Here's who let the dogs out

You know, I love a good prison break story. I mean, I must have seen The Great Escape about a bazillion times. (I even named my parakeet Eric Ashley-Pitt; go look it up.) And here’s one of my all-time favorites.

Humans at the famed Battersea Dogs’ (& Cats’) Home were going nuts, because they'd leave at night with everything shipshape and Bristol fashion, and arrive in the morning to find dogs out of their cages, having laid waste to the kibble in the pantry. 

This was only happening at night, and the keepers just could not figure out what the hell was going on. By the time they showed up in the morning, there was nothing but a mass of really full dogs of every description, and no one was ratting out anyone.

Finally, the humans set up CCTV, and they caught the break-out artist, er, red-pawed. An extremely intelligent lurcher (no, really—that’s a breed of dog) had been breaking out of his cage and then setting free the other dogs to roam the corridors and chow down on the foodstuffs.

(God, I love this dog!)

The identity of the culprit was a surprise, because (as one news report put it) lurchers aren't considered particularly intelligent dogs. No comment needed on that one, eh?

They put an end to Red's midnight marauding, but he will live on in the hearts and minds of freedom (and dog chow) lovers everywhere.

All that glitters

Filed under the heading of: dang, the Internet, I give you this service, which you may heretofore not have realized you needed, but reconsider:

Yes, it’s ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com.

For $9.99 (Australian, so—at time of writing--$7.88 USD), those clever folks at ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com promised to mail a packet of “this-shit-sticks-on-everything” glitter to the person or persons with whose day you really totally want to screw. From their FAQs:

Q. “Will the recipient know who sent the glitter?”

A. “Not unless you open your mouth.”

Q. “Why should I pay you to send glitter to someone I hate?”

A. “First off, use your fucking imagination. We’re going to be pouring a tonne of glitter into an envelope with a folded up piece of paper. You know what’s going to happen when that fuckface opens the envelope & pulls out the letter? The craft herpes will be released & will go everywhere.”

Q. “Why are you so obsessed with glitter?”

A. “Go fuck yourself”

The service so thoroughly meet a universal need that for a while when you clicked Buy Now you received the message that the proprietor(s) were so inundated with orders that new sales were suspended while they fulfilled existing ones.

However, this week it was revealed that one of the best game-changing paradigm-shifting next-big-thing innovations of the entire Interwebs was nothing more than a really, really successful prank.

And by “successful”, I mean: he sold it last week on Flippa.com for $85,000 USD. The purchaser has announced that he will fulfill the 10,000-order backlog and he has resumed sales. Both PayPal and credit cards. (“Yes, we know PayPal is a shitty company, hell why not send those dicks some glitter?”)

So you see, children, how the power of Internet can be used for good and the betterment of mankind? And how Aussies totally rock the ether?

Equality bytes

There’s an interesting oxymoron involved in applying for employment in the United States. Well, there’s a ton of them, but today I’m going to talk about this one: the Equal Employment Opportunity questions.

Employers have to report data to the Feds on percentages of employees of various racial/ethnic groups, sexes and disabilities; also whether you’re a veteran (of the Armed Forces) or not.

Interestingly, I’ve recently seen more than two choices for sex (or gender, as they politely like to refer to it these days), especially for companies around the Bay Area. It’s nice to have options.

Now, while it’s mandatory that employers report this information, it’s voluntary for applicants to supply it. I routinely check the “decline to state” boxes. They try various ways to trick you into giving the data, but there has to be an option to refuse to “self-identify”.

Now, here’s the oxymoron:

The drop-downs for each of those categories is a required field. So it’s mandatory that you respond to it, even when your response is “none of your dag-blamed business.”

So, I don’t really know how accurate that EEO data is on a national level. I just know that they’re going to have to interview me in person to make any guesses about my particulars.

Se non ora, quando?

Seventy years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G. Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for pest control), snuffed out their lives.

Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?

And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.

But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance and dogmatism are on the rise. And now that pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.

We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn that lesson, I just despair.

Gratitude Monday: Working the rooms

I can’t tell whether this is a stretch for Gratitude Monday or not, but today I’m grateful that I went to four tech/career-related meetups last week, and I kept a straight face and open mind through every one of them.

If you have never been to a “networking” event, then you won’t know what an accomplishment this is, because 9.5 out of every 10 of these things are teeming with pishers—people hustling a product, a service or themselves. And they move around like sharks, with their eyes continually scanning the crowd for new prey even as they’re trying to convince you why you should buy, hire or invest.

And the ones who aren’t trying to shake you down on the spot are clutching their Vista Print business cards in a death grip, with that deer-in-headlights look on their faces, silently beseeching you to put them out of their misery as they try to cough up the elevator pitch they memorized (but failed to practice) out in the parking lot 20 minutes ago.

So, not really my kind of soirée.

However, I decided that, as long as I viewed them as an old-fashioned tea party (with bulk pizza or tortilla chips and warm soda or beer to balance in both hands instead of teacup and saucer) where my particular object is to observe and encourage, I could approach each event as an opportunity to learn a variety of things.

Viz. There are a shedload of people churning out a world of healthcare applications in the expectation that they’re going to make money hand-over-fist, become internationally famous and, you know, help humanity. I think I was the only person in a room of more than 200 who did not raise a hand when the speaker asked (in the manner of a revivalist counting sinners), “Who here is working on a great idea to bring to the marketplace?”

This meetup was held at an interesting venue, a tech incubator. That same night there was also a meetup for retail tech, and one of its organizers assured me that they were much cooler than whatever else was going on. I should have taken him up on it; I could have hit two events in the same night. They might have had better pizza and colder beer, too.

It turns out that there is a 21^st Century equivalent of the old carousel of slides of someone’s summer vacation. At another meetup a tech entrepreneur (which, of course, is a redundant term, because I’m apparently the only person in the entire Valley They Call Silicon who isn’t working on a great idea to bring to the marketplace) showed a group of developers 35 photos of robots he took at the Consumer Electronics Show. Most of them were accompanied by this description, “So I thought this was pretty cool.”

However, in fairness, there was also a discussion of tech trends, including pros and cons of the Internet of All Things, that was, in fact, pretty cool. And the beer was somewhat chilled; although the tortilla chips ran out before the panel fired up.

I’m sorry to say that the least focused presentations (even including the My Trip to CES interlude) were at the women-in-STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) group, although the post-preso discussion, where attendees spoke of opportunities to mentor young women in the field, livened up considerably. Also, sadly, the wine and sodas were all room temperature, although the food (supplied by Google, I presume, since it was held in one of their buildings) was good.

And the last meetup, for job seekers, was a throwback to the last century inasmuch as the presenter—not introduced in any way—held forth for three hours on a non-generic (his description) success-guaranteed (100%) system for getting the job you want. It was the strangest atmosphere (particularly for job seekers) because there was no energy at all in the 50 or so attendees, no conversation, no networking—it was like a church just before they wheel in the casket.

Frank (no last name) had a few points I found cogent, although he buried them pretty deep in his smirky-if-well-practiced verbiage. He also kept referring to steps in his guaranteed-success system as “binomial” instead of “binary”. Not a sterling recommendation for his alma mater, UC Davis, but apparently his clients at various investment banking firms were happy with him.

(No refreshments offered at all at this one, unless you want to count the little individually-wrapped mints in the ladies loo of the too-cool-for-school hotel in Cupertino where it was held.)

To tell you the truth, I left two hours into his three-hour spiel, but at least I kept a straight face during that time.

And I’m grateful that I had all this live, free (pretty much) entertainment all around me. Got another three lined up for this week, too.

Don't go there

Shortly after the Islamic terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris early this month, those whacky guys at Fox News extruded a huge steaming pile and jumped straight into it. Since then, the hits just keep on coming.

Some self-styled “terror expert” named Steve Emerson on Fox proclaimed that Western Europe, and particularly the UK, is swamped with Muslims, and that there are many “no-go” areas within these countries, places where non-Muslims fear to tread.

Among these he named Birmingham as being so “totally Muslim” that no one else will even enter the environs.

Well, the Twitterverse lit up like a Grateful Dead concert with the hashtag #FoxNewsFacts. The tweets were flying so fast and thick it was like machine gun fire on Omaha Beach. Like:

(I also read that they'd changed the name to Birming, on account of ham isn't Halal.)

(Cleverly combining the cat meme with the #FoxNewsFacts hashtag.)

I mean—you get the drift, right?

After my first beverage snort onto the keyboard I stayed away from liquids and just laughed until tears came. I found about six new people to follow in just a couple of hours.

Even British Prime Minister David Cameron, who is somewhere in the Attila the Hun range of the political spectrum (If Attila wore Savile Row) got it right. “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”

Cameron was educated at Eton College and Oxford University (Brasenose College). He has mastered the use of language.

Eventually Emerson apologized (although I don’t believe the phrase “talking out my ass” was used), but clearly their target audience lapped up the fear mongering like frat boys at an open bar. And clearly he's still clueless about Birmingham:

(Also, other Foxoid “experts” named several European cities as being no-go zones. The mayor of one of them, Paris, has announced her intention to sue the network, which should be interesting.)

But wait—there’s more. Because on Monday, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (right up there with the Attila crowd, though not as well-spoken as Cameron) flapped his hands about at a speech at a British think tank and re-declared that Europe is rife with Muslim-dominated enclaves where Christians fear to tread, including parts of London.

When asked for clarification on where, exactly, these no-go areas were, Jindal got a little vague, brusquely insisting that he’s talked with people (you know—people) who assured him that there are parts of London where women don’t want to walk alone.

Well, yes indeed there are. And parts of Los Angeles and parts of Buenos Aires and parts of Brooklyn and parts of Seoul that I don’t really want to walk around alone in. But my reluctance has nothing to do with the religious or even necessarily the ethnic makeup of those areas. They’re really mean streets and I’m not equipped to deal with them. (Like I wouldn’t want to walk the halls of JPMorgan Chase, one of the most alien and alienating environments I can think of.)

Jindal—like Fox—is unapologetic. They operate on the well-established principle that if you make a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, it eventually becomes the truth.

Meanwhile, plan on staying upwind of them. That pile is still steaming.

Twitter logic

If you use Twitter at all, you’ll know that when you follow a lot of tweeters they send you an automated “Thanks for following me” Direct Message (DM).

Usually it includes an invitation to go to their website, Facebook page or some other so you can buy their product or service. It’s essentially as meaningful as a commercial on any basic cable TV channel; the appearance instead of the substance of engagement.

But here’s one I found kind of interesting:

  

Apparently my new bestie Hans (whom I only followed because he followed me and when I checked his profile he didn’t look like a spammer or someone wholly devoted to selling crafts) does not see the irony in using a DM to tell me he doesn’t respond to DMs.

Not even the Amighty escapes

If you haven’t worked in the arena of gathering requirements from customers—or, really, dealing with clients in any capacity—you may not find this as hysterical as I do. It’s “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth”, from a San Francisco-based humor site.

The language is so…”communications-y”. The sort of thing you’d get from focus group facilitators or anyone in any marketing department anywhere. Actually, from anyone with an MBA.

Viz. point 4: “Right now we’re only seeing two great lights in the sky… a greater one for day and a lesser one for night? Thinking that maybe we weren’t clear in the original briefing. Definitely need more than just two great lights. Need to make this a memorable, high-value experience for our users. Please revisit slides thirteen and fourteen in the deck. Shout with questions.”

And then there’s the “Please consider the environment before printing this email”.

Well—have a look (especially at slides 18 and 27; there may be showstoppers.

Thoughts?

Excess iPadding

There’s a widely-acknowledged phenomenon here in the US known as the “freshman 15”. It refers to kids going off to their first year of college gaining some measurable amount of weight, generally due to the quality of student dining hall food and increased alcohol consumption. (Also, I expect there’s a certain amount of comfort eating going on.)

I’m wondering if there’s such a thing as the “tablet 10”? Because I swear that since I got my iPad in November I’ve put on six pounds.

My general eating habits didn’t change over that period, so I’m thinking it has to be from turning into such a complete slug that I don’t even get up from the sofa and walk across the room to check something out on my laptop. I just pick up the iPad and run my query.

Can I be the only person suffering from this? Can I get a research grant to study it?

Gratitude Monday: Shaking it off

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: a dash-cam video that’s gone viral, as they say: a Dover, Delaware, cop on patrol, getting jiggy with Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”. He's now #DashCamDiva.

I was a little worried about the parts where Officer Jeff Davis has both hands off the wheel, but apparently no animals or anyone else was harmed in the making of this video.

What particularly appealed to me was when Davis went all “cool-cop pro” when he motioned someone to cross in front of him, and then got back into the groove when the coast was clear. This is indeed a man who knows his Swift—he doesn’t bungle one syllable that I can tell, and he’s got all the music-appropriate hand gestures that anyone can have behind the wheel.

Yeah, it was staged, and yeah, I hope to God perps or other passengers are not subject to that sort of thing in the normal course of events, because if they are, I see lawsuits in Dover’s future. But what fun.

Seriously—if you can watch this without a gigantic grin on your face, I do not want to be riding with you anywhere.