Moving stories

Y’all know how I love the sidebars of life all around me—yard decorations, business signs, bumper stickers and vanity license plates… I like playing with what the stories behind them might be.

Now, this one I’m guessing belongs to someone from western South America, and there were nine people also from that part of the world ahead of him/her at the DMV.

But this one is a little more interesting—it’s on one of those boxy Honda Elements that is often parked on the street outside my flat overnight (because there’s frost or dew on it when I walk to the Metro station in the morning).

Visual Basic is so turn-of-the-century. It dates right about to the time when pre-Time-Warner AOL had pretensions of being everybody’s on-ramp to the information superhighway. I wonder if the Element’s owner has had the license plate since before the dot-bomb, or whether s/he is just nostalgic for the Good Old Days?

Food for thought

Well, what can I say—we each #resist in our own fashion.

(Actually—the fact that "meat clown" is even a thing worries me a good deal.) 

Brainstorming downtime

Ah, HR—always trying to be relevant.

The latest out of the satrapy is the vaunted “Employee Downtime Area”, announced last year without any employee demand whatsoever. They’re taking the only place in the 13-floor edifice where you can get away from your desk to eat your lunch (without leaving the building) and converting it into “a new area where employees can now relax and socialize with their colleagues in a fun, informal setting.”

Yippee.

To this end, here’s what we can look forward to later this month:

“Brainstorm Corner* with couches, television/AV monitor and whiteboard wall

“Foosball Table with adjacent high-top tables and stools for viewing/queuing

“Mini Free Library (Take-a-Book, Leave-a-Book honor system) and lounge chairs”

*Don’t even ask, because I just can’t…

I don’t believe the ladies of HR have entirely thought this thing through, bless their hearts. Because how are you expected to be downtiming when your colleagues are either brainstorming with the whiteboard and TV monitor, and/or whooping it up at the foosball table?

Wanna know what employees would really appreciate? Employer-supplied coffee and tea on each floor and an espresso machine in that “Employee Downtime Area”.

Because nothing says “relax” like a double latte with a shot of hazelnut syrup.

Cyberstalking

I’ve shared a selection of Facebook follies before—how they’re always trying to prompt me into having the sort of life they think I should be having.

Well, they’re back.

In the space of less than 24 hours, I got two of their intrusive “suggestions”.

First there was this chirpy greeting:

Seriously—if that’s not creepy, I don’t know what is.

And then there was this, must have been Sunday morning, although I didn’t see it until night.

Guys—if your algorithm hasn’t picked up on the fact that I have never commented one way or another on any sporting event, then you need to hire a whole new batch of SDEs.

(Oh, and P.S.: why on earth would I want to share that with anyone?)

They put this crap right at the top of your timeline, like it’s so important. And however many times I click on the “see fewer bits of nonsense like this”, they still come back to see if I’ve changed my mind. Like a four-year-old.

I do not need Facebook to sidle up with a weather forecast to let me know that they know where I am. And I don’t need their assumptions that I’m watching anything on TV at any time.

What I would like would be for them to quit resetting my timeline preference, and to explain to me why things that show up in the Facebook mobile app do not appear in my browser feed (and vice versa).

Gratitude Monday: Pitching a fit

My department at work sponsored a six week class whose aim is to teach our colleagues some of the principles and methodologies of coming up with workable business ideas. You know, like “Airbnb for dogs” (an actual thing, which I know because they just closed a $40M round of funding a few months ago), or Birchbox for demolitions (not an actual thing. That I know of. Yet).

After a month and a half of learning and practicing this, the culmination was a pitch competition: each of the eleven* of us had to pitch a business idea to a panel of three judges, with six finalists being chosen to go one more round, where they post a two-minute video of our pitch to the Intranet, and our colleagues throughout the company vote on two final winners.

(*Eleven because, while five people dropped out well before the pitch week, four more just announced less than a day before the big session that they wouldn’t be participating. No particular reason, beyond, “stuff happens.” Lesson learned for the next time we do this: we make people sign an agreement that if we spend this money bringing an external instructor in to teach you, you drag your sorry ass to the finish line.)

Well, dear reader, I’ll cut a long and shaggy story short: the good news is that I did not disgrace myself. The bad news is that I’m one of the finalists and therefore have to cough up a video. (Even though I am not eligible for the prize, since my department is putting this thing on. And it’s a good prize.)

And I would rather swallow ground glass than be in a video, much less be the only person in a video.

Well, but (and this is the focus of my gratitude) I am not without resources. Friends of mine run a photography and videography studio, and I traded them an hour of my writing work for them shooting my video. I spent a good part of the day yesterday with them, working on this (and the writing project). It was fascinating, because although I got plenty tired of hearing my voice muff my spiel take after take in front of the green screen, they kept me going, and I’m almost looking forward to seeing the finished product.

And therefore, in conclusion, I’m grateful that I did not have to go through this ordeal all alone, just me and my laptop cam.

Thank you. I actually will be here all week, and you should definitely tip your server.

Unpresidented perspective

Okay, back to my theme of the week: the best way to deal publicly with the Kleptocrat.

Yes, that’s to take the piss. He reacts to ridicule the same way fellow chaos monkeys Erdoğan, Putin and Kim do. I imagine he’s hunkered down for hours each day on his Twitter throne trying to come up with ways he can terminate with extreme prejudice Alec Baldwin, Andy Borowitz and every comic in the world who points out how laughable he is.

The latest (at least as of a day or so ago) were the gifs and memes circulating that pretty much eviscerate the Kleptocrat’s pathetic penchant for dramatically signing his imperial ukases and then grimly showing them to the frankly sick-making obsequious cameras. Viz:

There are about a gazillion of them out there, but I’ll just share a sampling. 

And this guy appears to be behind many of them, so go visit his page.

 

You don't need to be a weatherman...

On Groundhog Day, I think we all know that winter is here, and that it’ll be here for a good long time. Possibly until the by-elections in 2018.

So let’s just have a clip from one of my favorite films:

In case you don’t know Groundhog Day, it’s a karmic tale about how a real asshole is doomed to repeat history until he finally learns from it and becomes a real mensch.

Unlike the ones we have in the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government.

Crowd-sourced truth

Okay, here’s another piece of comfort that social media brought me this week. I already gave you the “updating” of Wikipedia’s page on invertebrates to put the Speaker of the House in his proper category.

But, in the wake of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s principled stand against the unconstitutional executive order promulgated by the Kleptocrat (at the behest of his Gauleiter Bannon) to ban travelers from Muslim countries that haven’t bribed him by doing business with his companies, a Wikipedia editor stepped up to the plate, bigly.

Seriously—I may need to go back and donate more money to this enterprise. Because this is outstanding.

And I hope that Yates gets snapped up by the ACLU or a law firm in a New York instant.

When the Interwebz is confusing

After yesterday’s post on how actual humans with actual human reasoning capacity and actual human sensibilities have taken to social media to defend the rights of us all to access actual (as opposed to “alternative”) facts, I thought this example from the other side was instructive.

Sean Spicer, press secretary to the Kleptocrat, and the replicant for whom Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts”, is apparently not yet entirely grasping how this whole Internet thing works. Because:

(In case you are wondering, yes, that’s his account, as verified by Twitter. Blue check and everything.)

I captured the screenshot for the time when someone very carefully and slowly points out that The Onion is 100% satire, and that “misinformation” is a very long word that he might want to look up.

Jeez Louise.

Gratitude Monday: True colors

Today’s subject of my gratitude may seem a little odd, because I’m wildly thankful that the Kleptocrat in the White House and the Gauleiters around him were so egregious in their overreach during his first week in power. Because this display of arrogance, belligerence and just downright ignorance of governance (much less of Constitutional governance) made it clear to every thinking person on the planet that there will be neither reason nor compassion in this administration or its Republican enablers. And that the sooner these replicants are replaced by actual human beings, the better for us all.

From the ongoing bitching (and lying) about the number of people who attended his coronation (including an appalling performance at the CIA headquarters and a call to the director of the US Park Service demanding to know why photos that showed the empty spaces on the National Mall were made public) to the executive orders beginning the destruction of the ACA, denying FHA mortgage relief, abandoning AFTA, an across-the-board hiring freeze at federal agencies, banning overseas funding to healthcare organizations that offer abortion services or referrals, demanding an “investigation” into alleged voter fraud (which could be the only explanation, in his mind, for him not winning the popular vote “in a landslide”, as he believes he deserves), completely refusing to deal with the obvious conflicts of interests around his businesses, greenlighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline environmental-disasters-in-the-making, banning immigration from a select number of preponderantly-Muslim nations (that do not currently do business with his companies), and, of course, ordering federal employees to stop releasing research findings about any scientific inquiry that his Gauleiters find contrary to their business interests—the tiny-handed tweeter has made it abundantly clear what his vision of the world looks like, and that he expects to make that vision reality.

And a grim reality it would be, starting with that gag order on government research agencies.

Seriously—that research is funded by taxpayer dollars (which, to be fair, he’s about to cut off), and they are obligated to be completely transparent about their findings. Moreover, it is part of the basic genetic structure of scientists to share their research, no matter where it leads. Not doing that is considered deeply unethical.

I’m grateful for this because if he’d taken a slower path to the obliteration of our Constitutional and the world’s basic human rights, he might have been able to slip enough of the Nuremberg Laws past us before we realized what was happening and they were all the harder to uproot. By unzipping his trousers and waving his willie at us, he basically pissed off so many people with brains, consciences and social media accounts that you can probably hear the uproar on the Space Station.

I’m particularly thankful for all the Alt-[agency name] and Rogue [agency name] Twitter accounts that (I hope to God) are tweeting from a variety of coffee shops and Wi-Fi hotspots, possibly using a secure platform for confounding attempts to track them down and terminate them with extreme prejudice. Because they’re tweeting scientific facts, over and over again.

Not the, you know, “alternative facts” the kakistocracy prefers. Which makes what they’re doing very dangerous.

It started with @AltUSNatParkSer, shortly after tweets from Badlands National Park on climate change were deleted and a curtain drawn around them. (The social media lead for @BadlandsNPS was basically the radioman on the Titanic sending out SOS messages until Iceberg Kleptocrat melted, sending the truth down to the briny deep.)

In short order there were several rogue Badlands accounts, including this one:

And @RogueNASA:

Look at the number of their followers. All of them.

And CDC, NOAA and others. One I particularly follow is @RoguePOTUSStaff:

I don’t know whether they’re actually in the White House or not. If so, they’re bloody brave. If not, they’re still shining the light of transparency on this administration:

Well, you get the drift. Follow them. And retweet them.

The list is growing—and you know it’s a thing when PC World is reporting on it. Also it’s a thing when within hours of each account popping up, it has hundreds of thousands of followers.

Moreover, following on House Speaker Paul Ryan's spineless toadying (yeah, I know toads have spines; it's a metaphor) this week, Wikipedia, for one brief, shining moment, showed him prominently on the invertebrate page. I am so glad that I've donated to Wikipedia; I consider my ROI to have been beyond expectation.

(Apologies to the horseshoe crabs.)

On a perhaps more serious note, the media has begun referring to “alternative facts” as lies, both on screen and in print. Even those without big budgets for defending weaponized libel suits. And many publications, including The Guardian and WaPo, have set up encrypted portals for people in and out of government to securely report events anonymously.

At any rate—even though I am extremely pessimistic about the situation here and abroad caused by the Kleptocrat, I’m truly grateful that they waved their flags so egregiously right away, and for people inside and outside the government who are not allowing repression to take hold without a fight.