate change. No chance that he or anyone in his administration will read it, though.

(Maybe he’ll toss it to Spicey—who is a practicing Catholic and was by all accounts very much looking forward to the opportunity to meet the Pope. In an act of petty humiliation remarkable even for this jerk—who only measures his own stature by how low he can force others around him—the Kleptocrat brought a random selection of toadies, but left his press secretary behind on Air Force 1.)

Moving on to Brussels (which he has referred to as a hellhole) yesterday to attempt to throw his not inconsiderable fatness around with NATO, he had the assembled leaders from those nations sniggering as the guy famous for stiffing vendors, workers, partners, creditors and American taxpayers demanded that they all need to “pay up”.

(BTW, the occasion for the gathering of NATO leaders was the dedication of a memorial to the victims of the September 11^th attacks, the only time in history that Article 5 of the treaty has been invoked. Stay classy, Klepto.)

The Kleptocrat tried one of his intimidating my-hands-may-be-tiny-but-I’ll-break-yours handshakes on French President Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old Macron was prepared for this puerile stunt, and held the tiny hand in a white-knuckle grip for several seconds after the 70-year-old bully had gone limp.

(It may well be that this literal mano a mano contest was payback for an earlier incident where Macron had ignored L'il Two Scoops and greeted other leaders. Eventually the Chaos Monkey couldn't stand it any more, grabbed the hand of the lesser being and tried his usual dominating ape schtick. Payback's a bitch, my short-fingered vulgarian.)

(We're told, BTW, that the traveling dumpster fire assured Macron that he'd never supported his opponent in the recent French election. That would be Marine Le Pen, the right-wing nut job whom he had publicly praised during the campaign. But yesterday it was—and I quote—"You were my guy." I'm sure Macron found that both heartwarming and reassuring. And expressed that gratitude in his handshake.) 

But wait—there’s more. Proving that any class this buffoon has is strictly low, the glory hound literally shoved his way into the front of a cluster of NATO leaders to get full camera coverage. Note the smug look on his orange visage as he gets there.

There were wags on Twitter positing that, with all the revelations about connections between various Gauleiters and Russia over time, the Kleptocrat might order Air Force 1 to put down in some country without an extradition treaty (like Vatican City) and refuse to come back. Or that, what with extreme vetting of criminals trying to enter the country, Immigration wouldn’t let him back in. But I suppose at some point he’s going to come back like a bad penny.

What are the odds, though, that those swell gifts the Saudis gave him will not make their way into the White House inventory, but will end up in some vault on an over-mortgaged estate in New Jersey?

ROI report

Tuesday at work was one of those days—the kind that leave you wishing for nothing so much as a flattop of nachos steaming through an ocean of margaritas. This was largely because of that class I was telling you about, trying to teach people how to think in terms of ideas for new products and services.

Now I understand that this is a bit of a stretch for most of the staff in this organization, and maybe even a few exits past their comfort zone. That’s why we paid many monies to a consultant to come in and teach the six-session course. Early this month we started out with 17 people signed up. (We’d hoped to get somewhere between 20 and 30.) Everyone expressed great excitement when they asked to join. Two told me they couldn’t make it to the first class, but I gave them dispensation—they could catch up via online videos and discussions.

So, aside from those two, one person emailed me the day before that first session to proclaim that she’d thought it would be on Wednesday, and she had other plans for Tuesday. Ooookay. One other person just didn’t show, and only informed me two days later that she’d be unable to take the course. And eventually she was followed by Ms. Day-Confusing Person—unexpectedly high work load.

Well. Tuesday was the second meeting. Tuesday morning I received three emails (including one about 30 minutes before class time) moaning about (unexpectedly) heavy workloads that prevent them from continuing with the class. Moreover, I’ve still not heard from the two planned no-shows, but as they’ve now missed two of the six sessions, I’m declaring them forfeit, and their copybooks are well and truly blotted in my mind. (You want to try to come to a later iteration of this, cupcake? Yeah, right.)

Look—this course is more than a few bob out of my annual budget, and the purpose is to develop these people’s ability to essentially be more creative. This is a big benefit to them, even though of course we’re hoping that this also results in ideas that we can build out. This is something that many, many other companies’ employees would jump at; this crowd treats it like a back-up prom date they can ditch when a better prospect comes along.

(As long as I’m on the subject: the first cohort of this course wasn’t unalloyed joy, either. Out of our 20 original participants, a couple dropped out after two classes, three more at about week five, and five more refused to pitch an idea, which was the whole point of the exercise.)

So I’m thinking you can understand why my disgustedness cup raneth over on the Metro ride home on Tuesday. I don’t have either nacho materials or tequila at home, so I had to make do with the last inch of a pedestrian Pinot Noir in the fridge to accompany my supper.

My manager and I have our weekly catch-up meeting on Wednesday mornings. He is not attending this round of the course, so part of my reports is an update on how it’s going. I walked into his office yesterday at 0800. He finished the email he was composing, then turned to me and announced, “I hate people.” I never got the specifics on this, because sometimes it’s just best not to know.

Once he’d got that out of his system, he came over to the little conference table and asked, “How did it go yesterday?” giving me the perfect opening.

“I hate people.”

Well, he wasn’t best pleased with the seven slackers. I think he’s going to cool down a bit before emailing them. But I doubt that any of them will be invited to participate in any future classes. Which is fine by me—I’m really, really tired of whining.

But perhaps I should stock up on tortilla chips, cheese, jalapeños and tequila. I still have four more sessions to get through.

So amazing

I’m working on restructuring my neuro-processes actively to minimize negativity, so I try to restrict my Kleptocrat intake. However, there have been a couple of highlights from his Big Adventure in the Mid-East and Israel (as he framed it when he arrived in Tel Aviv).

First—he was clearly in his element in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he was surrounded by real despots, given gold presents and able to bond with other male supremacists who do not permit any form of free speech. For once, he was allowed at the local cool kids’ table, and he was pathetically happy about it. (Albeit exhausted, we’re told. These actual multi-hour work days do tend to wear you out when you can’t break them up with lunches, Fox News and tweets.)

And the photo ops—man.

As you can imagine this image just sent Twitter into overdrive:

  

Even the Church of Satan weighed in, although I’m not sure about the truth of this.

Well, so much for the new Axis of Evil. At their next stop, there was more of interest. For many, this video was a highlight of the trip so far:

I have to say that from the practiced accuracy of her swat and his immediate “nothing happening here” response, this clearly is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. The world completely understands, Melania. But divorce him, honey; I’m tired of my taxes subsidizing your separate living accommodations.

In another empty photo op, the entourage stopped for about 15 minutes at Yad Vashem, the memorial to victims of the Holocaust. It’s customary for visiting dignitaries to pause in remembrance, and leave a few words in a note. Our last actual president wrote this:

Here’s the Kleptocrat’s:

Man—it only lacks “have fun this summer” to flesh out a full yearbook scribble.

Right—I'm off to restructure my neural paths. Peace out. Or, as the White House Press Office might say, peach out.

Great minds

It seems to me as though more and more web sites are demanding that you “sign up” for their spam emails before they’ll deliver content. This includes before you’ve seen enough of their content to want to even scroll down the landing page, much less clog your inbox with their crap.

I personally think it’s pretty nervy on their part. Often that’s enough to get me to click away from their site, but occasionally I’ll try to evade their little popup. My automatic go-to is to close the box, either by choosing “No, thanks, I prefer to struggle on without benefit of your super-duper goods or information” or by clicking the close X. Sometimes just clicking outside of the popup will make it go away, but increasingly these people are jigging it so the only way you can get around it is to “sign up” for their emails.

In the rare case that I decide I really want to see something, I’ll use a bogus email address, usually a rude word or anatomical irregularity with a generic domain. If they’ve set it up so that you have to confirm the address by replying to an email from them, then I’m stuffed. But if not, then I get what I want and get out.

Well, obviously I’m not the only person to have thought of this work-around. Yesterday I arrived at Wayfair.com via a tweet. They demanded an address to send their emails to. I typed in pissoff@yahoo.com and hit enter. And got this response:

Bwahahaha!

Gratitude Monday: a room with a view

Because there’s something insidious in my back yard that starts attacking my respiratory system within five minutes of me stepping outside, I’ve had to limit my forays to about 30 minutes at a time, tops.

This means that I’m tackling the jungle canopy across my patio incrementally, and mostly limit my enjoyment of the greenery to looking through the patio doors.

However, I’m not exactly idle. I moved my small pots of herbs outside late last month, and last weekend I bought a couple of tomato plants, some larger pots and several bags o’ dirt, and I’ve been silently urging them on, because I definitely want homegrown tomatoes this summer.

Also, I splashed out about $125 on a free-standing pole with multiple hook-arms, a couple of squirrel-proof bird feeders and sacks of bird food. Because I love watching birds chowing down; squirrels not so much. If you want to discourage the little furry land sharks, you have to put your feeders somewhere they can’t reach, and since they can leap horizontally about eight feet, you need to place your feeders outside that distance. (Hence part of my reason for hacking away at the overgrowth.)

So far, the squirrel-proofness appears to be working. The little monster has been foraging around the patio in search of the seed I used to toss out onto the ground, but that stuff is long gone. I watched him try to jump on the pole, but he slid down, and he couldn’t reach the feeder. It was kind of amusing to witness him literally bounce against the patio door and gesticulate at me; he’s clearly pissed off that I’m no longer carpeting the back yard with food. But I care not.

In terms of feeding the birds—not sure what’s going on there. There’s one feeder of Fine Tunes and one of Nyjer seed. The other morning I saw a dove sitting on the Nyjer feeder, looking kind of surprised—not eating, just parked there. (They did love that stuff at my place in the Valley They Call Silicon, but they weren’t wild about that feeder because it’s really meant for smaller birds.) Hasn’t been back since.

And only yesterday have I seen a chickadee alight on the other feeder, but not for long. I’m hoping it’s a scout bird, and that others will twig to the fact that this is for them, and is not some perverse bird trap. Because I bought about 35 lbs of this stuff, and I would like to see some ROI.

Well, I’m betting that they’ll figure it out, even if they do seem a little slow on the uptake. And I’m grateful for having them around me once again.