Piteously slain and murdered

It has been confirmed through DNA analysis that bones of a man found last September in a Leicester car park are those of Richard III, last of the Yorkist kings of England, and last king to die on the field of battle. He was killed on Bosworth Field by forces of Henry Tudor in 1485, age 32.

I know it’s a chink in my Armor of Cynicism (okay—it’s a thumping great crevasse in my Armor of Cynicism), but I’ve always thought that Richard got an undeserved bad rep courtesy of Henry’s spin machine, which was then embellished by Shakespeare’s tragedy about the winter of our discontent.

Henry was a half-Welsh usurper who was trying to establish legitimacy for himself and his dynasty. Shakespeare’s patron for most of his career was Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor line (it lasted but three generations), so he was basically sucking up to the boss when he wrote about a twisted hunchback who was the personification of evil.

He is presumed to have ordered the murders of his nephews in the Tower of London in 1483; sons of Richard’s late brother Edward IV, they were alleged to have been got rid of to remove any question of legitimacy to his wearing the crown. There’s a whole lot of hoo-ha about this—whether Edward’s marriage to the princes’ mother was actually legal, whether the boys were legitimate heirs, and who would benefit most from their deaths. There’s also a lot of hoo-ha about Richard being a tyrant, a madman and a disastrous ruler. But I don’t believe the facts that have come down to us bear that second lot of hoo-ha out, and I do believe that the hoo-hawers ought to take a good look at the early years of Henry VII’s reign when he was solidifying the throne.

(The hoo-ha has not come to an end with the discovery of Richard’s bones. The cities of Leicester—where he was killed/found—and York—his home town—have both laid claim to him, with rights to entomb him and get all the subsequent tourist business. I believe Leicester has won out—after all, they actually have the skeleton in their possession.

(But what I find fascinating is that, when she was sounded out as to whether Richard might be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey with other kings of England, Elizabeth II—whose dynasty possibly wouldn’t be sitting on the throne if Richard hadn’t been deposed—has made it known that she would not be amused by this. Talk about being a sore winner.)

Richard died with a sword in his hand; his body was mutilated and ultimately buried within a Franciscan friary (because that’s how you treat defeated enemies when you need to lay a foundation for your own precarious legitimacy).

And here’s what the City of York recorded at the time, ‘King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was through great treason…piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.’

Tweeting holiness

Here’s someone you don’t expect to find on Twitter: the Dalai Lama.

Well, maybe that’s not strictly true—why wouldn’t you find him on Twitter? I understand even Pope Benedict XVI is now on the social media platform. Although I’m laying odds that he’s got some cardinal/minion posting the actual, you know, tweets.

Of course, it’s possible that there’s some Buddhist equivalent of a cardinal—an abbot or the like—tweeting for His Holiness of Dharmasala. I mean, I expect that living in the moment would kind of exclude tweeting about it, since nothing says monkey mind like Twitter uploads from your iPhone.

Whatever.

What interested me about the Dalai Lama’s profile is that—as of the day I found it—he had more than six million followers. And he was following no one.

Well—I suppose…whom would you follow if you were he?

On the other hand, His Holiness the Bishop of Rome only has around 1.5 million followers; but he’s following eight people.

Only it turns out that the eight people he’s following are…all himself:

Make of that what you will. And peace out.

Penises with teeth--for future reference

Yesterday there was a commemoration in the SF Chronicle of one of their film critics, who—in addition to reviewing movies—does a Q&A column in the Sunday entertainment section of the paper. It’s called “Ask Mick LaSalle”, because—as it happens, his name is Mick LaSalle and people write in to excoriate him, praise him and ask questions about pictures.

Since I’ve only been reading the paper for a couple of years (and only the Sunday edition, since their delivery person in San José couldn’t seem to actually, you know, deliver), I haven’t really paid attention to him.

But yesterday’s retrospective had one vignette that caught my attention; it was a Q/A from 9 April 2006:

“Dear Mr. LaSalle: From one young, aspiring journalist to a seasoned reporter, thank you for the realistic review of King Kong. Your line about the ‘penises with teeth’ is spot-on.

“Ted R. Utoft, St, Paul, Minn.

“Dear Mr. Utoft: Thank you, son. The first rule of journalism -- something your teachers will never tell you -- is that you should always try to get the phrase ‘penises with teeth’ into an article, any article, even when out of context. This is especially important early in your career, as a way of letting folks know that a bright young talent has arrived on the scene. Try this yourself in your school newspaper, and if anyone tries to stand in the way of your creativity, start knocking over furniture. As you represent the generation that will someday replace me, I want to help you succeed in every way possible.”

The review references “an attack by creatures that look like penises with teeth.” Since I’ve not seen the actual, you know, flick, I have no idea who/what these creatures might be. But it might be worthwhile recording it and then fast-forwarding it through to find out.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to work on getting the key phrase into more of my posts.

De gustibus...

By way of follow-up to my post about being not entirely whelmed by “Downton Abbey”, let me share with you what I found on my cable video on demand TV show page:

Evidently the Downton demand is so great, the fans can’t even be bothered to scroll through the D-F section to find the episodes.

Or can it be that they can’t figure out that whole alphabetical thing?

Happy, happy

At the moment I can’t recall how I came across this company profile on LinkedIn. Doesn’t matter.

I’m kind of smitten with the idea of working for a company called “Happiest Minds”, with “a mission to create Happiest People and Happiest Customers.”

Even if they appear to specialize in pretty much everything under the sun.

Literally silly

The City of Palo Alto has declared today to be Amelia Bedelia Day—celebrate by being literal.

If you’ve not yet met Amelia Bedelia, you should. She’s the subject of a number of books by Peggy Parrish, and today marks the 50^th Anniversary of publication of the original volume. In it, when housekeeper Amelia Bedelia first arrives at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, her new employers, Mrs. Rogers gives her a list of tasks to perform while they’re out.

It turns out that Amelia Bedelia has what you might call a machine-language simplicity about her. She takes every instruction literally. Imagine, then, what the results might be if she’s told to “dust the furniture” and “dress the chicken”.

Yes, indeedy—that’s exactly what happens.

But—it turns out that no one makes lemon meringue pie like Amelia Bedelia. So—just as we have come to adapt to the quirks of our electronic devices, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers find ways to accommodate Amelia Bedelia.

I think everyone who works in software ought to read Amelia Bedelia. I introduced my historiography professor to her. Part of the course included a module on statistics. He was what passed for a computer nerd in the W&M history department in the early 90s and he’d never heard of her. My own copy is well worn because I never tire of its amazing silliness.

Yes, all right—I am easily amused.

But so should you be. And; you should mark the day appropriately. Take someone literally. Be silly. At the very least, have a slice of lemon meringue pie.

Recruiters 29

If anyone’s wondering why the unemployment situation is so dire, I submit that a major contributor is the unassailable fact that 97.9% of recruiters are just complete morons.

I’ve given you many, many examples of this in the past, but here’s one from just this week.

Email came into my queue on Friday from one of the approximately 12,677 employees of a large, national recruitment firm specializing in tech positions. It slugged “Noticed your resume – new job open for a Sr. Product Manager (Start UP) – please apply!”

Well, coming from this particular operation, that’s pretty meaningless. And, as is also typical for this outfit, the job description was…not exactly straightforward. So I emailed him asking for clarification:

And here’s what I got back from him:

Well, ooookay, then. He hadn’t answered my questions, but he’d given me enough information to know the job’s not for me. So I filed it in the appropriate folder.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find this in my queue on Monday:

I needn’t tell you that the job description is identical to what he’d sent before.

And, as I’ve said many, many times before: I just don’t know how these people remain employed.

Still writing dangerously, Chapter 2

Hurrah!

After squirreling around for days, I finally got dinner on the pub table for the main characters in my novel. Shepherd's pie & steak frites (it's a bit of a gastro-pub).

For some reason, I’ve kept going back to fill in set-ups, & just could not get the damned shepherd’s pie out of the kitchen. But I finally did it.

It was either that or just have them drink themselves into insensibility—hours & hours, pints & pints.

Perhaps I should try drinking myself into insensibility the next time something like this arises?

Ringing the changes for Marcia

Today marks a major turning point in my friend Marcia’s life: she’s decided to pack in her job as personal administrative assistant to an IT exec for a major US automaker’s UK division. The corporation is making all kinds of cutbacks & when they offered her a severance package, she weighed up the options & decided that not working for them would be better for her in the long run than continuing down the path she could see before her.

Well, hell—I’m about 8000 miles away & I can see that that particular path doesn’t lead anywhere you want to be, & I’m not talking about the expected office relocation to Luton.

Marcia’s been with the company for just gone ten years, sorting out calendars, travel, frozen BlackBerries & I don’t know what all. I’ve got to hear about some of it, & all I’m going to say is that I’m surprised the company is still actually selling cars at all.

I’m kind of sad about it, because when she turns off her company laptop for the last time, I lose about 50% of my regular readership. (I'm the comic relief in her workday.) But you would not believe the load of crap (a word she would not stoop to use, but I’m an American & you expect that sort of thing from us) she’s been managing, & I’m so relieved & happy that she’s had the courage to recognize when she’s looking at “that’s enough” in her rear view mirror, & to walk away. This past year in particular has just been beyond the beyond—every time you thought you’d reached the absolute pinnacle of corporate idiocy, you realized you were only at the base camp & had another 4000-foot climb to go.

I’ve known Marcia since my days at Newbridge Networks in the UK. She was PA to the European GM (then the CEO), & I was on the same floor. Not sure how it is that we connected, but we did, for which I’m truly thankful. When the bottom fell out of my world in September 2001, she was one of the friends who helped prop it up. & then again in 2003, 2009, 2011 &…well, you get the drift.

Marcia’s my friend who’s a bell ringer. I’ve had the spectacular pleasure of climbing into bell towers (some centuries old) to watch her band ring a couple of times. Through her, I even got to go into the tower of the Washington National Cathedral, because it turns out there’s this global confraternity of ringers, & we went up one Sunday afternoon for a practice. Beat that with a stick, why don’t you?

Here’s Marcia at Mount Vernon, from that same trip she took over here:

Ringing is so complex, so involved—watching it done on both church bells & hand bells, I kind of understand how Marcia’s had the ability to manage all that corporate nonsense for all these years—you concentrate on what’s needed & ignore the external noise. Peals can go on for hours & you have to be on top of where you are & where you need to be for all that time.

Marcia came back over a few years later & I had one of the best Thanksgiving celebrations in my life in her honor. I brought out the good china (which hasn’t actually been used in the seven years since), did the turkey with stuffing (my great-grandmother’s recipe), mashed potatoes, pumpkin & pecan pies, the whole nine yards. I even toyed with the idea of that green bean casserole (you know the one I mean), but since it wasn’t part of my childhood holidays, I bagged it right away. (Another friend from the Newbridge time told me that if I really wanted to provide the ultimate middle-class American Thanksgiving experience, I should have Cool Whip with the pies, but I went with whipped cream. &, for the record, I don’t like either pumpkin or pecan pie; but it was fun to watch Marcia try them.) Marcia & two other friends were there & it was absolutely stellar.

Even though the kitchen sink backed up. But that happens to be a holiday tradition for me, so that’s okay.

Well, anyhow, Marcia’s going to spend time with her grandchildren, maybe work on the cross stitch project I’ve been hearing about for around eight-nine years, hack at the hedge in the back garden & possibly get in some more ringing. She won’t be fighting with archaic IT systems, German admins with BSE, execs thinking she can suspend the laws of physics with respect to time/space or the rest of that crap.

I don’t have any recordings of Marcia’s band, but I’ll send her on with this:

&, my sistah—I think you’ve earned a glass of rioja.

Still writing dangerously

Argh!

For the past three days, I’ve had the protagonists of my novel sitting in a country pub, waiting for their dinners. I’m stuck—& this time my [blah-blah] device doesn’t seem to be working.

Raymond Chandler advised writers who lose the plot to have a guy burst through the door waving a gun. Old NaNoWriMo hands tell us to parachute ninjas into the story & have our characters deal with them.

I’d just settle for a shepherd’s pie & a nice plate of fish & chips. & another round of ale.