More power to the people

Posting Amazon’s elusive customer service number, it occurred to me that I know of another boon to the consuming public: there’s a website that aggregates the magic touches it takes to escape phone tree hell & speak to an actual humanoid when you call an organization.

I hope the Nobel Committee are aware of the guy who started this, because it’s so beyond a mitzvah. Really, it levels the playing field just a little.

Use it in the very best of health.

Amazon's Customer Service Number

I had occasion today to try to get Amazon to divert a book they’d erroneously sent to my old address. (I tried first with UPS, but naturally—as the mere recipient of the package—I could do nothing about fixing the misdirection.)

I’ve been waiting for this book since I placed the order in April, so as you might imagine I was somewhat torqued off that for some reason the change of address I input to my Amazon account apparently didn’t make it to back-orders.

Anyhow—since their website is specifically built to keep you from contacting actual, you know, humanoids, I Googled “Amazon customer service phone number”, & got it.

& I thought I’d share the love: if you ever want to get some customer service (albeit from India) from Amazon, call 1 800 201 7575.

You’ll thank me for it later.

Triumph of the trivial

Interesting political tidbit that rather defines the McCain campaign. There was to have been a lunch with Sarah Palin next week at a private home here in the Seattle area—a limited attendance chance to meet & listen to the diva of the downmarket. Minimum price of admission: $2500, so I hope the lunch is more than mac & cheese or mooseburgers. ($25K would buy you some photo ops & maybe even a chance to talk to her.)

I know this because my employer sent round a notice of the event—which absolutely freaked me out. I’m told they sent similar emails for events featuring Obama, but it still makes me really, really uncomfortable. My employer ought to keep its nose out of my personal political activities.

Well, anyhow—turns out that La Palin had a scheduling problem & can’t make the lunch. (Did the helicopter-based wolf-hunting season just open?)

So the GOP are making what must seem to them to be a logical swap: they’re sending in Cindy McCain to hold the glass of white wine & smile for pix.

Now, does anyone else see the anomaly in this? The idea that if the person whose views could shape our lives for the next four years—you know, the candidate—can’t make an event, swapping her out for her running-mate’s spouse is an equal exchange? What the hell—they’re both lookers, aren’t they? They both spend more time getting their hair done & shopping for shoes than formulating ideas. They both have the XX-chromosome configuration—one’s as good as the other, yes?

What they’re basically doing is acknowledging the utter triviality of Sarah Palin—that she’s so devoid of substance that you can replace her with another chick & no one will notice.

God help us all.

Wall Street Blues, Part II

Well, after the shattering of the protective shield around the masters of the universe this week, you knew it was coming: the backbone of the class that have benefited the most from the current administration are having to, gasp, economize.

Oh, the horror!

You have to wonder about people who’ll go on the record as saying they have to tell their youngest daughter that she won’t get the royal cosmetic surgery treatment her three older sisters did because times are hard. Or swapping out caviar & truffles for Waygu beef for a father’s party—not that they’re saving anything, but it looks less extravagant. Do they even listen to what they’re saying?

So I guess those who feed off the conspicuous consumption crowd are also going to be facing lean times. Except, apparently, the high-class equivalent of the pawn shop—those who buy & sell estate jewelry.

This just makes me want to vomit. That woman who was bitching about paying a nanny $1250 per week being too much & looking for a bargain basement substitute—no doubt with a masters in early childhood development? She’s not facing hard times—the woman who’s going to get paid $750 per week to look after her kids (plural), do light housework & be available all the hours God sends is facing hard times. Her choices aren’t whether to buy at Bergdorf’s or Barney’s; they’re whether she should buy food or pay the Con Ed bill.

I swear—we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole.

For your viewing pleasure...

For some reason I can’t now recall I recently took it into my head that I wanted to see Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary record of the Nazi party’s annual conference of 1934. This is a film that, like the Constitution, a lot of people talk about without having actually, you know, ingested it.

I’d heard about it for a number of years, but never had a chance to see it—it’s not the sort of thing that would appear on a double bill at the art houses with Double Indemnity, Sons of the Desert or Singing in the Rain. But having the inclination, I found a video of it through the King County Public Library and sat down to watch.

It’s a remarkable piece. And I’m talking mostly about the cinematography and filmic philosophy—the way it was conceived, shot, edited and presented—a far, far cry from what we see down at the multiplex. But also about what was deemed appealing to the public at the time. Here are some thoughts:

First, you have to actually watch it. The first 20-some minutes are nothing but images and music. There is a prologue—written, not spoken—to set the stage, and then the aerial approach of Hitler over the medieval city of Nürnberg and lengthy shots of party members preparing for the highly choreographed activities.

This is followed by excerpts from speeches by various alpha Nazis—Hess, Schirach, Goebbels, Goering, Hitler and others—interspersed with rallies of Hitlerjugend, military reviews, torchlight parades, and masses of uniformed laborers of various stripes.

But no voice-overs telling you what’s happening or how you should think about it. In fact, the only spoken words are the various speeches. So you have to concentrate. (If you understand German you could possibly go fix a salad or something, but if you did you’d miss the physical appearance of these guys as they spoke.)

Second, it’s black and white. Yes, most films were in the 30s, but Riefenstahl was commissioned specifically by Hitler and she had access to all the resources in the Reich. If she’d wanted color, she could have got it—and those red-black-and-white Nazi flags look stunning against seas of brown shirts.

But again, black and white means you have to pay attention.

Third—no smash cuts every 3.7 seconds. You’re actually able to follow an image and process it. The camera stays on speakers without “commenting” by moving around.

Fourth, there’s the music—what a blessed respite from the docus you see produced today that not only add sound effects (marching feet, airplane motors, crowds murmuring), which actually detract from the authenticity of what you’re seeing (kind of like the mirror image of “reality TV”) but also splice in completely extraneous canned music loops to “fill” the space not taken by the fake sounds. Riefenstahl chooses this as carefully as she does her camera angles: opening segment is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which segues into the Horst Wessel Lied. The film closes out with Götterdämerung fading into Horst Wessel.

One Nazi standard into another. Worth more than all the irrelevant incidental music in all the stock houses in the world.

Then there’s how the main characters are presented. No attempt whatsoever to make them look prettier than they are. Frankly, Hitler’s inner circle was remarkably ugly—Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Bormann, Streicher, Goering… There’s not a one of them you’d want to take to a Manhattan after-party. The only looker in the bunch was Reinhard Heydrich. But there’s clearly no makeup on them. Plus they’re obviously and unashamedly sweating.

Now, this is fascinating given the recent trend in US politics: from the Nixon-Kennedy debates we’ve been on a downward trend where how you look counts more than what you stand for. Try to imagine anyone without even features, good hair, a svelte figure and designer clothes getting elected to national office. Not going to happen.

Can you say Ralph Nader?

(I imagine that was a good deal of Sarah Palin’s appeal to the RNC handlers who picked her as John McCain’s running mate. If she’d held the same views and looked like a youthful Bella Abzug, she’d never have made the short list.)

BTW—you don’t see this crowd together again on film until they’re in the dock at the Nuremburg war crimes trials in 1946. Minus, of course, those who’d committed suicide.

There are reviews and demonstrations and mass protestations of hope, belief and loyalty. When I say “mass” I mean an entire stadium of serried ranks of organizations swearing undying fealty to the party. Of particular interest were the labor brigades—uniformed and wielding their shovels like rifles.

(Really—it’s clear that you weren’t much of a Nazi unless you had a uniform.)

I also was fascinated by the cavalry demonstration: soldiers in the feldgrau uniforms and that distinctive helmet wheeling and cantering—with modern rifles with fixed bayonets. There was also horse artillery. Remember—this was only 16 months after the Nazis took over; they hadn’t started mass producing their Panzers yet.

Although you’d see a lot of these horses in service in the retreat from the Soviet Union and the defense of Western Europe, 1943-45.

The closing images are of the “blood flag” ritual—Hitler consecrating new party banners by touching them with the flag allegedly splattered with the blood of the fallen from the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch attempt. There’s also an interesting reconciliation with the SA—referring to the Night of the Long Knives that took place less than three months before, when Hitler had his old street fighting buddies eradicated.

Finally, there’s an endless parade of troops through the old heart of the city, and Hitler proclaims “All loyal Germans will become National Socialists. Only the best National Socialists are party comrades!”

Presumably all the cheering masses considered themselves as part of that elite.

Now, Triumph is a highly controversial film precisely because of its subject matter—and because it’s so good at presenting it. I’m not going to comment on that except to say that anyone outside of Germany who saw this film should not have been surprised in the least at the train of events that led to September 1939. Starting with the prologue, it was patently clear that the Nazi regime was all about doing a better job of putting Germany on top of the world than the Kaiser had. Viz.:

“On September 5, 1934, ... 20 years after the outbreak of the World War ... 16 years after the beginning of our suffering ... 19 months after the beginning of the German renaissance ... Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers…”

The “beginning of our suffering” refers to the Versailles Treaty, and the “renaissance” is Hitler’s accession to power.

There’s also a clear indication of Goebbels’s philosophy of propaganda: in order to make it work, you have to tell a big lie, and you have to keep on repeating it, in the face of any questions you’re asked. If you try little lies, you're sunk; and if you waver at all, you’re gone. Him talking about the free and open press in Nazi Germany alone is worth the price of admission.

There’s a historic touch to the finale that I find telling: that parade passes the Frauenkirche square, which is beautiful and quaint in a Grimm Brothers kind of way. Every year the great Christkindlmarkt is held right there—stalls of traditional (and, these days, Chinese) Christmas decorations, goodies and gifts, bratwurst and glüwein to keep the damp cold outside of you. These markets have been there for hundreds of years.

That area used to be the Jewish ghetto of Nuremberg. Until the good citizens petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor (don’t get me started on that one) Karl IV to cleanse their fair city of the aliens—who were also business competitors. The emperor graciously granted the town a pogrom; the Jews were gathered into the synagogue, which was set afire.

The beautiful Frauenkirche was built on that spot and has anchored city rites from holiday fairs to Nazi rallies ever since.

And you should definitely watch Triumph of the Will.

Financial security

Okay, they are really starting to annoy me.

You’ve no doubt heard the latest news from that bastion of capitalism. Six months after rescuing Bear Stearns & a week after bailing out Freddie & Fannie, the Feds have declined to save the bespoke-trouser clad asses of Lehman Brothers. (Since beginning this post, the government has stepped in to “loan” billions to AIG; I’ll rant about that below.)

& Wall Street is shocked & outraged.

The two investment banks & F&F have been washed ashore along with other rotted detritus of the Cheney-Bush economic maelstrom of greed. Specifically, they “overextended” on totally crap loans in the sub-prime débâcle. The masters of the universe have been cleaning out their desks, auctioning their coffee cups & mouse pads on eBay (opening bid: $130—after all, they’re trained to be rapacious & you don’t lose that just because they took away your keycard) & shuffling off to enjoy the last of their $80 hand-made cigars & $570 bottles of Opus One while they contemplate where they’re going to take their top-tier MBAs next & make more outrageous salaries & even more obscene bonuses.

Seeing as to how their options are kind of diminishing.

So here’s what I don’t get, being a liberal arts major, so I’m hoping some of you MBAs out there can 'splain it to me:

Investment bankers, hedge fund managers, insurance giants—in the past couple of decades they’ve bought pols by the gross for the specific purpose of not only refraining from regulating their industry, but of enacting legislation that will allow them to rape & pillage unencumbered by such pesky things like class action law suits, anti-trust actions, etc. The whole idea was that the “system” would only work optimally if free-market forces were allowed to operate freely & the government kept its ignorant nose out of things.

Even after the S&L crisis in the Reagonomics 80s & the telecoms/Enron meltdown at the beginning of this century—the “investment” industry was still able to perpetuate this sub-prime mortgage scam with the happy encouragement of the Bush administration, who touted the bubble as a positive outcome of their economic philosophy.

But now, after their genetically engineered capons have come home to roost in the multi-million-dollar Eastside co-ops, these guys have been crying & whining to the Feds that they’ve spent all their allowance (& all their investors’ allowances) & they need more money so they can stay in business & lose more money.

So how does it work that the government is anti-capitalist & economically blinkered if they try to regulate some aspects of business life, but are anti-capitalist & economically blinkered if they don’t bail these bozos out?

These dire financial straits are completely self-inflicted. & at the same time they were handing out/backing mortgage loans to people who were patently incapable of making the payments on properties they couldn’t afford if they pooled assets with a village, these financial vandals were taking home “performance bonuses” that ranged from excessive to obscene.

Why is their stupidity suddenly my taxpaying problem? If the positions were reversed—if I’d invested in property or stocks & then couldn’t make good on the payments, they’d toss me out in the street & seize my assets in a New York instant. & they wouldn’t return my calls if I tried to explain that I was just a little short this month & couldn’t they just trust me…

BTW—the Feds wouldn’t help me out, either. & I could be had for considerably less than the squillions we’re talking about.

There is not one single communication from anyone associated with investing, from emails to annual reports, that doesn’t carry the disclaimer that you “invest at your own risk”. Why does this stricture not apply to the greedy schmucks who send the missives?

& if they’re seriously worried about their futures, why don’t they

There’s a line in my favorite movie about investment, Trading Places, where Eddie Murphy tells Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche (playing Randolph & Mortimer Duke, characters who would fit in very well in the current scenario) that basically their brokerage firm is a bookie operation.

Well, no self-respecting bookie would try to weasel out of paying off bets, regardless of the immediate cost—primarily because there’s rather a lot more at stake than mere money in losing your credibility in that line of work. Also because they apparently have to be better judges of what’s a bad risk than major investment firms.

& you certainly wouldn’t hear a bookmaker whimper about how no one will help him. Who’d bet with a bellyaching bookie?

So, when the Feds told potential buyers of Lehman Brothers that they’d have to invest without the security of the US Government to make good any bad choices, it was just bizarre to hear all the wailing & bleating from the Wall Street community. Their about-face was faster than the 500-point drop on the Dow.

I’m glad that the Feds held firm with Lehman (& with Merrill Lynch, who had to find a buyer on their own). But this AIG thing is just more salt in the wound. I understand that they’re megalithic, with tentacles in every kind of business involving money but no actual tangible products, & that if they went belly-up, the current recession we’re in as a result of the sub-prime implosion, the endless war investment, the oil crisis & every other aspect of Cheney-economics—the company’s woes would metastasize & take down a lot more innocent people than have already lost too much.

(18 September addendum: check out this actual AIG commercial.)

But still—just as you know you have to give some tough love to your kids when they spend their allowance & ask for an advance, just this once—“loaning” $80B to AIG is a bad policy. They & all their ilk have no incentive to do anything different in the future, & we’ll all end up bailing them out of the next crack-brained get-rich-quick scheme they cook up & sell to the American people.

One last question: how is it that we aren't rioting in the streets over this?

Extremely insightful commentary on important election issues

So evidently John McCain’s pick for running mate is already proving to be a counter to the recession caused by the current administration’s whack-job policies.

Apparently perceived (presumably in trailer parks and Republican Women’s Clubs all around the country) as quite the style-setter, Sarah Palin has kick-started what the WSJ refers to as a “buying frenzy” for her fashion choices.

I suppose that counts in some circles as having an economic platform. No doubt it would lend her credibility if the occasion ever arose where she’d need to represent us at a G8 meeting.

I love the marketer at Naughty Monkey shoes, who has plans to work a deal with Palin—quickly—to promote the line of shoes. Obviously a realist, he points out, “We have to capitalize on it pretty soon.”

That’s because if the American electorate finally breaks out of its eight-year fugue, on 5 November Palin’s “style” will be so yesterday.

Meanwhile, I guess we’ll be treated to big hair, loud lipstick & pumps worn sans nylons. (For those with La Palin’s cosmopolitan pedigree, “sans” is a French word meaning “without”. I threw it in to show I’ve read actual, you know, books, & traveled beyond my country’s borders. & I don’t count the plane refueling at Fiji as a visit to that country.)

It’s interesting that the legit fashion industry (by which I mean firms that sell their goods in emporia other than Wal-Mart) has neither interest in nor comments on the candidate’s choices in clothes & accessories. After all, does an Orca really notice a Chihuahua?

(For another take on Palin, I refer you to The Onion, specifically to the beauty pageants she’s won.)

So, in the end, Palin-as-fashionista is every bit as genuine as Palin-as-maverick-fiscal-conservative.

Can you say bogus?

I knew you could.

A piece of my heart

It’s been a week since my beautiful, pushy, loudmouthed mackerel tabby cat Aji was killed. She got out of the house last Monday night, and Tuesday morning my neighbor two doors down found her little body in her yard.

She was with me for just a week over three years—she appeared on my balcony the weekend before Labor Day 2005; simply announced her arrival and waited for me to do my part. Which I was happy to do—she was bright, affectionate, lively and curious, and she was much more entertaining than cable TV.

When I let her in, I informed her that once she joined the household she would henceforth be an indoor cat. She agreed, but of course she didn’t expect that I meant it. Besides—she was a cat. She was always trying to get out. And she was so fast—she could get through a door before it was barely open.

The thing about Aji was once she realized something was a portal—that there was an Other Side behind it—she just had to go through it and explore. Those clever little paws of hers could get so many things open—she’d open dresser drawers and pick out clothes onto the floor to make room for her to get in and probe. I had to Aji-proof closets with bungee cords. She once got the above-counter kitchen cupboard doors open and I caught her high-stepping among the Czechoslovakian crystal cordial glasses.

I once opened the hatch to the attic and made the mistake of leaving the ladder in place while I went downstairs to check on something. A few minutes later I returned to see her mackerel butt disappearing into the attic and I had to scramble to get her back out. I closed the hatch but left the ladder propped up in the upstairs hall, because I needed to do follow-up work in the attic. For days Aji would climb to the top and demand that I open up so she could go exploring again. She knew there was extremely interesting stuff up there and she wanted to see it.

She was also a leaper—no height was beyond her powers. From a standing start she could jump to the top of the lingerie chest (more than four feet high) without knocking over any of the perfume bottles. In The Rambler it didn’t take her any old amount of time to realize there was a two-inch wide ledge at eight feet around the living room. She got up there and pranced back and forth, looking out the windows and informing me she wanted to go out.

Of course I bought her bags of playthings, but it turned out she’d brought her own toy with her: she chased her tail. It was hysterical to watch that. Only a few weeks ago, in the corporate apartment we were staying in, she was on a window ledge with vertical blinds, whirling about with perfect balance, going in and out amongst the blinds after that pesky tail.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have moved her here—it was too unsettling, there were too many New Things to explore and The Rambler was just too small for her and made it too easy for her to get out. I opened the door and she shot out into the night. I’d hoped she was starting up a gang but would return when she found there were no bowls of kibble lying around for her. She’d done it a couple of times in Virginia, so I had hopes.

But this isn’t Virginia, and she didn’t last more than a few hours. And it took King County Animal Control three days to come pick up her little corpse.

My insides are sore—I feel as though my organs were scooped out and whatever’s left has been mauled. I keep doing the block-Aji dance—crack open the door, look around for her and get ready to shoo her away.

I know—I should have done a better job of that last week.

Turns out Aji was a big part of my support system here, and it’s just empty without her. There’s so little sign of her left—I didn’t take nearly enough pictures while she was with me; I thought I had years ahead with her. I've got a few paw prints in places where she wasn't supposed to be--the floors of the Rambler hadn't been cleaned in a long time before we moved in, and she left a trail of tell-tale marks on counters, the mantelpiece and other high places.

There’s still Pele, of course. But she’s not the cuddly extrovert Aji was. These days she spends most of her time under a bed because in her mind if she comes out I could scoop her up, stuff her in a crate and ship her somewhere. Fair enough.

I expect Aji’s poking into all the closets and drawers in heaven, and leaping up into laps and demanding pets from all the saints. She always knew how to make a place for herself wherever she landed. It’s a lesson I wish I'd learned from her while she was with me.

Domestic tranquility

So, since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I appear to have fallen down a time wormhole.

Or possibly I mean a black hole.

I’d pegged the metro Seattle area as pretty much the mother ship of the PC industry. So I expected to have at least the techno-amenities I was accustomed to in the Old Dominion. (I’d also assured those who, on hearing of my move, intoned, “I hope you like rain”, that I’d lived for three years in London, so the rain didn’t bother me. & I expected the architecture in Seattle to be better.)

Silly me.

I’m currently parked in rented digs that remind me of Britain’s National Health Service: probably cutting edge for its time; but its time was 50 years ago. It’s in the style known here as “a rambler”; back where I come from it would be called a rancher, but whatever. Single-story, three-bedroom, one bath, carport, 1100 sf.

The owners are four brothers, who inherited it from their mother not quite a year ago. They “fixed it up” & put it up for sale for $250K over the assessed value. That would be $680K. Surprisingly, it languished on the market for several months before my agent showed it to me & we asked if they’d be interested in renting it for the nonce.

(See above about ONE bathroom.)

Well, yes—they might indeed be interested. After much to-ing & fro-ing through agents to the Brotherhood, we finally worked out a deal (of sorts).

Another thing people assured me back in Virginia was that I’d love Seattle because, “the people are so laid back.”

Evidently they were talking about service providers.

It took more than three weeks to get a landline, a couple to get cable.

Verizon didn’t have The Rambler on their grid (see below), so I had to get connectivity through cable (to which I’m opposed on principle, but what can you do?). Comcast had to run the line out from the street & drill a hole in the wall to give me TV & Internet. Seems The Brotherhood had ripped out the connection when they “updated” the place.

I should have paid attention to that, because after three weeks of grotesque calls to Verizon (before they finally realized, “gee, we don’t SERVE that area”…), when the Qwest technician finally showed up (after more surreal calls, but over a period of days, not weeks), he also had to run a new line out from the street—into the “Bell Systems” box, which obviously dates from the 50s as well.

I signed up for delivery of the Seattle Times—it’s not a first-rate newspaper, but it is the local rag, & I always try to support journalism. However, it’s been two weeks since I subscribed & I still haven’t had a paper show up in my driveway.

Then there’s trash… After three-&-a-half weeks & three calls, I finally have bins for trash pickup. I’ve told them that I’m only paying for service I can access. Since I’m informed that the Russian mob runs the company, I may end up sleeping with the fishes in Puget Sound.

I wonder if they’ll be as lackadaisical about delivering the cement overshoes as they are about giving me bins. (BTW, this being the capital of Green-ness, I have three wheelies: trash, yard waste & recyclables. Plus a little plastic container for “food scraps”. I feel like I’m back in WWII; should I start a Victory Garden?)

Actually, I need that container—a garbage disposal unit wasn’t part of The Brotherhood’s idea of updating The Rambler. In fact, a lot of their choices seem odd to me:

• The circuit box is in what I take to be the master bedroom; it’s completely exposed, no cover.
• The sole bathroom has two sinks. The Brotherhood installed new faucets (those butt-ugly “brushed nickel” finishes), but one of them doesn’t return to true. Instead of fixing it, they simply instructed me how to leave the handle so it doesn’t leak.
• They installed a new shower head, which comes to the bridge of my nose. (I’m 5’6”) Plus, it leaked; I had to haul out my trusty channel locks & tighten it. This means no one ever turned on the shower head after installing it, much less thought about actually, you know, using it.
• The counter in the bathroom is 36” high. Think about it.
• There are also only two towel racks in the sole bathroom; they’re 15” wide.
• They installed new linoleum in the kitchen, but can’t have done anything about the under-flooring. When you walk on it, it kind of bounces. (’Kay, I know I need to lose weight, but still.)
• The redone kitchen has a total of five drawers; none is wider than 8”. (For the Y-chromosome-challenged, go look at the drawer where you keep your silverware.)
• The three bedrooms have single wall uplights; the bulbs in them can’t be more than 8 watts.
• Neither did the Brotherhood bother with updating the actual electrical outlets; there’s barely one socket per wall. I have drop cords & power strips snaking around the hardwood floors like strings of spaghetti after a college pasta party (without the tomato sauce). I hope to God I’m not creating a fire hazard.
• When they redid the kitchen, for some reason they left a 110-volt outlet for the dryer (for which, with a washer, I had to negotiate). Even I know that’s totally whacked.
• Perhaps my favorite is the wall o’ windows they installed in the living room. Not one of them opens.

I have to say that I haven’t roughed it like this since I lived in the UK. No garbage disposer? (At least I do have the dryer, so I don’t have to spread my wet laundry around the living room once a week. Which is good, because it would probably take a couple of days to dry.)

But it’s not all domestic bliss. The whole area is…interesting.

Traffic’s every bit as bad as the metro DC area. But their carpool lanes are completely, well, bizarre. Instead of being consistently on the left side, on some highways (not all) they’re on the right, & they start & stop without apparent reason. Which means that you’ll be driving by yourself perfectly legally, & then all of a sudden you’re in a diamond lane & you have to get out to avoid being nicked. Plus, there’s all the turmoil when you want to exit & have to cross at least two lanes to get off.

Seattle hasn’t discovered air conditioning, yet. I arrived at my temporary housing, an apartment in downtown Bellevue, on 18 July to find it a veritable oven. I frantically ran round the place looking for controls to turn down the heat & turn on the AC. But the heat wasn’t on & there was no AC. The week I moved into The Rambler we had temps in the 90s. No AC, no opening windows in the living room, can’t open the doors because the cats will get out. I thought I’d moved to Hell.

Then there’s alcohol. After just about 20 years living south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was so looking forward to being back on the Left Coast, where (among other things) I could count on being able to buy a bottle of liquor in a free market instead of state-run stores (in states that permit anyone to buy & use a gun but consider taking a drink to be tantamount to dancing with the devil; as if dancing weren’t enough of a crime in itself).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that, while you can purchase wine & beer hither & thither, if you want a bottle of single malt, you have to find one of the dreaded state liquor stores. Well, boo; but what the heck—I found one on the Web & took a pass through it. In 27 seconds.

Washington has managed to accomplish what I just flat out hadn’t thought possible: they’ve made Virginia look positively progressive when it comes to attitudes toward booze. The stock & selection in these places is paltry in comparison to what was available in Virginia. Not that I’m a huge drinker, but I am a Californian, & I’m accustomed to having choices. & variety.

& the ABC stores in the Old Dominion were actually getting better. They opened a second store in Reston (population about 20K) within walking distance, & I killed about 15 minutes there one day waiting for the local hand-made pizza place to open. I just walked up & down the aisles, looking at all the types of tequilas & rums & whiskies for sale.

The operative term there was “aisles”. Of which there are none in any of the Washington state liquor stores I’ve seen.

I don’t know whether there’s a fear that state residents will tie one on if they’re allowed free access to booze & use their lumberjack & salmon fishing tools to go on a rampage, or what. But I assure you that the amount of liquor available in the stores I visited wouldn’t fuel a single frat party.

Something else that gave me pause: one of my employee benefits is free membership in the poshest gym I’ve ever belonged to. You need a map to make your way through the building; they have more personal trainers on staff than a medium-sized city has police officers; there are on-site medical services, a restaurant (‘scuse me, a “bistro”), a florist, a shop & a full-service spa. (One of my colleagues describes it as a casino, & it definitely has that ambiance, with its multiple rooms of phalanxes of exercise machines.)

So I was somewhat gobsmacked to find this sign above the water fountains throughout the place: “Washington State law prohibits spitting in drinking fountains.”

Thing is—if you have to remind people of the blindingly obvious requirements for the basics of decent public behavior, a mere reminder probably isn’t going to do the trick. Plus, I don’t know whether Washington state has a huge problem with people spitting in drinking fountains unknown in other parts of the country, or whether I’ve been drinking water from dual-purpose fountains/spittoons.

Well, I guess it’s going to be a new adventure. I should probably buy a plaid flannel shirt & workboots to blend in with the environment.

Picturing the past

I love old photos. This came through one of my downloads—a rather interesting historical document, no?

Leaving aside the rather grim setting—which might have been a state-of-the-art office environment in 1924, & would probably fetch a couple mil for subdividing in the Georgetown loft market today, even tricked out as it is—the whole arrangement speaks volumes about the workplace.

Those “computer stands” look like cruel & unusual punishment to me. & with their electromechanical guts, I’m betting the noise would have been comparable to Khachaturian working in a tractor factory.

But it’s fascinating that these were all “personal” computing devices—one human, one machine. (I’m not even going to venture a guess as to the processor capabilities for these things.) Twenty-five years later we’d “progressed” to room-sized Univacs & Eniacs—thanks in no small part to Admiral Grace Hopper, a woman with a true gift for numbers & logic. Then we gradually whittled the technology down to mini- & then microcomputer size. Now I carry around a smartphone with whiz-bang capabilities in the back pocket of my jeans.

Another point of interest is that I can make out exactly two men amongst this phalanx of women—not counting the standing guy, who’s obviously overseeing the operation to ensure there are no shenanigans got up to. (Corporate intrusion into your computer activity goes way back, doesn’t it?)

I have this vision of a bell ringing & the serried rows of computer specialists rising in unison & heading off to the loo. Although—you’ll notice there’s no room on these computer stations for coffee cups.

Finally, scroll to the right & look at the denizens of the other half of this office. Three of the four people closest to the photographer (two female, one male), in their non-adjustable wooden chairs at their big, heavy wooden desks, are looking into the lens with distinctly amused expressions on their faces. Are they happy they’re not part of the computer collective? Feeling superior because they could put a cup of coffee on their workstation (if they were allowed coffee)? Anticipating their own close-up?

I dunno. But this makes me feel less whiny about my brick of a ThinkPad laptop in my office with my ergonomic chair.