Cats--they're in everything

Today being Friday of a very full week (for me), I’m giving you a double dose of Interwebz Catz. You might want to bookmark this for end-of quarter frenzies, or those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.

First, for the musically inclined I give you the kitty mute for your euphonium:

This second one I’m not sure of. I myself have never had a cat that would willingly go into a kitty carrier. And the only time they were insistent on remaining in them was when we got to the exam room at the vet. But still.

Neighborhood watch

I go the back way (i.e., not using I-280, like my sat-nav system expects) to get to my orthopod in Saratoga—an upscale community here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

Well, most of them are upscale, or at least ruinously expensive. But Saratoga, a mostly residential town, reminds me a lot of certain towns in The Valley (San Fernando—remember “Valley Girl”?). South of the Boulevard, of course.

There can’t be any property in Saratoga that sells for less than $2M (and that would be a scraper), and most of the homeowners don’t seem to care about the multi-year drought. You could play polo on some of the front yards, they’re that big and that green. I keep hearing echoes of Marie Antoinette as I drive through in third gear (because there are stop signs at every intersection). Or maybe it’s Madame de Pompadour. It’s certainly someone who doesn’t give a toss about conserving water.

However, I’m not here to discuss #droughtshaming, which is actually a thing here. No, as I was poking along the street I noticed this configuration of mail boxes. (Because obviously no letter carrier is going to drive up 200 yards to poke post through a letter slot.)

And I wondered what the story might be behind the mine’s-bigger-and-more-secure-than-yours schtick?

Apparently there's no HOA regulation regarding uniformity of mail boxes.

Geek style

I got a free ticket for a big data conference in San José on Monday—for which I am extremely grateful (thank you, Google). It was a bit of a surprise, because I’d forgotten all about it when suddenly late on Friday I got an email congratulating me on being the recipient.

The conference was geared primarily (well, at least 99.3%) towards developers, so I got limited value out of many of the presentations, although the woman from Pixar was really good, and the Facebook guy who gave the keynote really opened up my understanding of some of the challenges.

(Did you know that Facebook has live streaming for celebrities? I’m really hoping that if they open that up to us mere mortals, they’ll make it prohibitively expensive, because otherwise I’m going to have to block a whole bunch of people.)

Anyhoo, I had a few interesting conversations, and the people watching was excellent within the limited range of 4500 software engineers.

But there was one guy in the general session panel discussion that I just could not quite… So I thought I’d get your input.

Guys—what the hell is up with this?

Philosophy on the move

As I’ve said before, here in the Golden State, you are what you drive.

This being the Valley They Call Silicon, you also are what you post. On social media, mostly. But these days, your vehicle is the message, every bit as much as it is your ride.

So here’s another vanity plate that caught my eye:

And yes, so do I. Often.

Gratitude Monday: A lesson from the ruins

This weekend was full of the annual “Never Forget” reminders of the 9/11 attacks. You couldn’t escape them, and nor (I suppose) should you.

I personally try to distance myself from the nightmare images of continuous loops of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center, viewed on a bank of monitors across a full wall at the office in Maidenhead. Or of driving home to London on the M4 the next afternoon and seeing GSK’s headquarters flags flown at half-staff, which sent me into uncontrollable sobbing.

I do not compare my grief to anyone else’s—certainly not to that of people who woke up that morning with intact families and friendships, and went to bed with great gaping, multi-story, jet-fueled, ash-covered holes torn through them.

But here’s what I also will never forget: the friends and colleagues across Europe who called and texted me for days, to check on me, to cheer me and to show their concern for me.

A sheet of A-4 paper with a hand-lettered message taped to the elevator wall at a hotel in Florence expressing condolences to any Americans who might be staying there for the appalling wounds we’d suffered. And signatures in different inks periodically added in solidarity.

The people—familiar and unknown alike—who insisted that I (and we) did not stand alone. The ones who’ve been here all along, even when I didn’t notice them, or was sure they didn’t even exist.

It seems odd that it takes the worst possible thing to make you realize this truth, and sometimes even then it escapes you. (Well, maybe not you. But me.)

But I’m profoundly grateful for all of them who not only feel the caring but also express it. Doesn’t really matter how large or small the gesture, how eloquent or inarticulate the communication; it’s the act itself that makes all the difference. As I well know.

License to drive

In California, more than anywhere else I’ve lived, you are what you drive. I noticed that big time when I was working in the film industry in LA back in the last century, and it hasn’t changed for the Valley They Call Silicon here in the future.

I confess to getting a bit of a kick out of seeing how people project themselves via various configurations of metal and means of propulsion. (Twenty years ago I would have specified internal combustion types; but that’s so last-millenium. There’s literally a Tesla dealership down the street from me, and maybe 20% of cars around here are either all-electric or hybrid.)

So imagine my take on this particular 7-series BMW:

I mean, is it someone with multiple personalities or someone who can't fit his/her head into the vehicle?

Well, they don’t call them vanity plates for nothing.

Pain relief

I’ve found it very interesting to undergo a series of hyaluronate injections in an attempt to keep my tibias and femurs from grinding each other to shreds at the knees. This is an alternative treatment to cortisone, with supposedly longer relief and fewer negative side effects.

Both of which I support.

This is a new therapy, and so far it comes pre-packed in individual syringes, rather than in bottles, like other things that go in syringes. I suspect it’s a big-pharma thing, both to keep the physician out of the dosing cycle and to mark up the pricing margin. You know, like bubble-packing tablets.

With cortisone, the physician will typically draw some lidocaine into the hypo, and then add in the steroid, so it all goes into you in one merry swoop. For hyaluronate, you get a dose of lido and then the pre-dosed goods.

Well, I’m here to tell you that in all my years of getting injections of one sort or another, I have never had anything hurt like these shots, not even when I got a double dose of cholera vaccine.

So I finally mentioned this to the orthopod, and asked if there was something special about the needle for this stuff. He blinked a couple of times and replied, “Well, could be. Hyaluronate is a gel, so you need a big needle to push it through.” Then he said he’d double down on the lidocaine dose and see if that helped.

Usually he tries to keep the syringe out of sight when giving the injection, but since I obviously had skin in the game, this time he didn’t bother. Let me just say that that needle was the biggest mo-fo I have ever seen. I mean, you could push spaghetti through that sucker. Maybe even linguine. No wonder it hurts like bloody hell, and always leaves a bruise afterward.

But this time, with the double dose of lido, they went down a treat. Man—I did not feel anything. He could have drilled for oil, and I would have been fine.

So—if you have hyaluronate in your future, save yourself some tsuris. Just tell the medico you need extra lidocaine. You’re welcome.

How long is that in dog years?

Queen Elizabeth II is having a special day. As of today, she has become the longest-reigning monarch in British history. She surpasses the record held by her great-great-grandmamma, Queen Victoria.

(I’m assuming that she makes it through to H-Hour, which is apparently calculated to be at 1730 BST.)

There’s going to be a flotilla on the Thames, and Members of Parliament will wax servile. My friend MLD will ring peals at two church towers in Berkshire, and I hope there will be a couple of toasts drunk to the old gir…I mean, to HM.

The monarch in question is evidently not taking time off from her day job, which today is in Scotland, opening a railway and sucking up to the semi-country’s First Minister. (If you’ve forgotten about their attempt at bonsai independence last summer, you can refresh your memory. Or not.) Let no one say this woman does not know how to take a hit for Team Britain.

Look—if you’re going to have a hereditary monarchy, Elizabeth II would be as good an example of how to do it as any. She shows up on time, hits her marks and knows her lines. She has been the One Fixed Point in a Changing Age for more than 63 years, which encompasses a lot of ages; milk bars, the Beatles, Thatcherism... She’s been polite to a string of prime ministers that run the gamut from Winston Churchill to Gordon Brown, and she’s carried on in the face the excruciatingly well-publicized antics of her children and grandchildren well into the distressing era of smartphones and social media.

And as far as we know, she hasn’t resorted to drink.

So, hip-hip and mazel tov, ma’am. You go, girl.

A sorry display

I was walking past a stretch of El Camino Real not too far from home the other morning—it’s a strip mall with Thai, Japanese, Indian and Chinese restaurants, a UPS outlet, an Indian snack place and an Asian market. There’s also a sari shop; one of perhaps several dozen in Sunnyvale.

The window display was what stopped me:

Just wondering if there are no mannequins that don’t look like the Brady Family. I mean, what do they use in Mumbai?

Gratitude Monday: The golden goose

I’m trying to think when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 15 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 50 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

I mean, here in the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

This being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes.

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy.

In the meantime, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones, Wobblies, all of you—thank you.