Wedding infrastructure

Alright, I’ll add one more bit of trivia to the whole Royal Wedding hooha today, one I imagine you won’t get from Katie or Barbara or Meredith: the Royal Router.

                               

Well—after all, it takes a powerful lot of telecommunications kit to broadcast not only the ceremony but all the moron-in-the-Mall humanoid-interest interviews. And every other commercial venture is trying to cash in on a connection to the doings. Why not Cisco?

Kingly matters

It may have reached your notice that there’s going to be a Rather Big Event in London on Friday. If it has escaped your notice then you won’t be reading this post in your monastery in the Urals.

Prince William, third in line to the throne of Great Britain, is getting married, ya great wally. To a commoner. But a really good looking one.

But the RBE has apparently stirred some discussion amongst Brits about whether Wills should succeed his grandmother directly, with his father, Prince Charles, either left out altogether or abdicating in favor of his son.

After all, Wills is much better looking, and taller (although he’s obviously inherited dear old dad’s thinning hair, and he not yet 30). And so far he hasn’t espoused any fringe causes like promoting organic farming and opposing modern British architecture. (Everyone’s ignoring those incidents of William taking out the RAF helos for joy rides, since that can be marked down to youthful exuberance and the RAF is practically the Windsors’ anyhow.)

Naturally the media are all over this like a bad British haircut, taking polls and getting professional Royals Watchers (I’m not making this up—they exist) to pontificate on why the son is just way more popular than the old man. The idea is that William would be more, you know, kingly, and that would be Better for Britain.

Of course, it would take a constitutional upheaval; but since the Brits don’t have a written constitution, I don’t know how much of an impediment that would be.

But I find this skip-the-king thing fascinating because the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that you take what comes up in the generational gene pool. The people do not get to say they don’t want Prince X because he doesn’t look as good as Prince Y—or even that Prince Y is more with-it than Prince X. (And the law of primogeniture means that it's most likely going to be the person with the royal Y-chromosome.) Lord knows, there have been weaklings, murderers, adulterers and raving lunatics on the British throne. One as recently as 101 years ago.

And that was in the day when the Monarch of Britain wielded some actual power.

The customary road to royal rule is genetic inheritance. Except for when someone whacks the monarch and seizes the throne. That's perfectly acceptable.

So it’s interesting to me that apparently some Brits want to enjoy the tradition of a dynastic monarchy, but still get to make the sitting king/queen a popularity contest.

Kind of an appearance-over-substance thing. But if they keep that up, they’ll end up with David Beckham and Posh Spice in Buckingham Palace. And, in the end, I’m not sure they would bring in the tourists and their money like the Windsors do. 

Exit the Dragon Lady

A woman who dominated my childhood perception of Asia, woman & politics is dead. Madame Nhu was 86. Or possibly 87. Like much what lay below the image she projected to the world, her date of birth is a bit murky.

Born Tran Le Xuan, to a family of privilege related to the last emperor of Vietnam, she married into a political family. In the 1960s her husband ran the secret police & her brother-in-law ran the country (South Vietnam, as it was then).

She was a Buddhist, but converted to Roman Catholicism when she married Ngo Dinh Nhu. As often happens with converts, she was exceptionally fervent & used her political connections to pass measures outlawing divorce, abortion & contraceptives. She also banned the Twist.

& yet her interference also improved the position of women in Vietnamese society. She closed brothels & outlawed polygamy & concubinage.

Madame Nhu had a mouth on her & she used it as both a club & a skinning knife. They didn’t call her the Dragon Lady for nothing. She enjoyed it, too—“Power is wonderful. Total power is totally wonderful,” was her watchword.

Actually, she was also known as “the Oriental Lucrezia Borgia”, but I don’t think that’s apt. Lucrezia was the pawn of the men in her family; Nhu definitely was no one’s pawn. She was the queen—the most powerful piece on the board.

She was petite & beautiful & had long fingernails. Somehow in my mind I linked her with Clare Boothe Luce, although she was much, much better looking.

She happened to be in LA as part of a US speaking tour in November 1963 when news broke that her husband & brother-in-law had been executed in the US-backed coup that shifted everything in Vietnam. After that she retreated to Paris & then Rome.

The obits don’t give a cause of death. I suppose at 86 you could just wear out. But I somehow don’t see the Dragon Lady wearing out. She decided to go.

Toothpick tour of SF

Okay, I’ve been in a bit of a puckish mood lately & I came across this… Well, what is it? Engineering endeavor? Performance art? Too much time on his hands?

I dunno, but it’s fascinating. Click on the start arrow & crank up the volume, because the artist explains what all the structures are as the balls roll through them. & make sure you watch all the way to the end—there are several paths for the balls.

Remembering the diggers

Today is ANZAC Day, marking 96 years since the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli. The military action itself was a miserable failure (unless you’re looking at it from the Turkish perspective), but it marked the coming of age for the antipodean part of the British Empire.

I haven’t been to Gallipoli, but I have visited a lot of the WWI British cemeteries in Northern France. Some are very small, maybe a couple dozen graves; others are appallingly large. Each headstone is marked with the soldier’s name, rank, regimental crest, date of death and age. But there are many that bear only a cross and the legend “a soldier of the Great War…known unto God.”

And here’s what I felt after walking the avenues of the dead: it was a war fought entirely for the furtherance of empires, on both sides of the slaughter. And hundreds of thousands of men from the colonies paid the highest price to maintain imperial structures.

To no avail—by 1918 three of the empires lay in ruins and the foundations of a fourth had been weakened so that it tottered on for only a few decades. Tens of millions were dead from military action, disease and starvation. And hundreds of square miles of Europe was laid waste.

And since then…well, you know the story.

Across Australia and New Zealand today, people commemorated all of their countrymen lost to wars in the past 96 years. Gallipoli to Afghanistan. That’s a lot of loss in less than a century for countries with such small populations.

Cruisin' for a bruisin'

I have friends who cruise—you know, take trips on boats whose point is essentially to have the appearance of travel with the substance of remaining stationary. Kind of. & they periodically urge me to join them on one of the trips.

The experience has never appealed to me for a couple of reasons. One: I am not what is known as a good sailor. I got queasy on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. I don’t see the positive aspect of paying out a couple of grand to spend seven days tossing my cookies. If I wanted an internal cleanse, I’d go to an ashram.

But almost as important is the overwhelming fakery of the modern-day cruise industry. A floating casino with hot-&-cold running activities to keep you revved up for the never-ending food spreads. It’s all manufactured, to my mind.

Occasionally they pull into a port—Ketchikan, St Martin, Acapulco, Kristiansand, whatever—so you & 679 of your closest shipmates can swarm over the souvenir shops for six hours before you have to be back on board to heave off for the next leg. This is not my idea of a good time no matter how I look at it. I don’t like being cooped in, herded around or being ordered to be festive.

Then there are the cabins—which, from watching reruns of “The Love Boat” you might anticipate would be analogous to a Marriott room. Well, maybe the Marriott’s room’s bathroom.

Plus the health hazards. Seriously—cruise ships are floating plague infestations. They concentrate more germs than a kindergarten convention. Flu, norovirus, Legionnaire’s Disease. When you coop hundreds of people up for days, & a couple of people get sick, it’s going to spread.

But here’s a new twist on the whole cruisin’ for fun scheme: a woman on board a Scandinavian cruise fell ill & while being transferred to a rescue boat at sea was dropped into the ocean. 

I suppose These Things Happen. But only if you’re daft enough to get on the ship in the first place.

No, you’re not going to get me onto a Fun Ship any time soon.

Latest pet trend

If you’re feeling a bit ragged after filing your taxes, or about the latest news out of Congress, here’s something that might provide a pickup: Petite Lap Giraffe. From the “world wide famous Sokoblovsky Farms”.

If you haven’t seen PLGs, those wonderful comrades at Sokoblovsky have helpfully posted the videos “as seen on American commercial” for DirecTV. (Scroll down past the pix of the “parentals.”)

Even though I’m sure it’s really not within my discretionary income budget, & my landlord would throw a fit, I’ve put myself on the waiting list for a calf. The next one is expected in 156 days & already promised to a prince.

& the wait will be a while:

BTW—way to run a viral marketing campaign, DirecTV.

Economic McNuggets

I don’t know what category this story falls into: economics, tragi-comedy, restaurant news, end-of-days, whatever. But McDonalds, that ultimate symbol of American culture, devoted yesterday to a highly-advertised big-splash hiring drive.

The stated goal was to add 50,000 employees to the 650,000 already working there in the US.

Which sounds impressive until you consider that we’re not talking full-time employment, with sustainable income, benefits or any sort of security. (In fairness, I can’t think of any job that offers security, except corporate executive managers, who seem to get paid spectacularly well even when they get fired.) In fact, employment at McDonalds brought us the neologism McJobs, which the OED defines as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects.” & this hiring spree includes a attempt to change perception of them as a corporate employing entity.

Another troubling aspect of this story is the news that many of the McJob seekers and holders are middle class adults with families to support, not the teenagers working after school that we picture in the uniforms and visors.

The smug joke about post-university career prospects used to be that the graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?”; the graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost? And the graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, “Would you like fries with that?” Evidently the engineers and accountants are now competing with teenagers, art historians and recent immigrants for part-time jobs at minimum wage.

From reports on the web from local news outlets, McDonalds’ National Hiring Day campaign has been successful. Restaurants from Hawaii to Maine have been stormed by applicants.

Thing is—like the product the corporation sells—these jobs are bigger on form than substance, which is bad for the individuals and the economy. Great for the stockholder and corporate management, though, so I guess we can stamp “mission accomplished” over it and move on.

Recruiters 19

You’ll recall my surreal experience with the Recruiting Chick for an enterprise software company here in the Silicon Valley. and the first farce of an attempted phone conversation with the Hiring Manager.

Well, despite their best efforts to inject the Marx Brothers into business life, the HM eventually did contact me. He was late calling, but not as late as the recruiter so I let it slide.

Interestingly, he opened by asking how much of the job I’d already covered with the RC. I refrained from stating the fact that we hadn’t talked about it at all since 1)she’d blown 1/3 of our allotted time by calling late; 2)she wasted most of the rest of the conversation trying to throttle irrelevant salary information out of me; 3)at no point did she bring up the actual job.

In fact, her only essay into the position under discussion was an email the following day to ask me if I realized the job was public sector marketing, not healthcare. And when I replied that the description she’d sent me focused on healthcare within the PS arena, her response indicated that the description “wasn’t quite on target”, and the additional information she gave me was useless if her intent was any sort of clarification.

Okay—so, back to the actual conversation with the HM. I just told him that the job description I’d been given apparently wasn’t an accurate depiction of the opportunity under discussion, since it focused on healthcare. HM humphed about a bit, thought RC might have been working from an older document and sent me the “right” one.

Which was exactly what the RC had sent me, although she apparently hadn’t bothered to read it. But then, looks like HM hadn’t, either, when he forwarded it to recruiting to start the process.

It turns out that he didn’t want a product marketer at all (despite the title on the JD), but a solutions marketer, who could identify and pull together entire solutions of multiple internal and partner product lines for presenting to public sector customers (which HM never really defined—everything about this group of people was amorphous and vague). I spoke with this guy for more than 30 minutes, asking a lot of questions, and I still didn’t get a picture of what this creature they want looks like.

So, red flags—which had already sprouted up like poppies in April from my conversation with RC and the flapdoodle about scheduling a simple phone call with HM—expanded to the size of banners at a May Day parade at the Kremlin. The level of dysfunction, the inflexibility in their approach to information exchange, the inability to define or articulate what the hell they want, their utter lack of communication—all Very Bad Signs.

HM had said he had more candidates to interview and I should hear back from RC the following week. But within two days I had one of her chirpy emails—again misspelling my name—to say, “At this time, we have decided to continue to interview other candidates for the role with more Solutions Marketing background.  I will contact you if any other positions open up that might be a better fit for your background and experience.”

With difficulty I restrained myself from wishing her good luck with that, since they didn’t seem to be able to define, much less articulate, what they want. And the qualities most in evidence from everyone I dealt with weren’t ones I’d want to surround myself with 50-60 hours per week.

Now, I’m well aware that in the corporate scheme of things, these clowns don’t give a toss that they’ve exposed themselves to me as incompetent buffoons with delusions of superiority.

They’re holding something they think I want—employment. Which is true. But that doesn’t prevent me from seeing them from what they are and finding that both risible and contemptible.

Next year in Jerusalem...

Today at sundown, Passover begins. That’s the festival that celebrates the Children of Israel being freed from slavery in Egypt. The Pesach season itself goes on for eight days, involves a kind of spring cleaning in Jewish houses & the shunning of any bread-like food that requires leavening (yeast, baking powder/soda, etc.). That’s because when the word came to the Jews that they had to get out of Dodge (so to speak), there was no time to let bread rise. They had to grab their gear & git.

Probably the most well-known part of Passover is the Seder, the dinner that begins the holiday, brings family together & reinforces the history by following the instructions in the Haggadah. It’s an interesting ritual, but if you’re in a hurry, Slate has conveniently provided a two-minute Haggadah to give you the big picture.

I’m not Jewish, but I’ve been to a few Seders, including one put on by Jews for Jesus; & another by friends in the film industry where the Questions were asked by the youngest male, black Catholic attending. & then we watched the Passover sequence from C.B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, as you do.

But here’s something of an update for the 21^st Century (or for year 5771 in the Jewish calendar): the Pesach story if Moses had had access to the Information Highway.

It still includes part of the Passover sequence from The Ten Commandments. It’s good to hold on to tradition.