2013--The wrap-up

Well, 2013 was an interesting year, wasn’t it? What—you can’t remember?

I’ll let Dave Barry remind you. I’m getting myself another glass of bubbly. See you in 2014.

Coffee with a snap

Still on the theme of veterans of our armed services, I just never get over how many ways there are to hang them out to dry. I mean—they suit up to do a necessary job that ranges from frequently boring and unpleasant to fatal, for completely crap pay, and basically no respect from the people they protect.

And when they get out, having been trained to do things like accurately fire the M4 carbine in tight situations, efficiently search vehicles for IEDs or maintain Apache attack helicopters in places you’d have trouble pronouncing—for some reason, no one wants to hire them to work in an office or a factory.

So—even though I’m not at all a fan of either their products or their ubiquity, I say big up to Starbucks for committing to a program to hire 10,000 vets over the next five years. They’ll be placed in a full range of positions from front-line baristas to corporate management.

And, since it’s ‘Bucks’ corporate policy to offer health coverage to all employees, they’ll have access to a full range of health care regardless of how many hours a week they work. Which wouldn’t be the case at other companies that have set up similar programs.

Yes, Walmart, that’s you I’m talking about.

One of the most telling aspects of the NPR story about this is the comment by Rob Pocarelli, the ex-JAG prosecutor who’s now a staff attorney at ‘Bucks. Before joining the coffee giant he was told by an interviewer that he might not be a good fit for the particular legal establishment because, “I think you’re going to find more of the intellectual type in the law firm environment.”

Yeah—because anyone stupid enough to say that, to a lawyer, in an interview is a mental giant.

Anyhow—props to Starbucks. I really hope this program is successful and that it goads other corporations to step up to the plate the way these veterans have done.

One more perfect day

There’s been a whole lot of verbiage swirling around the Internet about Lou Reed since he died Sunday at age 71. I really only knew him from his Velvet Underground days—which had to have been named after his voice.

But it turns out that Reed was an exceptionally thoughtful, intelligent and aware human, as well as a solid songwriter and performer. He performed at benefit concerts for Tibetan causes, for Amnesty International and the ACLU. Two years ago he joined protestors at Occupy Wall Street.

You get a strong feel for his brain and his heart in this review he wrote of Kanye West’s Yeezus.

I’m sharing two videos with you. The first is a montage that distills Reed’s creative process and shows his adeptness at dealing with interviewers. He pretty well obliterates the one with his monosyllabic responses from behind those shades. But when he talks with Rose about his purpose in writing, and how he thinks of his music as being one-on-one—damn.

I think Reed would have despised the unavoidable 30-second advertisement attached to it.

And here’s his “Perfect Day”.

Navy Yard victims: the list will grow

They’ve identified the 12 people who were murdered in Monday’s Navy Yard shooting spree. The media are crawling all over the families and neighbors, trying to get their backstories. No one seems to be bothering much with the eight more who were wounded, but I suppose they’ll come around.

Thing is—there are dozens more victims than the 20 they’re talking about. Everyone in Building 197 who had to evacuate under gunfire is a victim. Everyone on base who was under lockdown for hours while law enforcement officers tracked down and eventually killed the alleged shooter is a victim.

Everyone who went into work that morning expecting that the worst part of their day would be the five meetings they had to attend is a victim.

Here’s what I’m thinking about: as the investigators release the building, and as janitors wash away the blood, people will be coming back to work.

Twelve desks will need to be cleared out; sorting out the office supplies, and decisions made about the personal items found there. Someone’s going to have to box that stuff up and make sure it gets to the families of the dead. That’s going to hurt.

I’m thinking about those 12 empty chairs in Building 197. People will walk past them on their way to the coffee machine or one of the four meetings scheduled for the day, and they’ll remember that their colleagues won’t be coming back to sit there. Ever. That’s going to hurt.

Emails sent to mailing lists will bounce. Someone will get an auto-reply in their queue stating that such-and-such an address is not valid. That’s going to hurt.

Project threads have been broken. Tasks that were in hand by the various victims will have to be reassigned. Someone will have to go through PCs and paper files to find documents, spreadsheets, project plans, meeting notes: all those vital pieces that were in-progress until progress was stopped forever by a bullet. Then someone will have to pick up those pieces and carry on with them. That’s going to hurt.

In a hundred ways, every day for months now—the victim list of the Navy Yard shooting will grow.

So, no—not just 12 victims; not even just 20.

Oh—and we can add the this one to the list of non-discriminatory mass shootings in our great nation.

Now, Voyager

Ah, Voyager has left the building.

Yesterday NASA confirmed that the unmanned probe called Voyager 1, launched 36 years ago this month, has boldly gone where nothing from this planet has gone before. We’re pretty sure.

It’s doing a good job; but so is its sister craft. Voyager 2, is also still soldiering on. And I have a personal stake in V2.

Back in 1977 I was working for the Pasadena Star-News; I’d started as an intern at the beginning of the summer (just before my junior year in college), but when a couple of their reporters were invalided out, they brought me back as staff writer. Getting money to write stories every day. I thought I’d been hauled straight into heaven without all that pesky business of dying first.

They put me on General Assignment, with an emphasis on features, because it was always the human side of the stories that interested me. And I have a gift for it.

But on 20 August 1977, for some reason, the guy who reported the science beat wasn’t available to get out to Jet Propulsion Lab to cover the launch of Voyager 2 (which was sent up a couple of weeks before Voyager 1, but on a slower trajectory). So they sent me, one of my last assignments before the Fall semester started.

I didn't really know anything about the program, had never been to JPL, so I focused on what I do best: the people.

What I found was a bunch of mostly men (though a few women), in short-sleeved shirts, as high as it’s possible to be in a strict no-booze/no-drugs work environment. And before the days of energy-drinks. They were whooping and wheeing, just buzzing around the room like bees on supercharged pollen.

And what I remember was one of them explaining to me that what the whole Voyager program was “like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle with the picture side down and you’re not sure you have all the pieces.” But they were thoroughly and completely dedicated to putting that sucker together and figuring out what to do with the picture that emerged.

I often thought of that when I watched Space Shuttle launches (and disasters). It’s a tremendous leap of faith to embark on projects like that.

Speed well, Voyager.

Springtime for Hitler & Google

You know, that one clip from the film Downfall has to be the most recycled Academy Award nominee in history. It’s got more incarnations than the inhabitants of a large Tibetan monastery. You know the one: where Hitler is huddled in the Führerbunker deploying non-existent armies in the defense of Berlin while waiting for the Old Gods to smite the Red Army for good and all.

I myself have brought a couple to your attention: the one purporting to have our Adolf going mental at discovering CalTrans is going to close the 405 Freeway in LA, resulting in Carmageddon. He asks the eternal question: how’s he supposed to get to LAX? “Fucking Sepulveda? Please!”

I feel his pain.

And the one where he’s just learned what real defeat is: when your software hosting provider screws the pooch and you take a look at the fine print of your service level agreement (SLA). The thought of Hitler and Goering starting out programming in COBOL is just cherce.

But Third Reich 2.0’s latest installment (that I know of, as of this writing) gives new meaning to the tagline, “Don’t be evil.” It.has our intrepid Nazi receiving the news that Google Reader is shutting down, because the monolith needs to focus on a few products, like Google Glass. 

“Fuck those fucking glasses and the nerd they rode in on.” I’m looking forward to seeing those words on a tee-shirt sometime soon.

¡Daß ist ausgezeichnet!

Garage matters

For some reason this upper respiratory thing that attacked me last week has hung on like a baby gorilla and I’ve not dragged myself out of the house for several days (except to take walks, which is my substitute for going to the gym).

So it was a big deal that I got in my car to go to Whole Foods yesterday morning—the car’s not been out of the garage since Saturday.

But I also opened my second garage (yes, there are two that come with this flat—for which I’m paying a huge amount of rent; I use the second to store stuff like my good china, the bookcases I’m trying to get rid of and all the broken-down packing cartons for my next move, since the garage is so situated that you can’t actually get a car in or out of it) to find some old journals. And when I was pulling out of my car garage I realized the storage garage door hadn’t closed. It kept getting down about ¾ of the way and then just went back up.

I couldn’t get it to close. Which meant I couldn’t leave the place until it could somehow be made to close. Which meant I had to call the property management company, and the rep had to check this and that before she called a garage door company.

(The last time I actually opened this garage was December 2011, when I loaded up my mid-sized rental car to take 13 cartons of books to the used bookshop. There were cobwebs and stuff all over the thing. This complex was built in 1993; I’m sure everything in that door mechanism was original to that date.)

The short version of this story is that my day was pretty well shot, waiting for the repair guy.

But the good part is the repair guy, Bill. He must be 70, I swear, but still out fixing people’s garage door openers. He had to put this cable back on a reel—but then he went through tightening bolts, hammering the rails and spraying some industrial-strength type of WD40 on anything that moved. He even replaced the rollers, and you could hear the difference when the door slid open and shut.

Here’s the thing—Bill wasn’t interested in just doing a quick fix, he wanted to make sure the damned thing was well and truly fixed, that it wouldn’t give anyone any trouble anytime soon.

I’d forgot there were people who took such pride in their work that they go to that length.

So—not such a bad day after all.

Paper trail

You know, there are times when words are completely superfluous to requirements:

Up in the air

I am personally relieved that the TSA has now lifted the interdict on commercial airline passengers carrying pocket knives. They, souvenir baseball bats and golf clubs are now okayed for takeoff.

Not that the agency, following Polonius’ advice to be true to itself, seems to be able to explain exactly why they’re now okay but box cutters still aren’t. Possibly because no one will ever be able to say the words “box cutters” and “airline” and not see planes flying into buildings; but of course they wouldn’t say that even if it were true.

I’m relieved because I carry a Swiss army knife around with me all the time—it’s in the little bag with eye shadow, lipstick and the cheap-ass little nail file I got after my real one got confiscated by some airline in 2002. In addition to the two cutting blades, it has a slot screw-driver blade and a corkscrew. Now that they’re air-legal, so to speak, I don’t have to remember to remove it from my purse and leave it at home, or stick it into a carry-on bag which then has to be checked.

You never want to be without a corkscrew, in my opinion, and that’s why I applaud the TSA’s decision.

Welcome, 2013

You know what they say about New Year resolutions, right? They need to be specific, measurable, achievable and all that hoo-ha. And I’m working on them for my own life.

But I have…I guess it’s a wish, more than a resolution, and it involves the cooperation of a lot more folks out there.

What I’d like for 2013 is that I do not have to write one single post in response to some nutjob with automatic weapons who empties clip after clip into a church, school, mall, restaurant, office, university, movie theatre or any other public venue.

Work with me, people. We have to do better at this than we did last year.