Where's the flashy-thingie?

This week scored about a 9.5 on my Weird Shit-o-Meter (to appropriate Men in Black’s Agent Jay). And that was even before the pardon of Dinesh D’Souza.

But here’s another example: the BBC reports on the top ten reasons that (British) corporations toss out for not having women sit on their boards. The pathetic lameness of these things is extraordinary.

(Here’s the list, in case you’re not up to clicking through to the Beeb.)

If I were a stockholder I’d seriously consider selling my shares, because men so stupid as to go on record backing these crack-brained excuses in the 21^st Century could not possibly run a company at a sustainable profit. And that’s before we even get to the fact that businesses with a good mix of women in leadership positions consistently outperform those packed with the XY-chromosome set.

Destination anywhere

You know, it’s been a weird, weird past few days. Li’l Donnie Two-scoops using a tweet to wish us all a “happy” Memorial Day, while assuring us that the generations of dead soldiers would bigly approve of the job he’s doing in the White House; his wife disappearing after a taxpayer-funded “kidney procedure”; Roseanne Barr tweeting something disgusting even by her standards and then blaming it on Ambien; a Kardashian paying a call on the Kleptocrat to discuss prisons and sentencing (the big Kim-Klepto Summit?); the GOPig governor of Missouri is resigning following a sex scandal in a rush to try to avoid investigations that might reveal "dark money"; a GOPig congressmoron from Virginia who used his taxpayer-paid staff as personal servants has decided also to resign suddenly (having only just now discovered that he’s an alcoholic)…

These are some strange times, my friends; strange, strange times.

That being the case, and closing out this bizarre month, I’m thinking that this sign could be pretty much anywhere.

Post-holiday reality

Is there some kind of cosmic Rule that requires we balance a holiday weekend with a shedload of tsuris immediately thereafter? There must be.

Monday afternoon the fan on my HVAC unit stuck in the on position. The AC compressor cycles on and off, as per the setting on my thermostat, but the fan runs ever on.

It could be a lot worse—the AC could have conked, or the fan could have stuck in the off position; in either of those cases, I’d be SOL in DC-area early summer heat/humidity.

But I just have visions of my next Dominion Power bill, and I do not like the number of places to the left of the decimal point that I see.

(And I was just so chuffed at putting out my mosquito zapper on Monday. I hope to God it destroys those things in their thousands—even if it is a bit unsettling to hear that ZZZ ZZZ sound as it does its work.)

Then—work. I’ve got about six spreadsheets going to try to corral various aspects of the business plan. I had a mid-morning meeting where I attempted to tame various human aspects of this project, and then IT needed my laptop because it’s been acting screwy and the Lenovo technician was supposed to do something that would fix it.

I saved to Dropbox everything I had open—just as you’re meant to do—and handed it over. Forty-five minutes later I got it back and started back to work. Only one of the spreadsheets wouldn’t open. Nothing but an error message saying that Excel didn’t recognize it any more, so tough.

Naturally, Sod’s Law being in effect, the bollixed file was the one, mission-critical spreadsheet containing my financial models (such as they are) that I absolutely needed and that would be a gigantic pain in the tuchis to rebuild. So I freaked.

The help desk guy also could not open it, and my anxiety level was rising every second. Eventually, he asked if I could try opening it online at the Dropbox URL. I could, and it did! I downloaded that sucker, changed its name and saved it in two places. Whereupon I slunk home to call the HVAC repair guy and make an appointment for him to come out today.

And then I poured a glass of wine. To propitiate the cosmic Rule.

Veteran driver

Seems appropriate that as I was driving around this weekend—of all weekends—in the Military District of Washington, I found myself behind this car:

Gratitude Monday: paying the bill

We live in parlous times for democracy, with an ignorant, corrupt, venal, narcissistic kleptocrat in the White House, supported by GOPig and Evangelical Taliban sycophants who hand out mulligans for his every violation of the ten commandments and seven sins, as long as he shows signs of implementing their dreams of white supremacy and suppression of women.

It was clear from the 2016 election that Cadet Bone Spurs views the men and women of our armed forces as his own personal collection of toy soldiers to be deployed in whatever way will amuse him most at the moment—whether it’s missile strikes in Syria or a $30M military parade “bigger than Macron’s”, the Bastille Day parade (an annual event that honors France’s independence, not an individual head of state—whether competent or not) he fidgeted through last July.

Thirty million for a parade while 40,000 veterans are homeless.

And whether or not our draft-dodger-in-chief takes time out from golfing, watching TV and tweeting to show up at Arlington National Cemetery today, thousands of people who were not raised by rabid wolves will be there (and at other military cemeteries), communing with friends and comrades, or just honoring the fallen.

You know—those whose sacrifices over the centuries paid the bills for our Constitutional freedoms and our political follies, extremists and moderates, reactionaries and progressives alike. They lie in their tens of thousands around the globe, where they fell, and where they were returned home. I’m grateful for them all, for the graces they bought for us all.

My brothers and sisters—I give you heartfelt thanks, I apologize that we’ve made such a hash of it, and I live in hope that we will find our way back to the democracy you served with such devotion.

Tá

Today is a historic moment in the Republic of Ireland. The referendum to repeal the 8^th Amendment to the Irish constitution—the one (written by men) declaring that a woman and her fetus have an equal right to life. The one that has driven women for decades to make difficult, lonely, painful, shame-filled journeys to other countries to terminate pregnancies.

It was meant to ban Irish abortions. In reality, it only banned them on Irish soil.

As you might expect from a country under the thrall of an extraordinarily reactionary Church for centuries, Ireland has some of the most repressive laws on the planet WRT women’s reproductive rights. Basically: a woman has no rights when it comes to what goes on inside her uterus. The Evangelical Taliban in my country looks to these laws with drooling envy.

The hashtag #Hometovote is trending across Twitter as women (and men, to be sure) are traveling back to the old country to cast their votes—some No, but the preponderance Yes. Bankok, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Toronto, Hanoi, Sydney—some booked their tickets as soon as the referendum was announced. Some, unable to fly home themselves, have offered to pay the fare for others able to go.

(Part of the scene at Dublin Airport yesterday, welcoming citizens returning to vote.)

The stories told in the length of each tweet (just cast your eye here, if you’re wondering) are at once uplifting and heartbreaking. The #Repealthe8th movement originated out of sorrow, following multiple cases where women (and girls) were forced to carry deformed or dying fetuses, or bear children resulting from rape; where women died from dangerous pregnancies because abortions were denied them.

I see that the opponents are waving the false flags that we see here; if abortion becomes legal then hardly any pregnancy will come to term. Blah, blah, blah. There’s a lot of talk from the Church about the sanctity of life and women’s sacred role in it. This ignores the fact (noted above) that Irish women still get abortions; they just have to leave the country to do so, or seek back-alley providers, as women have done for centuries. And it’s not a good look for an institution that for decades brought the Irish the Magdalene laundries and endemic sexual abuse of Irish children by Irish priests who were protected by the entire Church infrastructure.

(Look—I’m not anti-Church. Entirely. I’m anti institutions that do not accept accountability for their crimes, and which still think they’re living in the Twelfth Century, and that we should join them there. I am of the opinion that they should either catch up to us here in the Twenty-first, or shut the fuck up. This includes the Republican party.)

If the referendum passes, it’s likely that the Dáil will enact legislation allowing abortion under some conditions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy. This is hardly the abortions-on-every-corner state the Noists are predicting. I get it—allowing women to make decisions about their own reproductive plans is a massive threat to the Patriarchy. Getting the vote in the first place was bad enough; #Repealthe8th is another shove at the pillars of the Temple of Men (by Delilah, not Samson).

But—whether it’s this time or the next, or the one after that—it’s coming. Vote, my sisters (and my brothers). Be brave and proud. Make history.

There otter be...

It was a long day yesterday, capped off by 105 minutes working on Excel spreadsheet formulae for five years of cost calculations—for one major element out of at least three in a five-year business plan.

Let me just say that there may not be enough distilled spirits to get me through the next month.

So I’ve stored this clip of outtakes from Muppet otters to apply to my sensibilities—for purely therapeutic purposes.

Every single time I watch it I start laughing so hard my eyes leak.

Which is exactly what I need.

If you can't do the time...

You may be aware that, since roughly January of last year, the banner of the Washington Post has included this tagline:

I’m sure it burns the bacon of Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops and all his GOPig gang. At least, those who can read.

However, WaPo’s got nothing on the Aspen Daily News (circulation 14,500):

People: this is what your grannies (and Baretta) have been telling you for generations. Will you never learn?

Data protection

The deadline for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is approaching. The law takes effect on Friday, which is when any personal data stored within the EU has to adhere to standards of privacy that sends companies like Google, Apple and Facebook into cold sweats.

Even if you are physically outside the EU, and you think you only interact with non-EU companies, it’s a good bet that your data has passed through the entity, and that’s enough to get the companies in question to update their terms of service to appear to comply with the law, while they work out ways to circumvent its intent and continue to sell it to anyone who’ll pay for it.

This means that you (and I) have been recently deluged with emails from the tech/publishing/retail world and his wife reminding us that they have our data and inviting us to “update” our privacy settings. I’ve mostly run through the exercise without paying too much attention to the vehicle. However, the one I got from this crowd (who put on a possibly dubious Web Summit in Lisbon, and occasionally email to inform me that one or the other of their staff is planning on being in San Francisco and would love to have coffee with me) led to an opt-out screen that is just a little slanted in its presentation:

Gratitude Monday: floral relief

I spent a good part of the weekend knee-deep in work. You know—emails flying, Microsoft Office playing silly buggers, empty financial modeling spreadsheets throwing terror into the depths of my soul.

And it’s going to be a tough week, too, as I’ve got to pull some pricing models out of my hat, my least favorite part of product management.

So I was surprised and grateful to notice this gardenia fixing to open on the little bush right by my patio door.

There are a few more incipient buds on this plant. But right now I’m holding on to the joy of this one.