Where's the flashy-thingie?

This week scored about a 9.5 on my Weird Shit-o-Meter (to appropriate Men in Black’s Agent Jay). And that was even before the pardon of Dinesh D’Souza.

But here’s another example: the BBC reports on the top ten reasons that (British) corporations toss out for not having women sit on their boards. The pathetic lameness of these things is extraordinary.

(Here’s the list, in case you’re not up to clicking through to the Beeb.)

If I were a stockholder I’d seriously consider selling my shares, because men so stupid as to go on record backing these crack-brained excuses in the 21^st Century could not possibly run a company at a sustainable profit. And that’s before we even get to the fact that businesses with a good mix of women in leadership positions consistently outperform those packed with the XY-chromosome set.

Destination anywhere

You know, it’s been a weird, weird past few days. Li’l Donnie Two-scoops using a tweet to wish us all a “happy” Memorial Day, while assuring us that the generations of dead soldiers would bigly approve of the job he’s doing in the White House; his wife disappearing after a taxpayer-funded “kidney procedure”; Roseanne Barr tweeting something disgusting even by her standards and then blaming it on Ambien; a Kardashian paying a call on the Kleptocrat to discuss prisons and sentencing (the big Kim-Klepto Summit?); the GOPig governor of Missouri is resigning following a sex scandal in a rush to try to avoid investigations that might reveal "dark money"; a GOPig congressmoron from Virginia who used his taxpayer-paid staff as personal servants has decided also to resign suddenly (having only just now discovered that he’s an alcoholic)…

These are some strange times, my friends; strange, strange times.

That being the case, and closing out this bizarre month, I’m thinking that this sign could be pretty much anywhere.

Post-holiday reality

Is there some kind of cosmic Rule that requires we balance a holiday weekend with a shedload of tsuris immediately thereafter? There must be.

Monday afternoon the fan on my HVAC unit stuck in the on position. The AC compressor cycles on and off, as per the setting on my thermostat, but the fan runs ever on.

It could be a lot worse—the AC could have conked, or the fan could have stuck in the off position; in either of those cases, I’d be SOL in DC-area early summer heat/humidity.

But I just have visions of my next Dominion Power bill, and I do not like the number of places to the left of the decimal point that I see.

(And I was just so chuffed at putting out my mosquito zapper on Monday. I hope to God it destroys those things in their thousands—even if it is a bit unsettling to hear that ZZZ ZZZ sound as it does its work.)

Then—work. I’ve got about six spreadsheets going to try to corral various aspects of the business plan. I had a mid-morning meeting where I attempted to tame various human aspects of this project, and then IT needed my laptop because it’s been acting screwy and the Lenovo technician was supposed to do something that would fix it.

I saved to Dropbox everything I had open—just as you’re meant to do—and handed it over. Forty-five minutes later I got it back and started back to work. Only one of the spreadsheets wouldn’t open. Nothing but an error message saying that Excel didn’t recognize it any more, so tough.

Naturally, Sod’s Law being in effect, the bollixed file was the one, mission-critical spreadsheet containing my financial models (such as they are) that I absolutely needed and that would be a gigantic pain in the tuchis to rebuild. So I freaked.

The help desk guy also could not open it, and my anxiety level was rising every second. Eventually, he asked if I could try opening it online at the Dropbox URL. I could, and it did! I downloaded that sucker, changed its name and saved it in two places. Whereupon I slunk home to call the HVAC repair guy and make an appointment for him to come out today.

And then I poured a glass of wine. To propitiate the cosmic Rule.

Veteran driver

Seems appropriate that as I was driving around this weekend—of all weekends—in the Military District of Washington, I found myself behind this car:

Gratitude Monday: paying the bill

We live in parlous times for democracy, with an ignorant, corrupt, venal, narcissistic kleptocrat in the White House, supported by GOPig and Evangelical Taliban sycophants who hand out mulligans for his every violation of the ten commandments and seven sins, as long as he shows signs of implementing their dreams of white supremacy and suppression of women.

It was clear from the 2016 election that Cadet Bone Spurs views the men and women of our armed forces as his own personal collection of toy soldiers to be deployed in whatever way will amuse him most at the moment—whether it’s missile strikes in Syria or a $30M military parade “bigger than Macron’s”, the Bastille Day parade (an annual event that honors France’s independence, not an individual head of state—whether competent or not) he fidgeted through last July.

Thirty million for a parade while 40,000 veterans are homeless.

And whether or not our draft-dodger-in-chief takes time out from golfing, watching TV and tweeting to show up at Arlington National Cemetery today, thousands of people who were not raised by rabid wolves will be there (and at other military cemeteries), communing with friends and comrades, or just honoring the fallen.

You know—those whose sacrifices over the centuries paid the bills for our Constitutional freedoms and our political follies, extremists and moderates, reactionaries and progressives alike. They lie in their tens of thousands around the globe, where they fell, and where they were returned home. I’m grateful for them all, for the graces they bought for us all.

My brothers and sisters—I give you heartfelt thanks, I apologize that we’ve made such a hash of it, and I live in hope that we will find our way back to the democracy you served with such devotion.