Dunno about you, but
since I had oral surgery yesterday and I’m spending a lot of time with an ice pack to my jaw, I could
use something apolitical and unobjectionable. Amusing, even. So, here we go.
This came to me under
the heading, “Cleaning the Lab”, and I see no reason to change that.
It is sadly pretty much
a given that Republican congressmorons are doing just about everything they can
to find ways to avoid speaking with constituents—preferably without looking
like the pre-chordates they are. So yesterday this photo made quite the splash:
That’s Darrell Issa,
Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (which he
has staffed with reps of generous campaign donor industries the committee is
meant to oversee), R-California 49th District. He’s standing on the
roof of his district office, dodging the people below him, outside the
building. They’re his constituents, ones who gather every Tuesday to protest
his craven actions in Congress. He’s photographing them, probably to turn over
to ICE for possible deportation, or at least to post to security guards so they
can block any potential office visits. My money’s on him not coming down until
the voters have been chased off the premises by guards or the cops.
At any rate, this photo
on Twitter sparked some really great replies. Viz.:
(Issa was charged with
both grand theft, auto, and with insurance fraud by arson in the past, although
he beat the rap.)
Following the past week
when the Kleptocrat served notice to friends and foes alike that we’ve decided
to default on the Cold War that every president since 1948 has tried to win, I
think we deserve something kind of silly to take our minds off it.
And what better than a
die-hard supporter to make the statement?
Today is Memorial Day,
which means that yesterday the area around DC reverberated to the roar of
motorcycles of Rolling Thunder. It was, in fact, the 30th anniversary
of the event formally known as the Rolling Thunder Run to the Wall, in which
thousands of men and women (but, to be fair, mostly men) ride their choppers to
the Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall.
There’s a bit of an
outlaw feel to this commemoration. As, I suppose, is only right: the event’s
mission is to keep alive the memory of the POWs and MIAs of the Vietnam War, a
mission that seemed from the beginning to resonate in biker clubs.
Last year I lived
within a stone’s throw of the Pentagon, where the riders gathered in their
thousands in preparation for the run on the Sunday before Memorial Day. It’s a
stunning sight, even if you think you’re prepared for it. This year, on
Saturday I was running errands in Fairfax and came across clusters of bikers
gathering at a parking lot so as to be able to form ranks to ride in to
Arlington on I-66. Kind of like a defiant funeral cortege.
The hair and beards are
greyer now, but the resolve is not one whit weakened by time or age. And
younger riders dot the ranks to carry on the tradition.
Here’s video from this
year’s run—frankly, the music sucks, and I wish they’d just left the sound of
the engines, but it still gives you an idea.
Last year, the bikers
came to Arlington National Cemetery the next day to pay their respects to their
comrades. I got a few shots that give you an idea:
This year, when we have
someone holding titular command of all armed forces who’s spectacularly
unqualified to send men and women into harm’s way, and to care for them after
they return, I’m grateful for the roar of Rolling Thunder, and the riders who
refuse to go gentle into any dark night.
Let’s close out the
week with a few more visuals from the Kleptocrat’s first foreign trip, in which
he sucked up to despotic regimes that support terrorism, pissed off our (possibly
former) allies and generally embarrassed us in front of the whole world.
We’ve seen him bonding
with leaders of Muslim nations in which he has still undivested business
interests, and sticking his foot in his mouth in his photo ops with the
Israelis. And there was that lovely moment in Tel Aviv where he tried to show
the world how his latest trophy wife can’t get enough of him. And that note for
those folks at Yad Vashem telling them how lucky they were to have him stop by.
Well, moving on to Rome
for a flying visit with Pope Francis I, we had more unpresidented moments. Debarking
from Air Force 1 at the airport, we saw another demonstration of how practiced
Melania is at avoiding those tiny hands:
Then there was the
photo op with His Holiness and the Klepto Family. Social media was alive with bubble
captions for this money shot:
My own paltry addition to the genre:
Kleptocrat: “When does
this guy give me the gold necklace?”
Melania: “As God is my
witness, if he tries grabbing my hand this time, Imma clip him in the kidney.”*
Ivanka: “Wonder how
long I have to wait before I put this outfit up on eBay?”
Kushner: “Gevalt!”**
Francis: “Ohmeyn.”
*Notice her hands—they’re
clenched, like she’s expecting to have to Take Action. **STOP PRESS: I understand that Kushner (and Ivanka, but who cares?) has returned already to the District They Call Columbia, possibly to seek legal counsel on account of the special investigation into collusion between the Gauleiters and Russia has named him a Person of Interest.
No little yearbook
messages, but the Pope gave Donnie Two Scoops a copy of his encyclical on climate
change. No chance that he or anyone in his administration will read it, though.
(Maybe he’ll toss it to
Spicey—who is a practicing Catholic and was by all accounts very much looking
forward to the opportunity to meet the Pope. In an act of petty humiliation
remarkable even for this jerk—who only measures his own stature by how low he
can force others around him—the Kleptocrat brought a random selection of
toadies, but left his press secretary behind on Air Force 1.)
Moving on to Brussels
(which he has referred to as a hellhole) yesterday to attempt to throw his not
inconsiderable fatness around with NATO, he had the assembled leaders from
those nations sniggering as the guy famous for stiffing vendors, workers,
partners, creditors and American taxpayers demanded that they all need to “pay up”.
(BTW, the occasion for
the gathering of NATO leaders was the dedication of a memorial to the victims
of the September 11th attacks, the only time in history that Article
5 of the treaty has been invoked. Stay classy, Klepto.)
The Kleptocrat tried one
of his intimidating my-hands-may-be-tiny-but-I’ll-break-yours handshakes on French
President Emmanuel Macron. The 39-year-old Macron was prepared for this puerile
stunt, and held the tiny hand in a white-knuckle grip for several seconds after
the 70-year-old bully had gone limp.
(It may well be that this literal mano a mano contest was payback for an earlier incident where Macron had ignored L'il Two Scoops and greeted other leaders. Eventually the Chaos Monkey couldn't stand it any more, grabbed the hand of the lesser being and tried his usual dominating ape schtick. Payback's a bitch, my short-fingered vulgarian.)
(We're told, BTW, that the traveling dumpster fire assured Macron that he'd never supported his opponent in the recent French election. That would be Marine Le Pen, the right-wing nut job whom he had publicly praised during the campaign. But yesterday it was—and I quote—"You were my guy." I'm sure Macron found that both heartwarming and reassuring. And expressed that gratitude in his handshake.) But wait—there’s more.
Proving that any class this buffoon has is strictly low, the glory hound
literally shoved his way into the front of a cluster of NATO leaders to get
full camera coverage. Note the smug look on his orange visage as he gets there.
There were wags on
Twitter positing that, with all the revelations about connections between various
Gauleiters and Russia over time, the Kleptocrat might order Air Force 1 to put
down in some country without an extradition treaty (like Vatican City) and
refuse to come back. Or that, what with extreme vetting of criminals trying to
enter the country, Immigration wouldn’t let him back in. But I suppose at some
point he’s going to come back like a bad penny.
What are the odds,
though, that those swell gifts the Saudis gave him will not make their way into
the White House inventory, but will end up in some vault on an over-mortgaged
estate in New Jersey?
Tuesday at work was one
of those days—the kind that leave you wishing for nothing so much as a flattop
of nachos steaming through an ocean of margaritas. This was largely because of
that class
I was telling you about, trying to teach people how to think in terms of
ideas for new products and services.
Now I understand that
this is a bit of a stretch for most of the staff in this organization, and
maybe even a few exits past their comfort zone. That’s why we paid many monies
to a consultant to come in and teach the six-session course. Early this month
we started out with 17 people signed up. (We’d hoped to get somewhere between
20 and 30.) Everyone expressed great excitement when they asked to join. Two
told me they couldn’t make it to the first class, but I gave them dispensation—they
could catch up via online videos and discussions.
So, aside from those
two, one person emailed me the day before that first session to proclaim that
she’d thought it would be on Wednesday, and she had other plans for Tuesday.
Ooookay. One other person just didn’t show, and only informed me two days later
that she’d be unable to take the course. And eventually she was followed by Ms.
Day-Confusing Person—unexpectedly high work load.
Well. Tuesday was the
second meeting. Tuesday morning I received three emails (including one about 30
minutes before class time) moaning about (unexpectedly) heavy workloads that
prevent them from continuing with the class. Moreover, I’ve still not heard
from the two planned no-shows, but as they’ve now missed two of the six
sessions, I’m declaring them forfeit, and their copybooks are well and truly
blotted in my mind. (You want to try to come to a later iteration of this, cupcake?
Yeah, right.)
Look—this course is more
than a few bob out of my annual budget, and the purpose is to develop these
people’s ability to essentially be more creative. This is a big benefit to
them, even though of course we’re hoping that this also results in ideas that
we can build out. This is something that many, many other companies’ employees
would jump at; this crowd treats it like a back-up prom date they can ditch
when a better prospect comes along.
(As long as I’m on the
subject: the first cohort of this course wasn’t unalloyed joy, either. Out of
our 20 original participants, a couple dropped out after two classes, three
more at about week five, and five more refused to pitch an idea, which was the
whole point of the exercise.)
So I’m thinking you can
understand why my disgustedness cup raneth over on the Metro ride home on
Tuesday. I don’t have either nacho materials or tequila at home, so I had to
make do with the last inch of a pedestrian Pinot Noir in the fridge to
accompany my supper.
My manager and I have
our weekly catch-up meeting on Wednesday mornings. He is not attending this
round of the course, so part of my reports is an update on how it’s going. I
walked into his office yesterday at 0800. He finished the email he was
composing, then turned to me and announced, “I hate people.” I never got the
specifics on this, because sometimes it’s just best not to know.
Once he’d got that out
of his system, he came over to the little conference table and asked, “How did
it go yesterday?” giving me the perfect opening.
“I hate people.”
Well, he wasn’t best
pleased with the seven slackers. I think he’s going to cool down a bit before
emailing them. But I doubt that any of them will be invited to participate in
any future classes. Which is fine by me—I’m really, really tired of whining.
But perhaps I should
stock up on tortilla chips, cheese, jalapeños and tequila. I still have four
more sessions to get through.
I’m working on
restructuring my neuro-processes actively to minimize negativity, so I try to
restrict my Kleptocrat intake. However, there have been a couple of highlights
from his Big Adventure in the Mid-East and Israel (as he framed it when he
arrived in Tel Aviv).
First—he was clearly in
his element in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he was surrounded by real
despots, given gold presents and able to bond with other male supremacists who
do not permit any form of free speech. For once, he was allowed at the local
cool kids’ table, and he was pathetically happy about it. (Albeit exhausted, we’re
told. These actual multi-hour work days do tend to wear you out when you can’t
break them up with lunches, Fox News and tweets.)
And the photo ops—man.
As you can imagine this
image just sent Twitter into overdrive:
Even the Church of Satan
weighed in, although I’m not sure about the truth of this.
Well, so much for the
new Axis of Evil. At their next stop, there was more of interest. For many,
this video was a highlight of the trip so far:
I have to say that from
the practiced accuracy of her swat and his immediate “nothing happening here”
response, this clearly is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. The
world completely understands, Melania. But divorce him, honey; I’m tired of my
taxes subsidizing your separate living accommodations.
In another empty photo
op, the entourage stopped for about 15 minutes at Yad Vashem, the memorial to
victims of the Holocaust. It’s customary for visiting dignitaries to pause
in remembrance, and leave a few words in a note. Our last actual president
wrote this:
Here’s the Kleptocrat’s:
Man—it only lacks “have
fun this summer” to flesh out a full yearbook scribble.
Right—I'm off to restructure my neural paths. Peace out. Or, as the White House Press Office might say, peach out.
It seems to me as though
more and more web sites are demanding that you “sign up” for their spam emails
before they’ll deliver content. This includes before you’ve seen enough of
their content to want to even scroll down the landing page, much less clog your
inbox with their crap.
I personally think it’s
pretty nervy on their part. Often that’s enough to get me to click away from
their site, but occasionally I’ll try to evade their little popup. My automatic
go-to is to close the box, either by choosing “No, thanks, I prefer to struggle
on without benefit of your super-duper goods or information” or by clicking the
close X. Sometimes just clicking outside of the popup will make it go away, but
increasingly these people are jigging it so the only way you can get around it
is to “sign up” for their emails.
In the rare case that I
decide I really want to see something, I’ll use a bogus email address, usually
a rude word or anatomical irregularity with a generic domain. If they’ve set it
up so that you have to confirm the address by replying to an email from them,
then I’m stuffed. But if not, then I get what I want and get out.
Well, obviously I’m not
the only person to have thought of this work-around. Yesterday I arrived at
Wayfair.com via a tweet. They demanded an address to send their emails to. I
typed in pissoff@yahoo.com and hit
enter. And got this response:
Because there’s
something insidious in my back yard that starts attacking my respiratory system
within five minutes of me stepping outside, I’ve had to limit my forays to
about 30 minutes at a time, tops.
This means that I’m
tackling the jungle canopy across my patio incrementally, and mostly limit my
enjoyment of the greenery to looking through the patio doors.
However, I’m not
exactly idle. I moved my small pots of herbs outside late last month, and last weekend
I bought a couple of tomato plants, some larger pots and several bags o’ dirt,
and I’ve been silently urging them on, because I definitely want homegrown
tomatoes this summer.
Also, I splashed out
about $125 on a free-standing pole with multiple hook-arms, a couple of
squirrel-proof bird feeders and sacks of bird food. Because I love watching
birds chowing down; squirrels not so much. If you want to discourage the little
furry land sharks, you have to put your feeders somewhere they can’t reach, and
since they can leap horizontally about eight feet, you need to place your
feeders outside that distance. (Hence part of my reason for hacking away at the
overgrowth.)
So far, the
squirrel-proofness appears to be working. The little monster has been foraging
around the patio in search of the seed I used to toss out onto the ground, but
that stuff is long gone. I watched him try to jump on the pole, but he slid
down, and he couldn’t reach the feeder. It was kind of amusing to witness him
literally bounce against the patio door and gesticulate at me; he’s clearly
pissed off that I’m no longer carpeting the back yard with food. But I care
not.
In terms of feeding the
birds—not sure what’s going on there. There’s one feeder of Fine Tunes and one
of Nyjer seed. The other morning I saw a dove sitting on the Nyjer feeder,
looking kind of surprised—not eating, just parked there. (They did love that
stuff at my place in the Valley They Call Silicon, but they weren’t wild about
that feeder because it’s really meant for smaller birds.) Hasn’t been back
since.
And only yesterday have
I seen a chickadee alight on the other feeder, but not for long. I’m hoping it’s
a scout bird, and that others will twig to the fact that this is for them, and
is not some perverse bird trap. Because I bought about 35 lbs of this stuff,
and I would like to see some ROI.
Well, I’m betting that
they’ll figure it out, even if they do seem a little slow on the uptake. And I’m
grateful for having them around me once again.
I’m part of a class in
innovative thinking at work—basically, since my department is sponsoring it, I
have to take it pour encourager les
autres. This is the second iteration of the course, and I’m not going to go
into how gobsmacked I am with how incredibly doltish my colleagues can be about
mastering the utmost basics—like when and where the class is meeting.
At any rate, an ongoing
assignment is to be always on the alert for ideas: ideas about anything,
really. Remembering you need to pick up whipping cream; there must be a better
way to keep track of time than ADP; maybe if you lay out your kid’s clothes at
night, you can save five minutes in the morning and get out of the house in a
timely manner. Whatever—the deal is, you should just be aware of things that
are going on around you so that when the time comes to come up with an idea for
a product or service that might actually make money, you’ve got the wherewithal
in terms of knowing how to recognize when something annoys you enough that it
might also annoy others, and they’d pay for a solution.
We have to come up with
ten ideas a day, and keep track of them.
The last time I went
through the class, I took squares of paper to people on this floor, giving everyone
I found four of them and asking them to write a word—any word—on each slip of
paper. I then collected them into a bowl, and when my trigger mechanism went off (back
in December, it was whenever I heard Christmas music on the radio, but for
others it was whenever they filled their water bottle, or checked social media), I’d reach into the bowl, pull out a word and try to come up with an
idea around that word. Any crackbrained idea.
I dusted off the bowl o’
trigger words for this round, and yesterday upon hearing Mozart for the 42nd
time that day, I pulled out “nubs”. (Perhaps I should preface this by noting
that some of my colleagues may have been taking the piss. In addition to “inspire”, “fire
hose” and “black”, yesterday I also found “kill”. Yesterday I was entirely
ready to act on that suggestion.) Well—kind of interesting, no?
I was struggling to be
inspired by my existing understanding of “nubs”, so I Googled it. Turns out
that a “nub” is someone who totally sucks at playing a video game, even if he’s
been playing it for a long time. No matter how long they keep at it, they’re
still going to suck.
Ah, I thought—like the
Kleptocrat trying to be president. I wished he was limited to playing the role in
a gamer environment instead of the real life version. So my idea was a video
game with him scuttling around the White House in a bathrobe, screaming at his
Gauleiters, ordering pie with two scoops of ice cream, calling Putin to check
in on how he’s doing, etc. Every 30 minutes, he’d have to go somewhere to play
golf.
There’d be a lot of
fundraising, of course, and money laundering. You’d have to decide when to
raise the membership fees or rent at various Kleptocrat properties. Also, you’d
have to decide which family members are part of the administration and which
ones have to live 500 miles away and only be trotted out for ceremonial events. One of the best parts is that there's no requirement for internal logic: just like the Kleptocrat in our space-time continuum, reality shifts at irregular intervals.
Oh—and the tweeting. If
you don’t interrupt whatever he’s doing at six-minute intervals, you lose the
round and have to start over again running in the primaries. Plus whining; there'd have to be a constant stream of that, mixed in with grandiose self-puffery.
See—a lot of this
ideation stuff is just releasing personal stress. But this one might actually
have legs. I should write up my pitch and start looking for VCs.
