International affairs

I don’t often devote an entire post to a joke. Although I suppose it could be said that many of my posts are jokes…

However, this came from my friend Joyce, Wisconsinite born and bred, so it's got, like, a pedigree.

* * * *

Sven, a furniture dealer from Wisconsin, decided to expand the line of furniture in his store, so he decided to go to Paris to see what he could find. 
           

After arriving in Paris, he visited with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home. To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine.

As he sat enjoying his wine, he noticed that the small place was  quite crowded, and that the other chair at his table was the only vacant seat in the house.

Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian girl came to his table, asked him something in French (which Sven could not understand), so he motioned to the vacant chair and invited her to sit down.

He tried to speak to her in English, but she did not speak his language. After a couple of minutes of trying to communicate with her, he took a napkin and drew a picture of a wine glass and showed it to her. She nodded, so he ordered a glass of wine for her.

After sitting together at the table for a while, he took another napkin, and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music.

They ordered dinner, after which he took another napkin and drew a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up to dance. They danced until the cafe was about to close and the band was packing up.

Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. To this day, Sven has no idea how she figured out he was in the furniture business.

* * * *

I’m sure it’s indicative of some defect in my mental processes, but I swear I did not see that ending coming. I did not. So there I was, projectile-snorting latte onto my keyboard at the Korean café, when I got to it.

Fortunately, they’re quite used to me doing stuff like that.

More than a lady who lunches

Ah, another acting powerhouse has crossed the bar: Elaine Stritch died today, aged 89.

If you’ve never seen her on stage or screen, well, damn, I’m sorry for you. She had the most commanding presence. I know her best from her Emmy-winning stint on Law & Order, where she played Lainie Stieglitz, one of the classiest lawyers ever—bigger cojones than most men, but an upright integrity, which you don’t often find in any calling, much less the legal one.

Stritch completely carried that off. She gave you the impression that you’d like to sit down for a couple of rounds of martinis with Stieglitz, but that you’d want to keep your wits about you, because she was entirely capable of leaving you in the dust at any juncture of the conversation.

I’ve also seen snippets of her stage performances, including her one woman show, Elaine Stritch Live at Liberty, a few years ago. I’m telling you, it was envy-inducing to see how amazing that woman, in her 80s, looked in a man’s oversized shirt and a pair of black nylons. And you could have slapped up the Red Army’s chorus on the stage behind her, and no one in the audience would have noticed anything except Stritch. Like I said, commanding presence.

And, of course, that voice. You never forget that voice.

Primarily happy on stage, she was very active in the musical scene, and closely associated with Stephen Sondheim’s work. As I understand it, she completely nailed “The Ladies Who Lunch” in Company. I’m not sure there’s anyone else out there who could even approach the force of her delivery.

She had quite a few knocks in her life, and yet faced up to filming a very honest biographical documentary earlier this year, Elaine Stritch: Just Shoot Me. Following its release she had a fascinating interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, in which she faces such topics as her diabetes, her drinking, the death of her husband, and getting old. Listen to it, especially if you can’t see the docu just yet.

It’s not actually easy to hear, because she’s honest about everything, including being short-tempered. But it’s all class. Just like she was.

Location, location, location

Whoa—this is not something you see very often here in the Valley they call Silicon:

By which I’m referring to the “price reduced” addendum to the For Sale sign. Because residential property prices are pretty much unidirectional, and headed into the stratosphere.

So I knew when I saw the dreaded "price reduced" addition a week after the original sign was put up that this place must have serious, deeply serious problems. Because it went from $987,000 to $799,000.

Here’s the original flyer:

(The only thing that changed in the replacement was the price.)

This hovel was built in 1949, and from the looks of the front yard, nothing has been done to update it since then. I’m telling you, they haven’t even watered the weeds.

And here are a few selected photos from their listing on Redfin. The kitchen:

The bathroom:

The other bathroom:

Well, the clue was “Ideal Home for Remodeling”. That’s the marketing hype. A friend of mine tells me the internal real estate term for these sorts of properties is “scrapers”, because you’re just going to scrape it off the lot and start over.

The new, $200,000-lower price must have done it, because a few days later, here was the sign:

See, the thing is—this property is about half a mile from the new Apple spaceship headquarters. You could sell a 1970s rabbit hutch with nothing but fecal droppings in the shag carpeting for décor in that neighborhood for $595,000.

(I can't find any data on the last purchase price; if it's changed hands since 1949 it was so long ago that the MLS system isn't picking up on it. But there's another house on my walking route, which is right across the street from the Apple complex. It last sold in 1998 for $370,000. It's listed now for $1,088,000.)

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the house disappears and construction starts on the McMansion.

Spitting into the wind

A few weeks ago I went through several rounds of interviews for a product manager position with a company in the online health insurance space. The vertical wouldn’t have been my first choice in opportunities, but as it happens the challenge was to devise the best ways (over multiple web domains) to inform a vast audience of users about particular healthcare choices.

And by “vast audience”, I mean pretty much every American sooner or later in their life. So every possible demographic, literacy level, education background and blah, blah, blah.

It was a very interesting challenge, and I would have done a superb job at it. (And I do not very often make sweeping statements like that. As in, I so seldom make sweeping statements about my capabilities as to statistically constitute never.)

I say would have because—after a week and a half of complete silence despite pinging the hiring manager, I finally got a system-generated no-thanks email. Not from any one of the three persons in HR and recruiting with whom I had been in contact, but from the “recruiting team”, via a third-party applicant tracking system (ATS). I particularly get a kick out of the use of the first person singular pronoun, combined with the absence of any individual name in the signature block.

What’s particularly interesting about this organization's hands-off approach to communication is that in my first interview, I asked the person who manages the hiring manager what they’re really looking for in the product manager they hire for this position (aside from technical competency). “Empathy,” he said. “More than anything, we need someone with empathy.”

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Must be a man thang

Yeah, if you’ve been following events in Manassas, Va., you’ll know that it is one strange place.

You may recall that Manassas was the setting of the bizarre 1993, uh, affair of John and Lorena Bobbitt. In which, following an alleged rape of Lorena by John, she fetched a kitchen knife and cut off her sleeping husband’s penis. Then she drove out into Prince William County, tossed the member out of the moving car and then called 911. There was a huge manhood hunt (oh, come on—like I wasn’t going to take the opportunity?), the penis was recovered and surgically reattached.

Eventually Lorena was tried for malicious wounding, and you would not believe the attention that the trial got from the international press. The city of Manassas must have increased its population by 40% during the trial, and every hotel room between the courthouse and Fairfax County was probably occupied.

The jokes alone kept fax machines whirring for weeks. And this was in the days before Twitter.

Look—1) I am not making this up; 2) if you want details go Google for yourself; 3) this is just context for what I’m actually posting about.

Because, twenty years on from the Bobbitt trial, the Manassas police and prosecutors are up to their asses in male genitalia. Again.

This time the technology has moved on and the case involves an attempt to prosecute a 17-year-old boy for sexting his 15-year-old girlfriend a video of his willy. The truncated version is that the cops and DA wanted to, ah, chemically induce an erection in the kid for evidentiary purposes. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, primarily because I just don’t get it.

But when I was reading the Washington Post’s story on this, trying unsuccessfully to make sense of it, here’s what struck me: right in the middle of the text was this astonishingly inappropriate (or possibly massively appropriate; I dunno) ad. (I notice that the story no longer has in-text advertisements; in fact at time of writing the page has no ads at all. That will probably change.)

I mean—what the hell kind of algorithm do they have for ad serving on their site?

Actually, I suspect it’s the same algo that the LA Times used to display multiple ads for coffins, funeral flowers and bereavement services within its story on the death of Farrah Fawcett.

You’d have thought that these publications would have refined their context-based ad systems in the five years since that incident. But if so, you’d be wrong.

Gratitude Monday: les Français

It’s Bastille Day. So guess the subject of today’s second Gratitude Monday post.

I’ve never understood the rationale behind some people—even people with multiple university degrees (I’m not going to go so far as to conclude that they’re actually educated people)—ragging on the French.

Some of them are like Tea Partiers who can’t talk about Wheat Chex without blaming President Obama for the milk going sour. Whenever I hear that sort of desperate reach kind of thing the first phrase that comes to my mind is, “compensation issues.”

Yes, some Frogs can be attitudinal—just like New Yorkers and Seattleites. They generally do it with more panache than New Yorkers, and have worlds more justification than Seattleites, so I personally cut them some slack.

I’ve never been disappointed taking a trip to France. From my first one with no credit cards, riding a bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela and staying in youth hostels, abandoned houses and highway rest stops, to the most recent involving comfortable hotel beds and some very nice meals—each one has enriched my perception of the world.

To the extent that I feel at home anywhere, I do in France. I will confess that they have raised the concept of bureaucracy to an art—a Baroque, over-ornamented art whose objective is to stun you into compliance with whatever whack-job requirement they have laid out for no discernible human reason. But they certainly do it with style, unlike, say, the UK, where the approach is basically, “Hey, if it was good enough for Victoria, it’s just fine for us. Get out your quill pen and sign here.”

It’s an adjustment, of course, for a Californian to recalibrate to French timetables and customs. Do not wander into a restaurant a minute before 1400 and expect to be welcomed, much less served lunch. And don’t show up before 1930 for dinner, either.

But if you can manage the time frames, and aren’t afraid to ask questions, it’s definitely worth it. (I once asked a server at a restaurant in Bordeaux, “Quel sort d’animal est une bavette?” Look: no smartphone; that means you have to get used to human-to-human interaction. Turned out that a bavette is a cut of beef rather like a flank steak and it’s delicious.)

For the record, I really didn’t care what it was, precisely—I was going to eat it regardless. I just wanted to know what type of wine I should order to go with it.

I’ve commented on this before, but I actually enjoy driving in France. Maybe not so much in the narrow-roaded towns that were built 800 or a thousand years ago, where you creep along in your rental car (or, worse: your company car from the UK, so that you’re on the wrong side of the vehicle for even the limited visibility that medieval streets provide) not entirely sure whether at the next intersection you’re going to encounter a crocodile of school children, a flock of chickens on their way to market or Asterix. That can be a little stressful.

But when you’re ready to get out of Dodge, my favorite travel indicator ever: the Toutes Directions sign:

  

Plus—out in the country, on the secondary roads—gorgeous.

I love the sense of history in France. Yeah, the French are subject to selective amnesia as much as the next nation, but coming from Southern California, chills ran down my spine the first time I stood at the edge of the medieval boundaries of Poitiers, looking across the plain in the twilight below and just faintly hearing the echoes of the Moorish armies that encamped there in 732, before Charles Martel drove them back toward the Pyrenees.

You don’t get that sort of thing on La Cienega Boulevard. Not usually, anyway. And certainly not without chemical enhancers involved.

It bites a little that this grasp of history means that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people of Normandy know and appreciate the events of D-Day far more than the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men who landed there 70 years ago. No—it bites a lot, and it’s an indictment of our education system that if there’s not an app for that, it’s unlikely to take hold in the brains of our easily-amused youth.

I picked up this book at the Musée du Débarquement, by Utah Beach on one of my trips. It’s the result of a 1997 school project in which the children at the Collège des Pieux, in a town southwest of Cherbourg, researched the 1939-1945 war. They interviewed their grandparents and other elders, they wrote to German and British participants and they dug into archives.

I’m not seeing Fremont High School putting together a class project like that, much less producing a 250-page book with photos and drawings among  the extremely pertinent text.

Well, I could go on, but I presume you get the picture. I am grateful for France and the French. Et vive la revolution!

Gratitude Monday: Balloon moon

You might be aware that Saturday night we were treated to the supermoon phenomenon. That's when a new (or in this case a full) moon coincides with the closest approach it makes to Earth in its elliptical orbit.

If you want the technical term, it’s the perigee-syzygy of Earth, moon and sun. What it means is that the moon looks huge and it shines really bright.

Well, it does, of course, unless you’ve got full-blanket cloud cover. Which never happens here in the Valley they call Silicon, because clouds connote a blot on the perfection of paradise, and people here take that sort of thing personally.

Only, of course, Sod’s Law being in operation, we had cloud cover Saturday night.

However—and here’s what I’m grateful for today—I went out a few times between 2130 and 2215, when the clouds were only starting to drift in from whatever corner of the universe they usually hide away in.

It was beautiful to look above and away from the electric colors of El Camino Real, over the 200-unit apartment buildings and the trailer park, beyond the rusty-mustard mercury lamps of the parking lot—up into the darkness, where just the moon gave light, and reflected against the incoming clouds.

I don’t have a tripod, so I just leaned up against the building hoping the neighbors wouldn’t come out and see me in my sleepy-time outfit. Here’s what I saw:

And this one caught just a bit of the trailer park:

I went out again around 2300, and the sky was completely blanketed. Couldn’t even see the moon behind the cover because of the city lights reflecting off the Earth-side of it. 

So I’m really grateful that I went out to see the supermoon before the clouds rendered it invisible. And I'm grateful for the show it gave me.

Duking it out

I found this story very interesting: there’s a big legal flapdoodle between Duke University and John Wayne Enterprises over the latter producing a brand of whiskey they’re calling Duke Bourbon.

Duke the university objects to Duke the heirs of the Duke John Wayne using Duke the word on Duke the liquor in any context that could somehow be perceived by Duke the university's donors as a blot upon the escutcheon of an academic institution of wide regard and even wider endowments. They’re bitching (if I understand correctly) about the image of the disputed word, claiming that the font that’s being used can be confused with their own iconic logo, and maybe reduce alumni support. 

(Okay, that bit about cutting into support is an extrapolation. But it's based on an understanding of the priorities of all the universities I've ever been associated with; academics are often secondary to fundraising.)

Well, I’m not, um, seeing that. Here’s the booze:

And here are the search results for “Duke University logo”:

It’s unclear to me under what conditions you might mistake any one of those iterations in Duke blue with the design on the whiskey bottle. But if you do, you should probably take a taxi home.

And Duke the university should just get over itself.

No I (or intelligence) in team

You know, I rather thought that corporate team-building events went out of style before the end of the last century, but apparently I was wrong.

Very, very wrong, as this story from NPR indicates.

The same managers who happily lay off employees and replace them with contract workers at half the rate and no benefits to look fiscally responsible to stockholders are finding money in their budgets for group activities that deliver the maximum of alienation and humiliation to all those taking part.

Well, perhaps the managers—being clearly clueless—don’t feel the humiliation, and of course they don’t care about alienation or else their companies wouldn’t be the hellholes they are.

You just have to wonder who signed off on things like a piñata full of bits of metal, to be bashed open in an enclosed space, or distributing magic mushrooms on the company dime. I don’t wonder who approves paintballing or any other activity involving faux hunter-prey play; they are male, have compensation issues and are poor losers.

The one team-ish event that I ever organized, to get engineers and non-engineers from England, Wales, France and Belgium comfortable with each other, involved assigned seating at the group dinner, and an inter-table competition to match pub-quiz type questions with their answers and deduce the overall theme of all the questions. One of my word processors drove her table to victory in less time than it would take to chamber a paintball round.

And they were playing for bottles of champagne.

Nature studies

My friend JQ shared a photo of a pretty stunning wasps’ nest—really, quite the engineering feat. Except that they built it right above the front door to her house:

(If you've never experienced multiple wasp stings that make you swell up like the Michelin Man, you can stop reading now. You won't care about this.)

This made me think about how our appreciation for, you know, nature is relative, depending upon whether you’re viewing it out in its, er, natural habitat or it’s assaulting your property.

The example I’m recalling involves woodpeckers.

I never saw a woodpecker on the, uh, hoof until I lived in Virginia. Really knocked me out the first time I saw one—stunningly beautiful, really—and I loved having them around in both Virginia and North Carolina.

They actually do make that machine-gun sound when they’re foraging for food in trees and other sources of wood; you know, the sound your average MRI machine makes. And it can be quite loud.

Well, I was at a friend’s house in Raleigh and we heard that rat-a-tat coming from behind us, and there was a pileated woodpecker going full bore on the eaves of my friend's house. He went ballistic—evidently woodpeckers can cause real damage. He was trying to shoo the bird away, yelling at it and stuff, but it was above the second story, so there wasn’t a chance.

I thought it was really funny; my friend, not so much. Which kind of made me think he was being a sourpuss.

Well, fast-forward a few years and move to my townhouse outside D.C. I was working in the kitchen when I heard that rat-a-tat…on the side of my house. I ran outside and sure enough—a pileated woodpecker was bashing away on my woodwork.

Let me reiterate—screaming at one of these things does not work. You have to hope that it doesn’t find your particular wood productive. Unless you can throw pebbles really accurately up three stories.

But that’s what I mean about appreciating nature being relative: critters lose their cuteness when it’s your property or children they’re chomping.