In the wake of today’s shooting at the Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the only comment I have is to reiterate
what I said after the last
major mass shooting, at a Sikh temple in Milwaukee (which followed less
than a month after another
mass shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colo.)
“Let me just say that a whackjob with a gun doesn’t really need a
cause to espouse or a specific group to hate; all he needs is the weapon(s),
the ammo, the access & maybe the ability to go to full-auto.“
I was right, too—it didn’t take long for the next
whackjob to target more victims for any or no reason at all.
As many of you know, I live in the Valley they call Silicon,
which has more coffee shops than all the Benelux countries combined.
Naturally, at least 75% of them are Starbucks, but
even so—there are lots and lots of places to go to have a really adequate
beverage (or even a meal) in a clean, non-sterile environment without forking
over the GDP of one of the aforementioned Benelux countries. There are some national chains,
like Panera Bread, and local ones, like Le Boulanger; and independent shops.
Some of the latter charge Starbucks prices, but at least they serve you decent
coffee and you don’t have to wade through the disgusting seasonal crap like
gingerbread or eggnog lattes. You might even get your drink in an actual mug,
maybe with a latte
art flourish.
So I just freaking do not understand why it is that,
when someone needs to connect, they invariably say, “Let’s meet up at the
Starbucks at [blah-blah].” I understand wanting a venue where there’s no table
service, or check to split. But why Starbleedingbucks?
Every single one of them I’ve been in (Menlo Park,
Santa Clara, Cupertino, Newark—doesn’t matter where) has been uniformly groady,
with bad acoustics and few tables (fully occupied, no matter what time of day
or night). And the tables aren’t big enough to support a checkerboard.
This week I was meeting with a guy who’s helping me
with a number of things (including connecting me to the law enforcement
community for my novel research). My venue choices (proposed by him): ‘Bucks at
Poplar and El Camino or ‘Bucks at Mathilda and Maude, in Sunnyvale. I chose
the latter—it’s in a shopping center so there’s actually some parking available—and arrived at 1700.
I could not believe—at 1700 every one of the (tiny)
six tables was occupied, and there was a queue nearly out the door of people
ordering overpriced froufy coffee-like drinks, wrapped in the ersatz cheer of a
Starbucks holiday canned music CD blaring. I felt like I was in the third rung
of Hell.
The only thing I can think of in mitigation is that
the places are freaking ubiquitous and that if you can’t find one you must be
an idiot. Although that in itself is problematic, since it’s fairly easy to go
to the wrong ‘Bucks when there are two in the same shopping center or within a
block of each other on a street like El Camino.
You knew this
story wasn’t going to end with the last chapter, in which Cecilia Giménez butchered
the voluntary “restoration” of a fresco at the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in
Borja, Spain.
No—in addition to demanding a cut of the gate at the
church, for which her work admittedly sparked a demand, Giménez is now hawking
her original work on
eBay. It’s listed as “Picture by Cecilia Giménez, Restorer of the ‘Ecce
Homo’.”
The auction was up to €630 as of yesterday
afternoon, up from a starting bid of €300.
This story
came via NPR and focuses on NYC, but I’m betting that if anyone were to sniff
around any city in the country, the results would probably be the same.
Seems that “off” smell all around us is the odor of
the piscatorial equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb, according to a study by
Oceana, a conservation group.
Meaning that there’s a whole lotta mislabeling of
fish going on—you think you’re getting one thing, but in fact you’re getting (and
paying for) another. Including some critters that are not at all good for your
health.
Oceana’s report indicates that 60% of the retail
outlets they sampled (from bodegas to high-end restaurants) were selling
mislabeled fish. And 100% of the sushi bars they visited had species inaccuracies.
Certainly it’s all problematic, but what I’m not
getting is: who buys fish from bodegas?
I frequent a bakery-café in Santa Clara that’s part
of a chain operated out of Korea. It’s a good place to write and to
people-watch, both of which I enjoy.
The chain has outlets in many states, but they don’t
appear to have completely grasped English. Witness two confections I saw in the
case yesterday:
And:
So far I haven't felt the need to blow $28 to find out whether they are labeled accurately. & my Hangul alphabet skills are a little rusty.
Of course—I could be making incorrect assumptions,
& these cakes might in fact involve Friends of Mickey. But I rather think
that if that were the case, the Santa Clara County health department might
deploy a SWAT team.
In the spirit of the season, I’m giving you one of
the more unusual pairings of vocalists.
One of the best things about this is that Bowie’s “Peace
on Earth” largely drowns out Crosby’s “Little Drummer Boy”. The less pa-rum-pum-pum-pum
in this world, the better for peace.
Over the past week or so, we’ve had several
rainstorms coming across the Silicon Valley. One of them accounted for me
stepping up to my ankles last Friday in a huge puddle in the parking lot of the
Korean café where I often go to write. My feet squished half the day.
It’s the very rare day like that that makes the two-sided
fireplace (gas) in the Sunnyvale Public Library make sense.
Or it would if they hadn’t reorganized the area to
hold book shelves instead of armchairs. It’s really odd—you have to edge your
way around the new books on display to get close to the fire.
As you know, as an antidote to a completely and utterly crap week (which seems to have slopped over into the past couple of
days; but I’m counting it as overflow from before and therefore banishing it
to the past), I checked out the complete series DVDs of Due South from the Mountain View PL, and have been watching them,
episode after episode.
I’ve not yet got to one of my favorites, “All
the Queen’s Horsemen”, which features Leslie Nielsen doing his looniest
best to “maintain the right”. But I’ve been thinking about the song they sing
in it: “Ride Forever”—it’s the RCMP’s Musical Ride, see, and they’re on this train
about to be gassed by an Insane terrorist. Well, watch it yourself.
But, while I’m waiting for a new external DVD/CD
drive for my laptop (just don’t ask, okay?) to arrive from Amazon, I’ve watched
a couple of YouTube clips with the song in it:
As something of an aside, I sometimes slip a cog
when it comes to picking up words in lyrics. I was beyond voting age before I
realized the opening line in that one chorus from Messiah is “All we like sheep” and not “Oh, we like sheep”...
So for some reason, although I did hear the Mounties
proclaiming “you can’t keep horsemen in a cage”, I swapped out the G for a V, and started wondering why you can’t
keep horsemen in a cave? You could, you know. If it was a big enough cave.
Depending on how many horsemen you actually, you know, had. And whether or not they had their horses with them. I'm just sayin'.
But then I started wondering what other letters I
could swap in for the G to find things you can’t keep horsemen in.
Cake—kind of hard to keep horsemen in a cake. Unless…no,
I’m not coming up with any kind of a cake you could keep horsemen in.
Cane—nope, can’t do that.
Care—well that’s just being silly.
The one that I kind of like, though, is cape. You can keep horsemen in capes, can’t you? I
would actually like to see horsemen in capes.
So, it’s looking as though Prince Harry may be off
the hook, since the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have announced that they
are expecting a child, who will be (either male or female, thanks to recent
changes to the rules of succession) third in line to the British throne.
I personally find all the media hoo-hah a little
extreme. According to this report
in the Guardian, there’s been
round-the-clock coverage of the “event” of the sort you’d expect for a
cataclysmic earthquake or presidential election. Except that there’s no one to
interview and nothing to report beyond (apparently) that the Duchess is glued
to a throne of a different sort.
Yes—the cat sneaked out of the bag because Kate has
been hospitalized for severe morning sickness.
Evidently broadcast executives have decided that
they need multiple news teams on the scene—at a hospital to which they have no
access—in order to speculate six ways from Sunday (boy? girl? name(s)?) about
things that in a normal world wouldn’t be considered news outside of a zoo with
a pregnant panda.
Even the Guardian
itself managed to hawk up a hairball of nonsensical factoids: “It is understood
she is less than 12 weeks pregnant, possibly only two months. The duchess is
likely to be taking anti-sickness tablets and have a drip in her arm so she
can receive fluids intravenously.” (Plus: look at all their sidebars.)
Well, duh! This is worth scrambling “11 production
crew for the hospital watch” by ABC? Our
ABC, not the Aussies’?
I’m just seriously dumbfounded that people are losing
their minds to this degree over something that has less and less relevance to
the real world. (Talking about maintaining that whole monarchy thing as
anything other than a symbolic nod to tradition.)
On the other hand, Harry’s probably out with his mates
downing a few and feeling massive relief that there’s soon to be one more
body between him and the throne.
I’ve been working with an organization
that’s trying to help people shorten the job transition time & consequently
lower the economic & emotional cost of being out of work. I mostly like it
because what I’m doing as a product manager has a visible effect on the service,
& I think it’s a worthwhile effort.
But it’s not without its challenges.
I’ve described the executive director as being like
a puppy at a barbecue—always running off after another scent. When I mentioned
this description to a person in the psychology business, she commented, “Sounds
like he has attention deficit disorder.”
Well—I guess that would be the clinical definition
of being a puppy at a barbecue.
Those who know me will get a laugh out of the karmic
kick of me having to continually bring another CEO back to the topic at hand at
every meeting, & having to continually make the same case for something he’s
agreed to in the past but wants reconsidered within the intervening 48 hours.
But I’m thinking it’s hard to top the three-hour meeting
I had with him the day before Thanksgiving, when I mapped out some new
functionality by filling up a wall-to-wall whiteboard three times (draw it out,
photograph it & erase it) with functional flow & arrows looping all
over the place for a new feature set he wants in place by the end of December.
As I was working on the last layer, trying to see
what might be missing, & continually asking, “What happens then?”—he suddenly
chirped: “What is your degree in?”
“Hanh?”
“What’s your degree in?”
“I have a bachelor’s in European studies & a
master’s in US history.”
“It’s just that you have…such a logical mind.”
“Well—the whole point of having a liberal arts
education is that it teaches you how to think.”
“Yeah—but you think so logically. For not being an
engineer.”
