Team spirit

You might have gathered that I’m not much of a sports fan. I’m vaguely aware that there are events that purport to be athletic endeavors around town, but in my opinion, once “sportsmanship” left the field, they should be called what they are. Which is a bunch of over-hyped egotists pumped-up on performance-enhancing substances engaging in activities that fleece the public, first in the granting of ridiculous tax favors and building of free facilities and then in the wildly over-priced ticket charges.

And that’s before the traffic jams.

Basically, whether it’s baseball, football, basketball or hockey, we’re just talking about another incarnation of corporate welfare.

Given that premise, I might be forgiven for getting confused by logos I encountered when I arrived at the District They Call Columbia earlier this year.

What happened was that I went into a Harris Teeter, saw this logo, and wondered, “Do they have a Walgreen’s [pharmacy] in this store?”

Because, look—grocery stores have over-priced and over-hyped coffee-like-substance chains, and banks and whatnot, so there might be a Walgreen’s…

Only it turned out that logo represented the local baseball team, the Washington Nationals.

But before you slap me upside the head, here’s the actual Walgreen’s logo:

So—an easy mistake.

Back in the very early years of this century in London, my bus route home from a Saturday morning wandering around the Portobello Road market or being a culture vulture at one of the museums took me past Chelsea Football Club. I was watching fans converging on the stadium one day, wearing shirts proclaiming their team support. Viz.:

(Apparently these are now collector’s items, ergo the eBay-worthy pix. Sorry.)

Here’s what I thought: “Man, that Autoglass team really has a lot of fans here.”

Well, look—when the corporate sponsor has bigger lettering than the team logo, what am I supposed to think?

I twigged to the situation at some point before I got home, and then mentioned it to a couple of colleagues on the Monday. They told me I was pitiful.

Well, fair enough. But in this regard, I’m with Sherlock Holmes: my brain does not need to be cluttered up with identifying specific athletic (ish) teams. What I care about is knowing when there’s a game on so I can take alternate routes to where I want to go.

The scary season

I was in Target the other day, and I think we’ve jumped the Halloween shark with this:

I mean—why not just hand out baby carrots and tofu?

Semper fi

Here’s a story that totally messes with the narrative put forward by the Republican presidential candidate: an Iraqi refugee, a woman, who is serving in the very military that he dodged five times in his youth.

Amanda H. Issa first encountered Marines as a child in Mosul, where she admired all the qualities that the candidate does not possess: discipline, sacrifice, comradeship, skill… So after a period in a refugee camp in Turkey, she and her family came to this country in 2011, settling in Michigan. Since then she’s graduated from high school and junior college, and joined the Marines she so admired as a child.

Ironically, during her bootcamp training at Parris Island earlier this year, Issa suffered a foot injury on a conditioning hike. It was so bad that USMC doctors told her she could be separated from the service. Issa refused to consider that and was graduated as PFC last month. Unlike the candidate, who used bone spurs to get his multiple deferments from the draft.

And she’s the kind of person that buffoon and his followers would like to exclude from our country.

Layer upon layer of meaning and information

Most of the women-in-tech list-servs I’m on have a good number of members who do not speak English as a first language. So I tend to cut them some slack when their grammar, punctuation and spelling aren’t publisher-ready.

But there was a (thankfully) short thread last week on Ada’s List (as in Ada Lovelace) in which the OP pointed out that the plural of a noun is formed by adding an “s”, not an apostrophe plus an “s”.

A lot of posters begin their emails with “Hello lovely Ada’s”. Apparently the missing comma of direct address doesn’t bother the OP. And ignore the fact that the list itself shows up in the sender’s block as “Adas List”, not “Ada’s List”.

Fair enough.

But someone who describes herself as “the pivot point between techs, designers, commercial and brand objectives, and user groups for startups” decided to weigh in. (Both OP & Ms. Pivot appear to be native English speakers, from England, for what it’s worth.) And let me just say that when someone chooses this kind of language as her face-on-the-world, you know you're in the presence of a major-league pisher.

Well.

I dunno, but it seems to me that if you’re going to attempt to, well, make a point about language, it would help if you refrained from word salad sentences, like that third graf. I mean—this is the kind of thing you might expect to overhear after watching an avant-garde one-act play off-off-Broadway, while standing amongst the vapers.

Also, in commenting on clarity of expression, which is clouded when people misuse contractions, your point is somewhat vitiated when you use the contraction of “it is” when what you probably meant was the possessive “its”. Just sayin’.

(I wonder if her shortening of communications in the last graf is ironic, given that it appears in a sentence where she proclaims that written communications should be “quite formal”? Perhaps she’s inviting us to explore her layer upon layer of meaning and information?)

I’m letting the typo on abbreviations slide; Lord knows my fingers don’t always cooperate with my brain. But I do find it interesting that she doesn’t seem to know the difference between abbreviations and contractions. An abbreviation, generally speaking, is a shortened form of a word (Dr. for Doctor, or lb. for pound [technically, a shortening of the Latin libra]), while a contraction represents the omission of one or more letters from a word or phrase by replacing it/them with the apostrophe (can’t for cannot or they’re for they are). Consequently, her pontification on “authentic patterns of speech” cracks me up.

As does referring to the “abbreviated” original phrase as its “full name” and then saying that however you want to spell stuff helps “provoke a deeply personal and genuine discourse”.

Well, at least—I think that’s what she’s saying. But truthfully, I’ll be blowed if I really understand her finely nuanced informal conversation (or, wait: it’s written, so does that make it formal?) and its constantly changing vernacular.

And I’m betting that the women on the list from Ghana, India, Colombia and Poland are with me on this.

Gratitude Monday: Days of Awe

Jews around the world gathered with families and friends at sundown last night to welcome in the year 5777. Rosh Hashanah begins with the call of the shofar at a synagogue service, and continues with a meal that traditionally includes a round challah (symbolizing the circle of life) and apples dipped in honey (for a sweet year). 

(I love the way food is fully integrated into religious observation.) 

It also marks the ten Days of Awe, when Jews reflect upon the past year and consider what they might have done better. The Days end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews acknowledge the wrongs of the previous year and ask forgiveness—from both the person(s) they’ve wronged and from God.

As I’ve written before, I think it’s a custom that pretty much everyone could benefit from. Most Christians pay lip service (literally) to the notion of atonement when they recite that passage of the Lord’s Prayer that goes, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But there are a shedload of Christians who run through that whole prayer without giving it much thought.

That may be true of Jews at the High Holy Days, too. But I think that taking entire days out of your life and devoting them to the notion of enumerating your transgressions and asking forgiveness (as well as accepting others’ apologies) tends to focus the mind.

At any rate, I’m grateful for all my Jewish friends and their families, and I wish them all (whether in Herndon, Chicago or on a cruise around Iberia) L'Shanah Tovah.

Ideas and hogwash

For Day 2 of the Washington Ideas Forum we had to go through TSA-like security screening, presumably because Rep. Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century) was first up to bat.

And presumably that’s because, as Speaker of the House, he’s third in line for the Presidency. And therefore worth more than Secretary of State John Kerry (fifth in line), who spoke later in the day, after the guards and scanners were removed.

Ryan, who is way more of a douche in person than on television, did nothing more than flap around a copy of his little pamphlet “A Better Way” (which he grandiosely refers to as a book), the supposed guide to Republican nirvana. And dodge questions, which were as softball as they come.

“I’m tired of divided government,” he sighed. “It doesn’t work very well.”

Oh, gee—ya think? That’s like an arsonist saying he’s tired of the fires.

It obviously doesn’t occur to him that he’s one of the biggest tools in the non-working government box. 

Interestingly, I don’t get the impression that he’s looking forward to a Trump presidency much more than a Clinton 2.0 presidency. He’s obviously not going to get along with either of them. And he’s certainly not going to do anything more towards building a united government than he has in the past.

(I will say that I'm glad that AtlanticLive didn't bring in Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-TheSouthWillRiseAgain (and, God help us, fourth in line to the presidency). Listening to him whine that President Obama should have told the Senate about the full ramifications of the JASTA bill—the parts where it would open the door for other countries and their citizens to sue American soldiers and others for war crimes. Because a chamber of 100 members, which includes 57 who hold JD degrees, apparently cannot understand the clauses of the bill that they not only passed, but they also voted to override the President's veto of it. Could it be that they felt they had to pass the law so they could understand it? Or could it be that they are simply an asylum of self-important loons?)  

Ryan tied for delivering the most weaselly and self-serving answers of the forum with General Pervez Musharraf, who’s no doubt one of his exemplars of how to run a united government: shoot your opponents. Musharraf, who was also served nothing but softballs (from NPR correspondent Robert Siegel—such a disappointment) cracked me up when he insisted that no one in Pakistan—not him, not ISI, not the military (who, BTW, is him—note the “General”, above), and not anyone in the neighborhood—no one knew that Osama Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad for five years.

That sealed compound with high walls, security cams and razor wire? “It could have been a drug cartel.”

Also: “There are a lot of tourists to that city.”

There were intelligent participants. I was especially interested in the discussion by Drew Gilpen Faust of Harvard and John DeGioia of Georgetown, talking about their respective institutions’ history with slavery. At one point, Faust commented that Harvard was challenged somewhat in looking out pre-19^th Century documents. DeGioia broke in to say that Georgetown has better documentation than Harvard because “Catholics keep unbelievably good records!”

I thought it also interesting that one of my tweets about the discussion on slavery brought out a right-wing troll intoning, “Slavery is over…You’re only a slave if you are a liberal!” Thus proving that s/he didn’t bother to read. Or think.

This was my first time at the Forum, although many of the people I spoke with are repeaters. I found the format somewhat off-putting: they covered a lot of territory, from Momofuku to opioid addiction, but they did it at the cost of any kind of depth. Twenty minutes of a journalist asking questions of one to three people, then whoosh—you’re off and the next one is on.

Also, there was no audience engagement—no opportunity for us to ask questions, or even to discuss amongst ourselves what we’d just heard. The pace of interviews was relentless; I didn’t even get out to the lobby for cookies yesterday, because I didn’t want to leave the auditorium. The venue, a theatre, didn’t offer the right space for people to have those conversations. I guess you’re meant to hold it in until you get back to the office to hash out the ideas.

Kind of an interesting approach. Personally, I came home yesterday and got straight into the shower, which I needed after both barrels of Ryan and Musharraf.

Duck, duck, sniffle

Yesterday I was on a bit of a lurp (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol), attending the Washington Ideas Forum, which is put on by AtlanticLive as part of the Washington Ideas Week, here in the District They Call Columbia.

It’s a policy-wonk kind of affair; ish. And there were some heavy hitters speaking. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) announced, “The Senate is out and we did not shut down the government,” as he took off his tie. And CIA Director John Brennan, when asked if the Russians are trying to hack the U.S. elections, said, “What we do at CIA is to look at a country’s capabilities, look at their intent, look at things that they have done in the past and determine whether something that certainly looks like a duck, smells like a duck and flies like a duck, whether it’s a duck or not.”

Then there was Labor Secretary Thomas Perez telling us, “We’re living in a ‘Modern Family’ world and we have ‘Leave It to Beaver’ policies” when it comes to protecting workers in our society.

But I think one of the biggest laughs came when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sat down and announced, “I have the sniffles and I’m not using cocaine.” He went on to speak cogently and compassionately about issues like immigration and the economy.

The forum is more of an ideas sampling, because we get about 20 minutes per conversation (between a subject matter expert and a journalist; or a journalist speaking with a panel of experts) and then, boom, off to another conversation. It’s like being at a banquet, taking one bite out of something and then having the plate snatched away before you can really taste what it’s all about.

Also, I find it interesting that they’ve made it almost impossible to network—between conference badges that only give your name, not your organization, and no time or space for having those little chats about what you just heard. That seems very odd, especially for a networking veteran of the Valley They Call Silicon.

Tomorrow they start out the day with a whimper—or, more precisely, with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century), and move on to a panel discussion that includes historian and president of Harvard University Drew Gilpen Faust. That should be a slice.

Many people are saying

As I mentioned yesterday, I just wasn’t up to watching or listening to the debate on Monday. As it is, I got plenty of it via Morning Edition on NPR, more than I wanted to hear.

I did scan tweets for about the first 20 minutes before taking refuge in a well-written detective story, and Twitter was all over the Trump sniffle (or snivel; not entirely sure) issue.

As you can imagine, the Twitterverse was having a ball. There's now even a Trump's Sniffle account:

Evidently it was enough of an issue for Trump to confide to his Fox Friends that his ludicrous performance wasn’t his fault. “I had a problem with a microphone that didn’t work. My microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose? My microphone, in the room they couldn’t hear me, you know, it was going on and off. Which isn’t exactly great. I wonder if it was set up that way, but it was terrible. I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories, of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling, and she didn’t have that problem. That to me was a bad problem, you have a bum  mic, it’s not that good.”

Right: the baron of birthers doesn’t want to believe in conspiracy theories.

Any road, he followed up by denying that he had a cold or allergies to account for the sniffling.

Well, that opened the door for what any New Yorker who was a man about town in the 80s should have expected. Viz., these comments (in this instance) from Slate:

Naturally, there was a Trump defender, who apparently does not have a problem with conspiracy theories. I just love the responses to him:

Arrgh!

I did not watch what the media are calling “the debate” last night. My life is too short and there is not enough alcohol to get me through something like that.

Particularly since I am sick to death of how the media (with the possible exception of The Washington Post) have done nothing but play by the GOP candidate’s reality TV rules that basically revolve around this simple declaration:

“I can do and say whatever I damn well please and you’ll run around like a pack of hounds trying to get the fox’s scent in the middle of a sausage factory. And then you’ll come back to repeat the exercise.”

The quintessential example of this was his ginning up the press a couple of weeks ago for “a big announcement” to be made at the opening of his made-in-China hotel in downtown DC. As you’ll recall, he pulled them by the nose through a tour of the hotel, then mumbled, “Obama was born in the U.S.” and walked away.

There were a bunch of howls, but at that point I kind of lost sympathy (not to mention respect) for them. Because do they not recall their basic Peanuts?

  

How can they not see that Trump is Lucy and they (and the electorate) are Charlie Brown. And their foot is never going to connect with that ball. Never.

Sheesh.

Gratitude Monday: The season

The last Monday in September, I’m so grateful that the weather has finally begun to lose its summer brutality here around the District They Call Columbia. Yesterday, for the first time since early May, I had the sliding glass door off the living room open, and turned off the AC.

Around 0900 I went out. The morning did not have that nip of autumn, but it was fresh, and I drove around with my windows down.

In a while, the leaves will begin to change color and drop. But I won’t have to rake any, so I’ll enjoy the daylights out of that. And I’ll make cottage pies for supper, and have a pot of green tea in the afternoon when I get home from work.

I love this season. Thank you, God, for autumn.