Makes sense

Having sat through a 45-minute presentation yesterday, let me toss something out to the universe:

Can we all agree to banish this interjection from all discourse: “Does that make sense?”

Inevitably the utterer is not actually asking for your opinion on the matter, and in fact would be shattered if you were to suggest that no, indeed it does not make sense, since there’s never even a pause before s/he runs on to the next point. It’s nothing more than a drawn-out filler phrase, an attenuated “you know”.

Which makes it utterly meaningless, a waste of breath and just up-my-nose annoying. So let’s enucleate it from the language. We’ll all be the better for it.

Bon appétit, I guess

I love playing “imagine the meal” at supermarket checkout lines. For example, the other day the guy ahead of me at the cash register was buying these items:

One banana, two bottles of Château le Plonk red and a tub of Fiber One® cottage cottage cheese.

I mean—what will that dinner look like?

When you're not the only one with Photoshop...

Oh, dear—Photoshop is getting quite the workout over the Unity march in Paris on Sunday.

You’ll recall that French president François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel led the procession, and that they were joined by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, to the amusement of everyone in the world with an Adobe subscription.

Well, it turns out that a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) newspaper in Jerusalem thought it inappropriate that the actual participants in the demonstration be shown with men arm-in-arm with women not their actual, you know, wives or blood relations, so they excised Merkel, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt from the shot. (They also cropped out the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as well.)

I’m not going to comment on a Weltanshauung that is so terrified of very thought of images of actual women appearing in the representation of an historic event that they falsify photos. We saw it a few years ago when Hasidic newspapers in Brooklyn Photoshopped out Hillary Clinton and another woman from the iconic situation room photo during the takedown of Osama bin Laden, and I already didn’t comment on that. Much.

Instead, I’ll give you the response to HaMevaser from the Interwebs:

Sic semper anyone who thinks they can get away with dicking around with women on the web. That horse done left the barn.

Where in the world is Nico Sandiego?

Dear Lord, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy totally lost the Interwebs. On Sunday he’d joined the unity march in Paris somewhere in the scrum behind the leaders.

But as the procession moved, he maneuvered his way into the front line with the actual heads of state and miscellaneous dignitaries.

I wonder if his cleverness was worth it, though, because people noticed and social media lit up like a Grateful Dead concert. The hashtag #JeSuisNico exploded and everyone with a graphics package and a Tumblr account started churning out “where’s Nico” shots at a rate of knots.

I mean—Nico takes a twerk for the team:

Nico joins the Beatles:

Nico, Nixon and Elvis:

Nico takes down the Wall:

Nico and Ike see off the D-Day troops:

And two appearances at the Tehran Conference:

It’s a wonder to me that any work at all gets done with this sort of thing going on. It’s also a wonder to me how pols all over the world pull this kind of crap repeatedly, when there’s ample evidence what social media can do to them.

It's like they don't know Twitter exists.

Perhaps that’s what our own leaders were concerned about when they decided to take a pass on sending anyone of consequence to represent us at that march?

Gratitude Monday: Unintended consequences

Capping off an absolute bastard of a week in Paris, today I am grateful for the response of people all over the world, in high places and low, as they flooded the streets of cities yesterday, clad in black as though attending a family funeral. In their tens and hundreds of thousands they witnessed for the 17 men and women murdered in attacks Wednesday and Friday: journalists, police officers and supermarket shoppers.

I mean, really—it was Everyman in the sights of those Kalashnikovs, and it was Everyman who gathered silently in Paris, London, New York, Cairo, Tokyo… They carried placards proclaiming “Je suis Charlie”, “Je suis Juif”, “Je suis Ahmed”, and they raised pens and pencils. It was stunning, and so heartening.

I’m not saying there wasn’t posturing or hypocrisy evident in these events, but today is Gratitude Monday, so I’m going to let that crap slide.

Because I’m hoping that demonstrations like these will lead to continuing resistance to thugs of any stripe who think it a glorious thing to gun down people armed only with newsprint and grocery lists in the name of any god.

One of my favorite images from yesterday’s gatherings is this one: the French tricolor is projected onto the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square, smack under the nose of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Is this a jihadist’s worst nightmare? I fervently hope so.

The silence roars

As I mentioned yesterday, the Internet pretty much exploded with cartoons expressing the sorrow and outrage of the civilized world at the atrocity at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

But there was also response from newspapers—actual publications mixing ink on paper, just as the satirical weekly did to such great effect—which went straight to the heart of the matter. Because the hooded and masked thugs who gunned down 12 people in the course of “avenging the Prophet” evidently thought that ending those particular lives would end the sort of commentary they’d been making.

And again and again, publishers and editors made it clear on their front pages that this was a fundamentally baseless expectation. I’ll give you two examples, first from The Independent (UK):

And  what has to be the extremists’ worst nightmare, from B.Z. (Germany):

Nous sommes tous Charlie

I was on my walk yesterday morning when I first heard the news of the murders at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly based in Paris. At time of writing, twelve people had died in the act of terrorism, which targeted four of the main cartoonists, but killed eight other journalists and two police officers as well. One of the latter—wounded on the street—was finished off by gunman for no apparent reason. Except that he could.

The newspaper has ridiculed politicians, religion, business and anything and anyone else worthy of deflation. A lot of what they publish is offensive to a lot of people, which of course is the job of satire. This has been a particular burr under the saddle for Muslims, who have many precedents when it comes to expressing their offendedness through violence. The editors have had to defend themselves in court, and they’ve received death threats and survived a firebombing a few years ago.

(Basically: "Flush all religions")

So far I’ve not heard of Opus Dei or Haredi operatives being associated with such events, but the thugs with Kalashnikovs and masks over their faces who literally shot their way into Charlie Hebdo’s office yesterday were heard to shout, “We have avenged the Prophet.”

There’s been a global tsunami of response on social media, most of it outraged by but some in support of the attack. I’ll let you guess how that breaks out demographically. The graphics and cartoons hashtagged #JeSuisCharlie have been passionate and heart-rending.

"Grab your weapons, comrades!" (Francisco Olea)

(Loïc Sécheresse)

"There is no freedom without freedom of the press" (Tomi Ungerer, who as a boy lived through the German occupation of Alsace, and thus knows from repression and terror.)

(A 2012 New Yorker cartoon)

And one that truly captures the ethos of Charlie Hebdo:

"Oh, no..not them..." (Tommy Dessine)

There have also been spontaneous demonstrations of sorrow and solidarity in cities around the world. Including Paris:

Berlin:

Strasbourg:

London:

Dublin:

Tunis:

Pristina, Albania:

Rio:

Myself, I can’t seem to stop crying, because—aside from the ghastly human loss of each of those lives—the attack on freedom of speech and thought is downright anathema to any definition of civilization.

This is what happens when people have closed minds and open access to weapons. It’s the triumph of the barbarians—in this case the ones who want us all to return to those golden days of the 7^th Century.

As for the cry that we must respect religious sensibilities, if your God is so utterly lacking a sense of humor and so easily affronted that satire is somehow a capital offense, then s/he should not have given humans a brain capable of critical thinking and articulate expression.

Deutschland über alles

What the hell—let’s kick off the New Year with a cat video. This one from the weather forecast portion of a news broadcast in Germany:

What I love about this is not only the weather guy’s sang froid, but that apparently the station has a resident studio cat.

They are just worlds ahead of us.

Mag trade

Dunno whether they’re still referred to by the trade as this, but back in the 1940s, when Lee Miller was working for them, the British edition of Vogue was known as Brogue, while the French edition was Frogue.

I thought those were mildly amusing wordplays, but this one takes the (dog) biscuit:

 

Someone definitely needs to publish this.

Gratitude Monday: The joy of friends

Remember how I welcomed the New Year?

Well, it started out right in alignment with the pixie-dust. I got a call from a friend I’ve known since I first went over to the UK to interview for the job that eventually took me there for three years.

During that time I got to know Ros pretty well. She’s Italian, I’m Californian; we were both to some extent fish out of water. Also both slightly mad, so we bonded pretty quickly. An admin in the sales/sales support unit, still in her teens, she impressed me with her drive and absolute focus on getting things done. Ros could freeze the blood of account directors nearly thrice her age with one of her Looks, and then smooth everything out with a laugh (which is infectious, I can tell you).

Shortly after my arrival, I set up a group to support sales proposals across the region. Business proposals are huge, complex documents comprising inputs from sometimes dozens of people. Just keeping track of the latest version of these things is a nightmare, and then there’s the issue of people not meeting their deadlines. Ros wanted to be a document controller, and I absolutely knew she could be a star at it.

What surprised me was pushback I got from colleagues, including the putative supervisor of admins. She assured me that the other admins would not like Ros getting this opportunity, because she’d essentially be moving ahead of her peers. (This is something Brits refer to as “having ideas above one’s station.” I am not making that up, and it explains a lot.) None of the other admins was interested in the job; they just thought that she shouldn’t get it because…because.

Well, see above about being a Californian. I held my ground against the admin queen, my own manager and the woman who was running the technical support side of the group. I had to slap “junior” in front of the title, but I got Ros.

And I was right, and Ros was right, and all was right with the world. She tore the hell out of that job; her proposals went out on schedule and looking fine, and bid managers and other contributors had nothing but praise for her dedication. (This came from a bid manager in the Paris office: “Ros does not count the hours.”)

I could give you dozens of examples of her generosity and creativity, but here are a couple of my cherished Ros memories: she taught me one of my favorite sentences ever: “Ci vediamo domani.” And there was one time—post-project, when she’d been working all the hours God sends for many days, when she suddenly looked up from her monitor and wailed, “[Bas Bleu]—I’ve been on this Nike site for an hour and it won’t let me buy this bag!”

I doubt it had actually been an hour, although it probably seemed like that to someone bent on buying a bag (and Ros can shop for Britain, take my word for it). And it wouldn’t have mattered to me if it had been, because I reckoned my staff were professionals, they got their work done to an extremely high standard, and (within the bounds of legality and consideration for others) I didn’t care what they did to unwind. But Ros’s desk was equidistant from mine and my manager’s, and he thought people should arrive at the office by 0830, remain there until 1730 at a minimum, and engage in no horseplay during the intervening hours. Working through the night did not excuse you from that expectation. Not a bad guy, really, but definitely one or more pokers pretty far up his butt.

Well, we got through that one—actually, I think Ros and I made Graham uneasy just in a general way individually, and he didn’t much fancy the idea of dealing with us as a pair—and I privately suggested that she not make a public issue over any future online shopping disappointments. At least not while he was within earshot.

But back to the call on New Year’s Day. Since I left the UK in 2001, Ros has gone on to two different Fortune 500 companies, moving up to bid manager and now capture manager, which carries a high level of strategic business vision and what’s known as dotted-line team management. You have to be able to get people to do stuff they might not be interested in, without wielding direct authority. Ros is a natural at this sort of thing.

She was telling me about a couple of recent experiences, and from 8000 miles away I could see the assurance and the complete passion she brings to her work. She’s rightfully proud of her accomplishments, and it lifted my spirits to hear the happiness in her voice.

It also reminded me of what you can do when you’re focused, determined and willing to throw yourself completely into something.

Ros says I’m responsible for her current success. Well, yes—I was her mentor back then. But while I’m happy to have had a part in it (I did indeed dismiss those stuffy Brits with Victorian notions and pokers up their butts as stuffy Brits with Victorian notions and pokers up their butts) by giving her her start, after that I pretty much just got out of her way.

From the beginning, as she was cutting and pasting all those hundreds of Q&A sections, she was reading, assimilating, asking questions, piecing things together. She also went after every possible training she could get. She never stops learning. She sets goals, achieves them, and then sets some more and goes after them. That’s something I find both admirable and inspirational, because it doesn’t come naturally to me.

Ros called because she’s decided she’s going to write her memoirs. A few years ago I would probably have had some doubts about something like that. But not after hearing her last Thursday. She knows the story she wants to tell and she will not be daunted if she doesn’t pop out a first draft by Groundhog Day. She just spent three years gutting a Victorian cottage in Windsor and building it out exactly to her suit flawless Italian sensibilities. She’ll get this right, too.

Here’s how I always picture Ros—we’d ditched the corporate crowd one afternoon at a sales conference on Cyprus and went off to the birthplace of Aphrodite. This is a woman who will accomplish whatever she sets out to do:

And I’m grateful that she reached out to me at the beginning of the year, when I could really use some inspiration. Perhaps what goes around does indeed come around.