My brush with stardom

I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1950s Hollywood movie stars. I think it’s because in those movies (which I mostly saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movies) they seemed so far removed from any reality that touched me. There was no way that I could connect with them.

So when a Navy videographer friend of mine came into town one summer with his team for a project with Kirk Douglas, I though the invitation to shoot the production stills as more of a lark than anything else. (I love shooting those.)

The spot was part of what was called “Sitrep 30”—a half-hour of essentially newsreel-type news that was broadcast at Navy installations and on ships. The film The Final Countdown (about the supercarrier USS Nimitz being thrown back in time to December 1940 near the Hawaiian Islands; Douglas played the captain) had just been released, and the team’s commander had managed to wangle the star into a pro bono voiceover narration, with stand-ups for the beginning and the end.

I helped edit the script the night before, and on the day, we converged on the Helmsman statue at a small park in Marina Del Rey. We got set up and Douglas showed with his lawyer/manager—he was apparently on his way to evict a tenant from one of the condos he owned in the area.

Well, it was not a felicitous experience—Douglas kept flubbing his lines for the standups, so the commander had to quickly write up gigantic cue cards. Then the soundman kept having to re-record, what with the air horns from boats in the marina and take-offs and landings at nearby LAX. The actor was impatient with it all, so we did a bit of scrambling.

But eventually we got enough to go with, and I got to shoot about a gazillion frames. (I was loaded with two Nikons, one for black-and-white and one for color.) Here are a couple:

His obits said that he was active in the community, and a major factor in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Maybe he was just having a bad day. And so may his memory be a blessing.

Also toadies

You’re familiar with collective nouns, right? An army of ants. A fleet of ships. A flock of sheep. A murder of crows…

Yesterday we all learned the collective noun for lickspittles: a Senate.

But he's still impeached.

Belief systems

Apropos of nothing, really—except that at time of writing we still haven’t seen Cadet Bonespurs deliver his willie-waving SOTU address—here’s something I shot on one of my walks.

It’s good to know that people have strong beliefs.

I believe I’ll have another drink.

The best medicine

It says something—a great deal, tbh—about where we are that #StoneColdIdiot can trend on Twitter and everyone in the world knows immediately who that idiot is. (Former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill used the phrase in response to the Kleptocrat’s tweet about the Kansas City Chiefs doing “the great state of Kansas” proud in the Super Bowl on Sunday. He’s clearly a guy who not only could not find Ukraine on a map, but he couldn’t find Missouri on one, either.)

He’s going to be acquitted by the gutless lickspittle Republican-controlled Senate tomorrow. They fear his tweets more than they honor the Constitution or their sworn oaths of office and of this process. A few of them have gone on TV to proclaim that he’s surely learned his lesson from this experience, so we won’t have to worry about him abusing his office again. That’s their lame rationale for absolving themselves of the need to convict and remove him from office.

Anyone with three synapses firing in sequence (which does in fact include many Republicans) knows this is utterly false. Cadet Bonespurs is incapable of learning anything, much less how to act like a President of the United States and conduct himself with the dignity befitting the office. And his red-hatted goober fans will cheer him on regardless. (Actually, they’ll cheer him on because he won’t learn and will continue his increasingly slurred and staggering capering about the world’s stage. In this he is their true representative.) So, he’ll declare a major victory against decency and up his campaign fundraising.

(Also, apparently, he'll go after the people on his enemies list. Just like a mob boss.)

My take is that he’ll certainly feel so empowered by this experience that he turns the State of the Union address tonight into one of his campaign rallies, lying for however long he can stand while Republican Senators and Representatives fill in for the MAGAts, cheering him on. But here’s my hope:

The instant he opens his yap, Democrats should start laughing. Maybe just a few chuckles and giggles to begin with. But they should move into guffaws and belly laughs until the entire chamber is roaring with hilarity. If there’s one thing in the world he can’t bear, it’s ridicule. (Remember how he took his tiny balls home early from NATO after that video of world leaders poking fun at him?) Just keep slapping your knees and holding your sides until he shuts up and leaves.

I’m thinking of the Star Trek episode, “Day of the Dove”, where the Federation crew and the Klingons stop fighting one another and instead laugh. It kills the entity that was feeding on their hate and fury. I say we should give it a shot here. It’s one thing that will get the #StoneColdIdiot’s attention. And his goat.

Gratitude Monday: purposeful work

Last week was quite the marathon at work. As I mentioned in my post on Friday, I had 25 meetings, 20 of which I scheduled. There’s a lot of stuff we in product management have against our names this year, and I was really hoping that the four two-hour sessions I put into the books would give us a leg up.

We had a kind of a spanner tossed into the works on Tuesday, when a Big Wheel showed up and took over two meetings (nearly three hours), pontificating on How Things Will Be to both engineering and PM. There are reasons why he’s been asked to do this, but the jury’s still out pondering whether he’s a savior or a seagull.

(Seagull managers are ones that swoop in, crap on everything and fly away, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.)

And by “the jury” I mean “me”.

Even so, we got a metric ton of work done, and made significant progress on the Brioche project, if not so much on PM’s strategy. Turns out that, when you’re working for a cybersecurity company, standing up an application for external testing involves at least two metric tons of boxes to tick, from stakeholders I’d never even heard of before last month.

Just before he got on a flight back to Amsterdam on Friday, the leader of the team building Brioche thanked me for all the hard work I’d put in throughout the week. They really needed me to be on top of all the box-tickings, because if I weren’t, we’d be delayed forever; this is stuff they didn’t know about before last month. I replied that this would be the first time I’ve ever said this about a week of 25 meetings, but it was a pleasure.

And it was—not seven hours of back-to-backs on Tuesday, or Mr. BW, maybe. But pulling together people and plans and feeling like I made valuable contributions was indeed a pleasure. Which extended into the weekend, when I got together with MG to plan the agenda and create a preso for a meeting today at 0930 with Mr. BW, to explain Project Brioche to him and help him decide to keep the project going.

I realized while out on a walk yesterday that I’d have resented the hell out of spending a few hours on my weekend on any project for my last three employers. But I jumped right on it this time because keeping Brioche going is important to the company, and because I do not want to let my team down, even a little bit. They get everything I’ve got.

And that is my gratitude today—to be part of a team that inspires me to be better and work harder. It’s definitely part of #playingtowin.