A day out

I got the chance to go to a tech conference yesterday in SF. It was a great day, courtesy of a couple of friends, & I’ll have some observations about it in a later post. Right now, I have just a couple of questions:

How is it that the Intercontinental Hotel’s idea of a Diet Coke comes in a can? They can’t afford a soda machine?

Why does CalTrain, the commuter line that runs essentially from San José to SF (meaning, it goes along the backbone of the Silicon Valley, probably the highest-tech corridor in the universe), not have Wi-Fi? What the hell is up with that?

Sunny side of unemployment

Y’all know what a sucker I am for a flash mob. Here’s one at an unemployment office in Madrid:

Trying to picture anything like this in a red state…

Ave & vale

Pope Benedict XVI’s surprise resignation has set the Catholic Church in quite the tailspin; primarily because it’s exposed some stuff at the executive level that I expect the organization—like many other multinational corporations—would prefer to keep in the boardroom.

As you know, when there’s a vacancy at the chairman level, the top-line execs congregate to elect a replacement. Those execs would be cardinals. But the executive toilet is just awash with scandal, which would ordinarily not be an obstacle to business as usual except that some of the dirt has been leaked.

For one thing, the cardinal from the UK, Keith O’Brien, has been forced to resign by the outgoing Benedict. O’Brien had submitted his resignation some time ago, he said, but apparently the pope decided to move up his day of departure significantly when the Vatican proved unable to stop allegations that O’Brien has a history of being too up-close-and-personal with priests under his pastoral care. It was evidently back in the day, but still…

What that means is that, since O’Brien (who evidently had his little roll-on bag already packed for the conclave) now won’t be joining his red-hatted brethren, the UK has lost its sole representative to the new board election.

On the other hand, the retired archbishop of the Los Angeles Diocese, Roger Mahoney, is going to the ecclesiastical equivalent of Disney World, even though critics have said he should stick to his knitting at home, given his involvement in alleged systemic cover-ups of ongoing child abuse by priests in the diocese. Even though he retired some time ago, Mahoney was only last month “stripped…of his public duties after it was revealed that he plotted to conceal child molestation by priests,” according to the LA Times story.

You know that by the time the diocese gets around to taking action, there’s no “alleged” about things and they’re in a wagon-circling exercise, so it’s kind of interesting to see that while Mahoney isn’t deemed fit by the Church infrastructure to open parish fairs, he’s okay to have a say in who’s going to be running the company business for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…a story originating in La Repubblica and reported elsewhere claims that a team of cardinals investigating the so-called Vati-leaks scandal indicated a “network of gay prelates in the Vatican”, and that blackmail had been one of the consequences. This report may or may not be a factor in Benedict’s sudden announcement of retirement, which did actually have a “kay-I’m-outta-here-bye” feel to it.

If this were GM or Oracle or Barclay’s, I’d nuke some popcorn and crack open a Diet Coke to follow along. But it’s the company founded by Saint Peter, for God’s sake, and this is just so dispiriting. Makes you wonder who’s going to cleanse the temple and whether there’s a flamethrower big enough to get the job done.

So I suppose that it’s really nit-picky to note that apparently the papal Twitter account is going to disappear with Benedict. Perhaps more of these guys should have been occupying their thumbs with their smartphone keyboards.

She died, of course

You may be aware of the big horsemeat scandal currently enveloping Europe. It’s not so much that people are eating horsemeat; it’s that horsemeat is being introduced into the meat supply chain & subsequently marketed & sold as beef.

I’m not exactly sure what prompted the rash of tests run on prepared meals & pre-formed hamburger patties—or, for that matter, why tests aren’t routinely run to begin with—but they turned up at times substantial percentages of Dobbin in the products that were being sold as 100% beef. Or as close to 100% as you get in these kinds of things. (Remember the pink slime scandal here a while ago?)

Well, now it’s swept through Ikea—seems the that Czech authorities found horsemeat in the Swedish pressed-sawdust furniture giant’s Kottbullar meatballs. Ikea has recalled them—a search on their UK site for “meatballs” returned only the chicken product. Or at least, a product labeled as chicken:

I’m not going to get all wound up in the issue of the ethics of agribusiness or animal slaughter practices. I will point out that the story opens up the way for all kinds of punny comments, which NPR readers have taken full advantage of.

There were a couple of prize entries:

“Not a whinnying combination. Maybe IKEA is jockeying for a new market.”

“The meatballs have more horsepower than a turbo Saab.”

There was also this exchange:

“Was wood found in the Idea furniture?” 

“Traces of it has [sic] been detected within the glued laminations…I wonder what the glue is made from.”

But the one that just undid me was, “Would you care for some spaghetti bologneighs?”

Well, we all know what happened to the old woman who swallowed a horse.

Nyan says the cat

Apparently Saturday was the 27^th annual celebration of Cat Day in Japan.

Otherwise known as Nyan Nyan Nyan Day.

(That’s for the sound that Japanese cats make, instead of the meow sound English or American cats make. What—you thought animals have some universal speech capabilities?)

Seems appropriate that the day is celebrated in Japan, home of Maru, a Scottish Fold with the kind of international online following a Kardashian would envy.

(Off topic, but I wonder what’s up with MS Word’s spellchecker being so last century that it doesn’t like either Maru or Kardashian?)

The report cited is from the Washington Post. It loses some of it’s journalistic credibility by referring to Maru as female. But otherwise, well—I’m always glad to find new celebration days to add to the calendar.

Writing dangerously & mournfully

It’s been an odd week; not entirely sure why.

One thing, maybe, is that I’ve been stuck for the past three days in a civil funeral for my murder vict… I mean, for the murder victim in my novel.

Let me just say that being mired in a funeral service is a whole lot less fun than being hung up in a country pub unable to get dinner on the table. At least there I had booze.

It’s a “civil funeral” (a term which I did not make up, but which brings to mind the probability that there are uncivil funerals) because the deceased in this case was opposed on principle to churches. He also didn’t have a whole lot of friends, so that limits the possibility of having people get up & tell remember-the-time stories.

He was, however, a blues fan, so I’ve been immersing myself in CDs from my collection. I’m not going the mournful route—the geezer was as ornery as they come—so I’ve got a few of the classics by Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins & some others.

But I couldn’t let it go without Bonnie Raitt. I’m thinking her version of “Louise” just has never been topped, but I can’t find a decent YouTube video of that one to share with you. (There’s something about the line “Louise rode home on the mail train” that just does me in.) So here’s another of hers that kind of speaks to me right now.

Bring on the weekend.

Another bite out of crime

Not directly related to my post last week about the Great K9 Krispy Kreme Kaper, but here’s a story out of England about another police dog giving evidence that the law is, indeed, a ass.

It seems that one PD Peach was mentioned in reports of some incident by the West-Midlands Police, and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) requested a witness statement from PC (Police Constable) Peach.

The coppers wrote back that PD stands for Police Dog, but the CPS didn’t seem to care. They wanted their bloody witness statement, thank-you-very-much.

So Peach’s handler filled out the proper form on behalf of PD Peach—a true marvel of concise, succinct reportage, And signed it with a paw print.

Aside from being sent to the CPS, it got posted on the station bulletin board, someone took a photo of it and before you can say FacebookTwitterKaiThnxBai, it was viral.

And the CPS proved itself to be in need of a sense-of-humor transplant. They’ve opened an investigation. Like they don’t have enough actual, you know, crime to chase up.

(Okay, okay—so the form does state that it’s RESTRICTED (When Complete). Slap a fine on someone and move along. Nothing to see here.)

Naturally, PD Peach now has his own Twitter feed; although so far he’s not nearly as communicative online as he was in his witness statement. And he might take a page out of @BronxZoosCobra for engaging followers.

We’ll have to see if the CPS can get the poker out of its butt. It’s just too bad Law & Order isn’t still in production. I know they’d have got their heads around this “ripped from the headlines” story properly.

Infrastructure matters

A friend of mine who lives in Boston posted this on his FB page; I think it may have been a share from George Takei, but whatever:

& it reminded me of driving around on the borderlands between Fairfax & Loudoun Counties in Virginia, back in the wild days of the mid-90s, before cars had sat-navs & you were lucky to find some roads marked at all, much less with a name.

It occurred to me at the time that this might be some strategy left over from The Woah: in case of another Yankee invasion, while the bluecoats were milling around trying to figure out where the hell they were, the Confederate forces could group in one of the adjoining fields & just start picking off the enemy one by one, working from the back to the front like Sergeant York.

Can’t do that, now, of course—all those country roads are four-lane highways & the fields are filled with townhouses & strip malls.

Still not sure who won that war.

Crime bites

I don’t quite understand why this crime story out of Gwinnett County, Ga., didn’t make the nationals: a local man jonesing for doughnuts jacked a Krispy Kreme truck and sped off for the Interstate.

There was a high-speed chase by a variety of law enforcement teams (including a K9 unit) that ended up in a dead-end street. The suspect, James Freddy Major, 45, is alleged to have been “under the influence”, although the story doesn’t state exactly the influence was.

It (the story) does quote the police incident report: “The suspect…was apprehended by K9 dog bite”, which just makes my day.

Although I do wonder why you’d need a K9 team to follow a Krispy Kreme truck.

Truly love

Turns out I have one more story that fits in with Valentine’s Day—from NPR’s Story Corps.

I’m not going to talk about it. Except to say that you should listen to it.

If you want love, this is it.