Plenty to say

On one of my walks I came across this car parked in one of the People’s Republic squares. The owner clearly has a lot of opinions.

Either that, or there are a lot of holes that need covering up.

Gojira returns

Someone on Twitter posted that adding Godzilla to any movie would make it a better movie. Now, maybe it’s because the tweet had footage from an Avengers film, but the entire thread was extremely shortsighted, IMO, because everyone was focused on Marvel-related stuff. But I expanded my horizons into rom-coms, viz:

When Harry Met Sally and Godzilla

Sixteen Candles for Godzilla

Godzilla’s Best Friend’s Wedding

Godzilla Jones’s Diary

You’ve Got Mail, Godzilla

And one I’d possibly even pay to see in a theatre: Godzilla Swallows Love, Actually

Seriously—this idea has legs. Scaly ones, but legs.

Interesting...

I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia yesterday, so on the way to it I met up with a couple of ex-colleagues. We three had a standing meeting every two weeks to go out for coffee and chat—it’s one of the few instances of cross-department communication in the organization.

Not much has changed in the six weeks since I left. Well, except the CEO, who’d been set to retire on 1 September, left suddenly. I mean—he was speaking at a users conference on a Friday and on the Monday there was an all-hands meeting at which the board chairman announced the CEO was gone and a former CEO would be filling in until a permanent one is found.

If anyone in the company knows why the sudden departure (without so much as a farewell email), they are not sharing the information.

Oh, and my ex-colleagues JC and LW have demonstrated their utter (and completely predictable) inability to understand anything about the IT system that’s necessary to launch the program. So, without me there, all those billable hours that the consulting company they hired spends with sock puppets and words of one syllable are going to mount up to serious money.

A lot more than they’d have spent paying me market rate to run the show.

I’m actually glad I’m no longer wrapped up in all that nonsense.

Between the pages

I came across a meme a while ago that reminded me of how Archie Goodwin described Nero Wolfe’s reading habits:

"I divide the books Nero Wolfe reads into four grades: A, B, C, and D. If, when he comes down to the office from the plant rooms at six o'clock, he picks up his current book and opens to his place before he rings for beer, and if his place was marked with a thin strip of gold, five inches long and an inch wide, which was presented to him some years ago by a grateful client, the book is an A. If he picks up the book before he rings, but his place was marked with a piece of paper, it is a B. If he rings and then picks up the book, and he had dog-eared a page to mark his place, it is a C. If he waits until Fritz has brought the beer and he has poured to pick up the book, and his place was dog-eared, it's a D. I haven't kept score, but I would say that of the two hundred or so books he reads in a year not more than five or six get an A." (Plot It Yourself)

I don’t recall whether Wolfe has ever not read a category D book all the way to the end.

Gratitude Monday: Getting up

This weekend we apparently had an equal number of white supremacist terrorists’ bullets and politicians’ thoughtsandprayers flying around, so it’s a tough Gratitude Monday and I’m taking it micro.

I was talking with a friend and former colleague on Friday, lining her up in case I need an employment reference, and I told her about #playingtowin. I commented that it’s a little bit late in the game to have learnt this; she shot back, “It’s not too late if you can still get up.”

I’m adding that to my arsenal, and that’s what I’m grateful for today.