Be very afraid

Eh, evidently things are not all well in the halls of non-profits.

Or, to be more specific, things are bloody awful in the computer server room.

I got in to work yesterday morning and noticed goofy-looking bird-prints on the floor of the atrium outside my office. And scratch marks on the walls.

Well—turns out there was more going on than Big Bird:

Looks like there was some kind of violent incident around the entry to the server room…

And signs of terrible things in the room itself:

In fact, there was a warning on the door to the work area:

I think they’re going to have to reset the days-since notice:

Well done, computer guys. Well done.

Makes my little office door decoration look like the toddler class of Halloween style.

Health and something

A couple of weeks ago, our HR department held a “health and wellness fair”. There were vendors ranging from a health-focused chef serving salad-in-a-jar to mini-massages and a bank.

First off, I’m of the opinion that HR ought to eat its vegetables before it gets dessert, so I’d rather have them focus on things like timely responses to emails, managing benefits and shortening the hiring sequence from months to weeks. However, I thought I’d go down to see what was happening.

Second, I’m not exactly sure what a bank has to do with health and fitness, but whatever.

As part of the event, you carried a paper with your name on it around and got little stickers until you filled up the little sticker area, and dumped it into a box for a raffle.

Frankly, I was perfectly happy with that salad—you put the dressing in the bottom and then layer in a bunch of ingredients until you get to the greens, which in this case included spinach and watercress, and then when you’re ready to eat, you shake up the jar and bob’s your uncle.

That salad was so good that I actually went back down to the fair to thank the chef.

At any rate, I forgot about it until last week when one of my office neighbors appeared in my door while I was working on a PowerPoint deck, and he congratulated me.

Bas Bleu: “Hanh?”

Colleague: “You won a prize.”

Bas Bleu: “Hanh?”

Colleague: “You won a raffle prize. The email just came around.”

Well, it hadn’t for me, but it appeared shortly. And blow me if he wasn’t right: I won something called a NutriBullet.

Bas Bleu: “What’s a NutriBullet?”

Colleague: “I don’t know.”

We both frantically Googled it, he on his mobile phone and I on my desktop. Turns out it’s one of those mini blenders, only this one insists it’s not a blender, but something much better.

Because it “expertly pulverizes fruits, vegetables, superfoods and protein shakes.” Jeez—superfoods? It had to be superfoods?

I looked at the list of prizes and said, “I would have liked one of the massages.” My colleague said, “I’d like the Fitbit.” (Only, of course, he’d have had to go to the fair to be entered in the raffle, wouldn’t he?)

Well, it turns out that this thing will also pulverize ice, and you can make margaritas with it. So it might be a good thing after all.

Hombres y hambre

Something occurred to me as I observed the #badhombres hashtag flying around social media (and being printed onto tee shirts, available for $19.99 plus shipping) since the last presidential debate.

What if the Chaos Monkey was actually saying “bad hambre”—as in, he was really, really hungry? Bigly?

If so, then he should be grateful that we possibly face a future with taco trucks on every corner.

Something that's not alligators

So, an emu named Taco walks into a bar…

No, I have not been hitting the sauce. Nor, apparently, did Taco, who was spooked by a neighbor’s dog into jumping her human’s six-foot garden fence and went walkabout.

It was in Florida. Of course.

And how do you round up an emu? “It’s like catching a giant chicken,” said Cpl. David Jacobs, of the Brevard County Sheriff’s office.

That’s gotta be the quote of the year.

Gratitude Monday: presidential choice

As we stagger into the final weeks of this appalling election, I take heart in the small signs that not everyone in this country—or even in this city—has completely lost their sense of humor.

I work in the downtown area of the District They Call Columbia, a block from the Metro Center station. This area has many established fixtures, including a few homeless people who appear there come day, go day, around the calendar; some panhandle, some talk to invisible forces, some just seem to live there.

But one day last August, on my way to the salad bar place, around the Marriott Metro Center Hotel I saw several men dressed in old olive drabs, each with a dog in harness. One was sitting right at the corner of the hotel’s froofy restaurant. As people passed by him he held up a hand-lettered sign that could, I suppose, be construed as extortion.

“$1 or I’m voting for Trump.”

I laughed, but kept on walking, because salad. But I considered the pitch and on my way back to work I asked, “What’s written on the other side?” Yes, it was “$1 or I vote for Hillary.”

(I'm not sure how he assessed pedestrians to determine which side to show. Maybe he didn't; just held up whatever. But he looked pretty savvy.)

Well, I don’t carry cash on my lunch runs, so I took my salad back to the office and rummaged around for a fiver. I got it and my camera and walked back out to his corner. I asked if it was okay if I took his photo, and he said yes. Then I handed him the fiver and told him, “Vote whichever way you please.”

By the time I was heading home, he and his mates were gone, and I’ve not seen them since. I hope they’ve got something better going on for them. But in the meantime, I look back at that clever and amusing hook and I’m grateful for the reminder—from a somewhat unlikely source—that not everyone in this country has lost their minds over this election. I’m holding on to that for the next month.

Real hombres don't read books

I’m not going to comment on Wednesday’s debate between the major presidential candidates, except perhaps to give thanks that it’s the final one.

However, as you might imagine, I’ve got some Twitter-love to share. Because, starting with a comment from a Saint Louis alderman, the hashtag #TrumpBookReport just took off like a Chinese rocket.

Here’s the original tweet:

And here are some random samplings of the responses:

Naturally, more than a few Chaos Monkey supporters missed the point, viz.:

And then there was this chick, who not only missed the point, she didn’t quite get the whole “bad hombres” thing.

But on the whole, Twitter buried them all.

Dear old dad

Two photos defining good parenting came across my social media recently. Specifically, parenting on the father side.

First off was this one:

One of my Twitter followers thought this was kind of abusive, but from the look on that girl’s face, I believe she’s learnt her lesson. Someone said, “I bet she thinks three times before she skips school again!” I replied, “Bet she’s begging her parents to transfer her to another school. In another city.”

But if you do think this is way harsh, here’s the antidote:

You’re welcome.

Langue et langage

As you know, I enjoy the virtues and vicissitudes of language—any language, I ain’t proud. So this BBC vignette rather appeals to me: linguists sharing their favorite idiomatic expressions from various languages. The ones that don’t quite translate into English.

The Polish one—not my circus, not my monkeys—actually is reasonably transferrable. Lord knows we’ve got a full-bore circus going on, with plenty of monkeys.

(I guess that an expression on our side of the language barrier that might be equivalent is the somewhat wordier “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Usually said just before one packs up for the day and leaves.)

The one here I particularly like is the Chinese phrase about the grass mud horse. That’s because it’s a homonym of the Chinese equivalent of “yo mama”. This syllabic slitheriness reminds me of a slightly roundabout play on words that starts with the French “ouate de phoque”—a homophone for the English whiskey-tango-foxtrot? (Which in French is actually translated to “c’est quoi ce bordel?”)

Only the actual English translation of ouate de phoque is “seal wadding”.

I learned this from a multilingual Facebook friend. Occasionally when he posts something that strikes me as beyond the beyond, I’ll comment “Seal wadding!”, and he has to explain it to others.

Well, perhaps it doesn’t sound as amusing to you as it does to me. Because you just can’t make this stuff up. Unless you’re a linguist, I suppose.

Algo roulette

Y’all know how interesting I find algorithms used for search and for serving ads. (One of the worst instances of the latter actually came from the LA Times; that one is forever printed on my cortex.)

Well, here’s another example that I find deliciously perplexing, served up by YouTube, a Google property:

I mean—are the people who’d listen to Tom Waits and Bette Middler singing a smoldering “I Never Talk to Strangers” likely to be in the market for dating Arabian women? Conversely, are the people interested in dating same likely to be listening to Waits and Middler?

I didn’t click on the link, so I can’t tell if the “dating” site is an iteration of Eastern European women who really, really want to be friends with you. Or what. I just don’t really want to know. I am kind of wondering what, exactly, that algorithm is smoking.

But I’m betting that somehow Facebook is going to be showing me more of similar sites.

Gratitude Monday: what a year

I was riding Metro to work Thursday morning when I realized that precisely a year before I was getting ready for a job interview. The interview, in fact, that brought me to the District They Call Columbia.

It was also the last time I spoke with my BFF: I walked back to my hotel after the interview, kicked off those interview shoes and dialed her to report on the whole thing. How I actually enjoyed talking with the panel of seven, was psyched up by the challenge, loved being in the city in October. She was drifty because of the morphine, but nonetheless expressed her excitement, and made a joke about my one competitor for the job.

Our last laugh.

It’s been a taxing year since that day, and I’m only now starting to feel like I might be getting my head around what I need to do, how to frame my communications, where I need to be. Many rivers to cross, of course, but I can do it.

So today I’m grateful for the way things finally came together, and for the opportunities ahead.