More entertaining than the luge

The games have begun. You know—the 2014 Winter Olympics, in Sochi. Hey—it’s been in all the papers…

I’m not really big on winter sports, so I’ll be following at a distance. Especially since NBC is “covering” them for the US audience and that network couldn’t report a ham sandwich without Matt Lauer and Meredith Veiera blathering on and on for eight minutes about the lettuce.

But so far the Russian organizers (if I can actually use that term) have provided lots and lots of entertainment value, especially if you’re on social media. Because as of yesterday, there are lots of questions about whether this whole thing is actually coming, you know, together. In fact, they’re making the run-up to the London games of 2012 look positively streamlined by comparison.

The thing is—while they seem to have got the Olympic Village put up (somewhat Spartan, but at least complete with such amenities as working plumbing and functional doorknobs), as far as the accommodation for journalists goes, uh, not so much.

And we know this because the journos have been tweeting it. For example, Shaun Walker, of the Guardian:

Or Kevin Bishop of the BBC:

But I think my favorite (so far) is Stacy St. Clair, of the Chicago Trib. She has this thing going about the water that is not to be missed.

The Russians got so tired of all the whining about no doorknobs and unsafe face water that Dmitry Kozak, the minister in charge of prep for the games, told a reporter (and I am not making this up) that “We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.”

Which might be indicative that the plumbing is, in fact, working. And that there’s no problem with connectivity. But a horrified aide to Kozak pulled away the reporter before a follow-up question could be asked about installing cameras in hotel bathrooms.

Later on a spokesperson denied all ideas of surveillance in hotel rooms or bathrooms. But, I dunno; there might be temptations of getting some viral stuff going. We should ask the NSA about this.

Naturally, there is now an @SochiProblems Twitter account. At the time of writing, it had more than 110K followers.

The official Twitter account of the Sochi Olympics has 127K followers.

And there is another parody account, Sochi Problems. All those tweets begin, “C’mon guyz…”

God bless the Internet.

Slippery slope

This amusing photo came around on social media a while ago:

But it got me to thinking about the place I lived in Seoul—a complex of 12 six-story apartment buildings (half with indoor toilets; none with elevators). The play area was behind my building. It consisted of a sandbox and a slide. The slide was in the shape of an elephant:

And the entire thing was made of concrete, including the elephant’s-trunk slidy part. Unpolished concrete. If it had ever been painted, that had long since been worn away by little butts.

Not so bad in winter, of course, but in summer…

Well, as you can see, the kids didn’t seem to mind about it. In fact, they very seldom bothered with the actual steps.

And if they’d still had the box it came in, I’m sure they’d have had a grand time playing in that, as well.

Large whisky, please

Apparently giant cracks have appeared in the earth’s surface and the sun did not come out this morning, because Americans are being out-drunk (per capita) in the whiskey stakes. By the French. And by the Uruguayans.

This according to a story encapsulated in the Washington Post last month. Here it is, in shocking pink:

It came to my attention via one of the email lists I’m on, and of course I was stunned. Not by the French so much (although I really don’t feature them drinking mass quantities of Johnny Walker or Jim Beam when they've got Courvoisier) as by the Uruguayans. I mean—what’s going on there?

Plus—United Arab Emirates coming in ahead of the UK?

So naturally I did a bit of further research. Basically all that accomplished was to confirm Mark Twain’s observation about lies, damned lies and statistics. Really hard to get down to comparing whiskey with whiskey—or even with whisky. The Economist broke out Scotch, but not other types of whiskies, but still had France ahead of the US and Britain (but no sign of UAE or Uruguay):

Of course, everyone is pretty much a piker when compared to the Russians. They apparently suck down 13.9 liters of vodka each year—about seven times the next load of lushes (the French and 1.9 liters of Scotch). They should have made it an Olympic sport.

(I suppose they still could if things don’t pick up in Sochi pretty sharpish.)

I did not find anything else pointing up UAE, which of course comprises seven emirates, with Islam being their state religion. I don’t know where you’d find data on alcohol consumption in a place like that, where it is apparently sold legally, but you need to get a drinking license from the government to, you know, imbibe.

The population is about 9.2 million people, but the impression I’m getting is that liquor concessions are only made for foreigners, not citizens. So someone is drinking a whole lot extra to make up for the majority. Could there really be that many ex-pats and tourists there to account for the per capita statistics? If so, how the hell are they not in a permanent state of picklement?

Well, I dunno. But I’d purely like to be on the research team that sorts it out. And finds out what’s up with the Uruguayans, too, while we’re at it.

Drinks of detection

Last month I wrote about tea and coffee in a general way. I also introduced you to Reginald Hill, one of the finest writers of detective fiction ever. Now, while Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield almost never drink anything without some considerable alcoholic content, tea does loom large in several detective series of my memory.

Going back farthest, the year I graduated from college I was introduced to Arthur Upfield’s novels about a half-Aboriginal detective inspector named Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police. Bony applies his understanding of both the land and humans of all varieties in solving crimes from the 1930s to the 1950s.

I have no take whatsoever on the accuracy of these “skills”, but they’re excellent story devices, and Upfield used them the way Tony Hillerman did with his Navajo detectives, Jim Chee and (to a lesser degree) Joe Leaphorn. (Chee and Leaphorn are coffee drinkers, though.)

(Let me just point out that having two of the best writers of police procedurals so close together on the “H” library shelf has made my patronage quite efficient.)

Anyhow, my recollection is that when Bony needs to step back from a problem, he often brews up a cuppa using his billy can over a small fire. He never goes anywhere without his billy.

By way of indicating how this sort of device can affect the reader, my sister started reading the novels during one of her summer breaks, and she was quite taken by that whole tea thing. Story is that in the wee hours of the night one time, her husband came out and found her in the kitchen making tea to accompany whatever book it was she was immersed in at the moment.

“What are you doing?” he asked, never having seen her make actual, you know, tea before.

“I’m boiling my billy,” she replied.

He retreated back to bed.

In Alexander McColl Smith’s series about Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe (which begins with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency), things also move slowly, in the rhythm of nature. Bush tea becomes a mechanism for Precious to encourage an emotional client to divulge the nature of his/her problem, or to focus her own mind on a case.

Well, I actually think she must have it delivered to her office in industrial quantities, because she goes through a lot of it. Like Bony, Precious relies on her understanding of the largely rural country around her, and her insights into human emotions, to solve her clients’ problems.

I was introduced to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency at a dinner party a few years ago in Palm Springs. Several of the women were reading the series and they recommended it to me; one gave me about five of the books. They also discussed the whole bush tea thing.

Turns out that bush tea is Rooibos, “a broom-like member of the legume family of plants growing in South Africa’s fynbos”. The same woman who gave me the books said that she’d been so interested in it that she’d gone out and bought some. I asked her how she liked it, but she shook her head. Not much, apparently.

Still—when you’re reading something like that, you have to give it a try. I did, and I tend to agree with her—probably an acquired taste.

Finally, another sort of tea figures heavily in the series by Eliot Pattison about Shan Yao Yun, a Beijing police inspector who ran afoul of the Party and was sent to prison camps in Tibet. The books are very well written, to the point that they’re actually harrowing to read at times. (And you understand that, as a military historian, I come across some ghastly stuff; so when I say “harrowing”, I mean that I’ve had to put the book down and literally walk away from it for a while.)

During his imprisonment with “outlaw” lamas, over the course of the series, Shan comes to understand the land and people of Tibet, knowledge which he uses to unravel complex and delicate problems. (Anything that puts you in the way of the Chinese government is de facto complex—and life threatening.) The beverage of choice here, though, is something called po cha, butter tea. It’s made from tea leaves, yak butter and salt.

Whether this would be an acquired taste or not, I can’t say, as so far I’ve not found any butter tea to try here in the Valley they call Silicon. Lack of yaks might be part of the problem. I imagine yak butter would be extremely expensive.

But if I do come across it, I’ll let you know.

Gratitude Monday: Public radio pledging

On this Gratitude Monday, I’m giving it up for my local NPR outlet, KQED. I’m thankful that they’re there to give me Morning Edition and All Things Considered (weekdays and weekends), and for Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me; Fresh Air; Car Talk; World; and other programs. NPR is my primary source for news, both on air and online; and for on air that means KQED.

Plus, unlike their sister TV station, they only run pledge drives about three times a year. (I swear KQED-TV trots out the tired old warhorses and guilt-trip interruptions on average three weeks out of seven.)

In the past, I’ve donated money, but this year I decided to volunteer. So if you called for the past few mornings between 0700 and 0900, you might have got me at the other end of the line. It was an interesting experience.

First of all, let me remark on how good-natured the pledgers are. The very first day of the drive, the KQED people didn’t actually have all the systems properly set up (which seems odd, because after all, this definitely ain’t their first rodeo), and their idea of training on both the computer and the phones was a little on the sketchy side. But callers were really exceptionally patient as I stumbled through the various screens.

Thankfully, they did have an address verification capability that meant all you needed to do was input the street address and a ZIP code, and it filled in the city and state. This was apparently from the USPS, which is interesting, because my experience with USPS reps back in December seemed to indicate that they themselves aren’t capable of extrapolating that information from a ZIP code.

Naturally, most contributors were calling in for the “thank-you gifts”. Because they’re trying to encourage sustaining (= never-ending) membership, there were only two levels of giving that got you gifts, $15/month and $30/month. At the higher amount, the one gift on offer was 125 years of National Geographic on DVD-ROM, which wouldn’t have inspired me (and they’ve been giving that away for a couple of years), although you also got to choose any of the ones being offered at the lower level.

Those, in my opinion, varied in attractiveness. One (which they apparently thought was going to be a door-buster) was Season 4 (currently being broadcast) of Downton Abbey on DVD or Blu-Ray. Listen, you couldn’t pay me enough to have that in my house, and it did not seem to be raking the callers in. (The Soda-Stream water carbonator was somewhat more attractive, as was a water purifier. Although they did make me wonder about the quality of the local water systems.)

On the other hand, if they’d just consistently offered the AAA backpack with emergency kit and Rugged Ruckus solar-powered radio (with USB port so you can charge your mobile phone), they could have ended the entire pledge drive after about five days. (Instead, they parceled them out ten or so per nine-minute break, so that if you called after all ten had been taken, you were stuck with Downton Abbey. So people rang off to call back another time.)

Not everyone was in it for the giveaways, though. I had a couple of callers who made their pledges and refused the gifts on offer. And one woman raised her monthly pledge from $2 per month to $5, which (when you think of it) is more than doubling the commitment.

And there was one guy who called not to pledge, but to express his disgust that the gift for that break was four tickets to the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, because Disney was a “known fascist”. (There was no real mechanism for me to take his complaint, so I gave him the number of member services.)

My fellow volunteers were interesting. One day I was seated next to Pep Squad Girl—you know the one you went through high school with, who oozes perkiness in equal measure with omniscience. I rather got the feeling that the rest of us were surplus to requirements with her in the room; had this image of her answering multiple lines simultaneously and sprouting octopi tentacles to enter data into three rows of laptops…

There was also one guy with Ted Baxter hair and an ego to match. All conversation with him was a pivot for him to talk about himself. After a while I was taking the (very polite) piss; but he never noticed.

One last interesting point for me was the whole concept of the relativity of time. The nine-minute pledge breaks (two per hour) just whizzed by when I was answering phones. But when I’m listening to them, they last about 20 minutes, just like they always do.

Still, I’m grateful for public radio, for the people who support it, and for the opportunity to get in there and help out from the inside.

Another modest proposal

Oh, dear, oh, dear—evidently the House of Windsor’s house is not at all in order. Queen Elizabeth II has overspent on household maintenance, and she’s down to her last £1MM in reserves. (Question: Couldn’t she just check between the sofa cushions? Gotta be a few million quid there—she must have a lotta sofas, no?)

Horrors!

And even with the profligacy, royal residences are said to be in poor condition, and HM needs more dosh to attend to the deficiencies.

The parliamentary report recommends that the Queen (well, her minions, really) should do more in the way of cost-cutting—by which they actually mean “lay off employees”, keeping the public sector (well, I dunno—is the Royal Household considered “public”? Oh, never mind) in line with private sector strategies of not bothering with improvements or innovations when you can just sack the staff.

It actually used the phrase “do more with less”, which has to eat the Royal Lunch.

There’s also a recommendation to increase revenues, and one suggestion was that Buckingham Palace should be opened to more paying visitors during times when HM is not in residence.

Well, let an American product manager who has no qualms about thinking outside the box propose they go a couple of steps further. I’m talking Bucks House B&B. This is not even an untried idea—the French have done it with one of the sub-palaces at Versailles.

Of course, they’re probably serving better food, but still.

Really—there are all kinds of tourists with more money than brains who’d pay premium prices to spend a night at the palace and shoot out selfies at a rate of knots. And I’m sure there are plenty of spare bedrooms that could be dusted off and hawked on hotels.com or Room 77.

Although—I’m wondering how many of the bedrooms have en-suite bathrooms? How would said tourists feel about paying £700 per night for a single bed and a loo down the corridor shared with yahoos from Utah, Uganda and Uzbekistan?

Then there’s the breakfast of cornflakes and cold toast under the beady stare of HM’s serving staff. (Well, more likely underemployed yoofs brought in on zero-hour contracts and tricked out in livery to look like the real thing. But they’ll be trained to get the snoot effect down.) What the hell—charge extra if they want an actual meal—it’s the palace, for heaven’s sakes; you could get away with £65 for the full English, including VAT.

Yeah, I know—they’d have to worry about folks nicking the towels or the spoons. Although, look—you’ve got their credit card details; just tack on £35 per spoon and £100 per towel. You can really revenue-spin the hell out of this. And you’d keep the linen and cutlery factories going, so a bonus on the employment front.

(Unless, of course said factories are in Bangladesh. Um.)

Okay—we do have to work out some details, including shaping HM’s head about the concept of sharing. It seems she was pretty cheesed off by police on patrol eating the palace peanuts. And we know this because she marked the level in the bowls of nuts around the place (yes, with her own royal hands and an imperial Magic Marker) and then let it be known that she was not amused.

But look—package up said peanuts in two-ounce packets stamped “By Appointment to the Queen” and sell ‘em for £5 a pop. It’s all good.

And, Windsors—you’re welcome.

Coffee connectivity

I know my way around the various coffee shops in the Valley they call Silicon—excepting Starbucks, whenever I can avoid them. (But then they’re pretty much all of a muchness, a dreary, synthetic, bitter-tasting muchness; so maybe I do know my way around them.)

And it’s been my observation ever since coffee shops started offering free Wi-Fi (again, Starbucks tried muscling its patrons to pay for the privilege, but eventually had to cave) that all kinds of people use them as an alternative (or perhaps even as a primary) workspace. I’ve been on con-calls for more than ten years where one or more participants was in some coffee shop, for a number of reasons.

Now, I understand that giving away Internet access is basically inviting people to park their cheap asses at a table in your establishment for hours, for the $3.00 you charge for a cup of coffee—especially if your refills are free. (Starbucks? Ha!) So it’s got to be a dicey trade-off for management: do we offer free Wi-Fi and risk table hogs, or do we not offer it and lose business from all those people who won’t come in without it?

(It’s curious that coffee shops in Europe—London and Wiesbaden being two locations—are charging customers by the minute, not the purchase. Presumably they’re assuming that people are there more for the connectivity than for the coffee. I shall follow this potential trend with interest.)

As you might imagine, here in the Valley they call Silicon, it’s the rare occasion when you see someone sat at a coffee shop table without a laptop or tablet. Even when there are several people sat at the table engaging in acts of pseudo-IRL-sociability. Clearly, free Wi-Fi is kind of a basic cost of doing business here.

So it’s really a puzzle to me that local bakery-café chain Le Boulanger is so lackadaisical about the Internet access in its outlets. (Or maybe it’s that they’re just cheap.) They went from a system where you just connected to their network to requiring that you log in via an online app; but getting that web page to come up is actually quite dodgy. (The app requires that you log in via Facebook, Twitter or an email account. Seriously? I use other people’s email addresses.)

I quit going to the one in Mountain View because of this inconsistent access—and because when their network went down, their staff just said, “Yeah, it’s not working.” No back-up, no work-around; basically, “Not our problem.” (Even when it was operational, I swear it was powered by a couple of elderly and very tired hamsters, barely managing DSL speed.)

And there’s a Panera Bread about a mile away with a bitchin network.

Yesterday I was in the Boulanger store in Cupertino—with Mountain View, probably the vortex of techdom, what with Apple and Google representing the hardware and software meccas—and again ran into that “you must log on to access our network” combined with “but we’re not going to display the log-on page for you” conundrum. And I also ran into that “not our problem” staff attitude.

I asked a fellow typing on his Mac if he was using the restaurant Wi-Fi; he told me it hasn’t been working reliably for months. And he’s told the staff about it, repeatedly, but received nothing but the shrug…

And here’s the thing: within a couple hundred yards of this place, there are a Panera, a Peet’s, a Philz and a Paris Baguette, all with free Internet access. (There’s a Boudin Bakery, too; but they don’t offer Wi-Fi at all.) Even techies can manage to walk that distance.

It’s an interesting strategy—advertise that you have Internet access, but make it nigh-on impossible for your customers to use it. I suppose it saves a few coins here and there, but it will eventually cut into your repeat business.

In fact, I just give up on Le Boulanger; it’s not worth the annoyance of showing up, either alone or to meet up with someone, and not know whether you’re going to be able to do real work while you’re there. And believe me—the quality of the food is not such that it compensates for that.

Turn, turn, turn

Wow. A giant has passed—Pete Seeger died Monday at age 94.

Those of you raised in the age of industrial or grunge rock—or probably everything post-disco—no doubt are scratching your heads wondering who he was (other than quite old, of course). Well—you might have caught him singing for President Obama’s first Inauguration. If so, no doubt you wondered who the hell he was.

Ah, children—beginning his career during the Great Depression and continuing pretty much literally to his death, Seeger was a folksinger, a writer, an activist (labor, civil rights, peace, environment—his passions ran both deep and wide), a humanist. Seeger was old while he was young and young while he was old. He displayed courage and grace the likes of which you don’t see in any music celebrity today.

I mean: do you feature Daft Punk or M.C. Hammer facing down the House Un-American Activities Committee, and being willing to go to prison for it?

No, I didn’t think so. But Seeger did that in 1955, at the height of the McCarthy frenzy, refusing either to name names or to take shelter behind the Fifth Amendment. Actually—here’s what he said:

“I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature… I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Possibly one of the most concise and eloquent statements of what an upright American should be in the face of ignorance, fear, intimidation or wrongheadedness, in any form and from anyone, but especially from one’s government.

Seeger pioneered the way for so many of my musical heroes—from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. I must have first been introduced to him via the Byrds’ cover of “Turn, Turn, Turn”. But I couldn’t have escaped into adulthood without “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome” (you should hear Dr. Loco and the Rockin’ Jalapeño Band’s version), “If I Had a Hammer”, “Which Side Are You On?”, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”… Oh, hell—you catch my drift.

One of the many recordings I have of him is this one, for a PBS show on his friends Woody Guthrie and Huddie William Ledbetter (better known as Leadbelly). “This Land Is Your Land” may have been his signature piece, though Guthrie wrote it, and he commands the performance, even surrounded by such powerhouses as Sweet Honey in the Rock, Springsteen and John Mellencamp:

He was a gregarious and generous performer, which you can see from any videos of his concerts. He was made to be with an audience, not record in a studio. Here he is with Johnny Cash, on the latter’s TV show:

Or this one with Woody’s boy Arlo:

On of the best concerts I ever went to was Arlo and Pete at the Greek Theatre. A magical experience.

But it turns out he was totally down with social media, too—with both Twitter and Facebook accounts. I love his Twitter profile:

And here are a couple of his tweets from last month:

Well, I’ve been listening to his stuff for the past day—just letting YouTube take me where it will. At 94, Pete Seeger’s earned some rest; he had a wonderful, remarkable life. As he used to sing again and again, there is a season for everything. God rest you, Pete.

Off message

You know, I’m not sure whether I’m being petty, hard-assed or just age-related cranky, but I have to say that—as a person for whom clear communication has been at the core of everything I’ve done since I started speaking in complete sentences—people who share Inspirational or Amusing Messages would find me more receptive if their billet-doux weren’t full of misspellings, grammatical errors and sloppy imagery.

For instance:

So much for Web wit.

But on the Metaphysical side, we have this:

And not only does the misuse of “it’s”, along with the pronoun-antecedent disconnect (body and ego plural/it, singular); if the producer had got that right s/he’d have had the chance to misuse “they’re” or “there”) make my jaws clamp, but I’m lost trying to connect the “love and light” thing with what follows. I guess we’re meant to infer that “love and light” equate to the spirit, but I’m just not sure.

Honestly—this sort of thing gives New Agers a bad name.

Gratitude Monday: Good influence

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for a friend (with whom I’ve been out of touch for a few years) who suddenly appeared via social media to thank me for something I really had no idea I’d done.

Seems that Lisa’s work colleagues voted her the “most influential” person in her company. And she thinks that somehow I was, well, influential in her success.

While I’m not so sure about that—Lisa’s always struck me as being highly self-propelled and able to manage very complex operations under less-than-optimal conditions (and make it seem effortless)—it was such a blessing for me to hear that she thinks I’m somehow part of that.

I’m also somewhat chuffed to think that I might somehow, under some circumstances, be an influencer.

And finally, I’m reminded of all the times Lisa and I got together during my years in the UK—to discuss work situations (both of us were in sales support; we comprised 50 percent of team members with the XX chromosome configuration, out of about 30 total), translate cultural differences between the US and the UK, and just, in general, exchange ideas. She was a sounding board and a reality check, both of which I really needed during my sojourn there.

(There was also the episode of “confronting our demons”, which you’ll be interested to know was not proposed by the fourth-generation Californian, but which came from the Welsh girl. It was an exceptionally good idea; and in the process I learned that Lisa likes Champagne as much as I do. Which is great, because I had been rather concerned about the quantities of Lucozade she used to consume.)

Anyhow, it was a sheer blessing that Lisa appeared this past week to bring all this back to me, and I’m deeply grateful for it. And for her.