Planetary alignment

As we get closer to the total eclipse of the sun on Monday, things are getting increasingly weird.

As you’d expect, tbh.

If you’d like a for example, here’s an advert (probably from Craigslist) for a, well, take a look:

The woman who posted it on Twitter was wondering whether she should toss her, erm, hat into the ring:

But it turns that she doesn’t meet the cats requirement, which appears to be a deal-breaker.

But here’s what I was wondering on my Metro ride home: what, exactly, is the feline involvement meant to be in this act of cosmic whatever? Is this something PETA should be aware of? And how does the nitrous oxide figure into it?

Well, I wonder, but I’m not going to inquire. Not sure I want to see the response.

...may the good Lord deliver us

The Washington Post occasionally annotates stuff going on, largely to do with the Kleptocrat, because someone needs to do a blow-by-blow breakdown of his monstrous porkies. And they did so on Tuesday, parsing li’l Donnie Two-Scoops’s train wreck at the Towering Dumpster Fire on Monday.

You owe it to yourself to read it, with the annotations, and the comments on the annotations. I do not know the person with the handle BarbWire, but I would be proud to buy him/her a beverage of his/her choice, anytime, anywhere.

Another interesting thing about said train wreck was this shot of Klepto's current chief of staff John F. Kelly and a couple of aides watching his performance.

Remember that Kelly is a career Marine, and consider what it takes for a retired USMC general to slump like that. Also, the two men at the right appear to be calling upon the Almighty to deliver them from this abomination.

But further to my point yesterday about him being a foot-stamping hissy-throwing pouty-face loser—here’s his response to CEOs bailing out of his advisory council on CEO stuff:

Yes, he’s taking his tiny balls and going home..

(This is a turnaround from his response 24 hours earlier, when they first started streaming out:)

And actually, apparently the Kleptocrat just said he's closing down his CEO clubs. But in fact the remaining CEOs notified him that they were disbanding, so he's taking credit for it.

25^th Amendment, folks. Time for the 25^th.

We are so screwed

Right—back to Nazis, again.

Because when the Kleptocrat’s grudging reading of a statement Monday condemning the racist neo-Nazis’ violence in Charlottesville over the weekend did not bring the adulation he thought he was due, he first tweeted his pique:

Then he let his inner foot-stamping adolescent out by flouncing out this stream of absolute false-equivalence lunacy yesterday.

And you know what? I can’t even. It’s not just the complete cognitive dissonance in his imaginary both-sides-were-equally-at-fault, or the obvious anger that being president isn’t as much fun as he thought it was going to be. This sad, ridiculous, pouty, racist loser has access to the finest nuclear arsenal ever amassed, and he’s entirely capable of ordering a strike on Pyongyang, Caracas or the Washington Post just because it occurs to him that he can and we can’t.

There is not one single redeeming quality in his entire makeup.

Gawd.

Call Terminix, or Webster

Today I am sick of Nazis, white supremacists and their ilk, inside the White House and all over the country, so I’m taking a little break, via this play on words and software development:

Gratitude Monday: FTS

Here are a few thoughts about the events in Charlottesville over the weekend:

White supremacist neo-Nazi thugs showed up in military-manqué cammos, with their tiki torches and assault weapons, industrial-strength CS gas and riot shields, to proclaim their outrage at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park. 

(The angry white racist to the right, Peter Cvjetanovic, 20, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, has since told media repeatedly that he's not an angry, shouting white racist, but a white supremacist who "as a white nationalist, [he cares] about all people."

Underlying their outrage is the Make-America-White-Again Weltanschauung that life is a pie, and that any part of that pie that goes to someone else means less for themselves.

They waved Confederate and Nazi flags proudly, apparently unaware of the irony that the last flags raised by both Confederates and Nazis were white, and represented unconditional surrender.

Anti-racist protestors showed up carrying hand-made signs.

So, when violence broke out, including the ramming of chanting, sign-carrying anti-fascist marchers by a car, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring many others…

…what would a reasonable observer conclude about where responsibility lies? On “many sides”?

(At the time of writing, there are three dead: Heyer, killed by the car driven by James Alex Fields, Jr., and two Virginia State Troopers, whose helicopter crashed into trees near the city  on Saturday afternoon.)

Also: if a few hundred non-white people showed up—just showed up, not carrying weapons of any kind—in any city in the nation, what are the odds that police forces from multiple jurisdictions would have been deployed to arrest them at the slightest misstep (“Littering, Joe—they’re tossing their gum wrappers in our streets! Round ‘em up.”), probably before they’d got a couple of hundred yards?

Assuming they were even granted a parade permit.

So, why were Charlottesville (and Albemarle County) cops so notable by their absence? Starting with the tiki-torchlight parade-and-rally Friday night, and into the appalling events of Saturday—what, exactly, were they doing?

(Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has since defended the [non-]actions of the police by saying they were outgunned by the Nazis. Which is a load of crap. Outgunned, assuredly, but why? You knew these thugs were coming, and you knew they would be armed to the teeth. Have you never heard of preparing? Badly done, Virginia. Badly done.)

Well, it’s Gratitude Monday. They say that the very act of trying to find something to be thankful for (even if you fail) is a key to happiness. So here’s what I’m grateful for:

Those fat, pathetic, losers with compensation issues in their paramilitary dress-up clothes limited their willie-waving to spraying CS gas, beating people with poles and killing only one person (may her memory be a blessing); at least they did not start firing their weapons into the crowds.

This time.

Fashion forward, with roomy pockets

This Craigslist job posting for a “personal assistant” came across my Twitter feed Wednesday, and it’s taken me all this time to plumb the depths of its narcissism and oblivion.

Even with the help of the lengthy stream of comments on the original poster’s feed.

Here was the original posting (since amended, which I’ll get to in a bit). I broke it down into chunks; if you click on each, and then click on the resulting screen, it should enlarge so you can actually read it. I can't believe these people got all this verbiage in a Craigslist ad:

A few thoughts:

They have nothing against sloths, but no dry senses of humor need apply? Are they fearful that someone might be mocking them if they think something funny was said, but they have no visual or auditory clues to that effect? I think they might be…

Happy to clean up dog shit and diarrhea; that seems a little unreasonable. Willing, I understand, but if I came across someone who was happy to do that, I’d frankly steer clear of him/her. As for the ability to lift a 40-pound dog up several flights of stairs, that seems like a red flag. There’s not an elevator in their SoMa abode?

It’s okay to be fashion forward, but leave room for the dog’s potty bags in your pocket. Huh. I guess that means that a fanny pack wouldn’t do it? Because there’d be room for the potty bags, but that’s totes not fashionable, y’know? I also wonder about the single hour a day scheduled for cleaning. Maybe their fifth-floor walk-up is very, very tiny?

(Someone on Twitter also called out the one hour per day that was Doodle-the-dog time:)

Also, their limit of five drinks per week seems unrealistic, given the list of duties and expected requirements. As everyone on Twitter pointed out, you work for these whackjobs, you need to drink.

Not quite getting most of the “bonus” characteristics, like:

Multilingual—what languages would these be, I wonder?

Knowledge of how to brush tangled hair without causing pain, starts down to Creepy Town, but it shifted into overdrive with “enjoy giving mani/pedis”.

The full spectrum of cookery seems quite ambitious for someone only being paid around $20/hour (the scale kept going down, and then up, but even the top end is below what a good cook gets), especially when that person is also cleaning, dog rescuing, providing personal protection, running errands, detangling hair, negotiating contracts, and a manicurist. Also, who’s up to date on GoT and Silicon Valley.

As you read through this Russian-novel-long posting, it’s interesting the number of times the writers insist that an applicant be willing to admit s/he is “not perfect”, “can own up to mistakes”, etc. And by “interesting” I mean “pathological”. At no time is there mention that they themselves might not be capable of doing the same.

Well, of course you have to jump through a serious of mindless hoops to apply for this job (including making a five-minute video explaining how you meet 100% of the requirements; yes, 100%), but the good news is they’re interviewing daily.

Now, here are a few interesting nuggets:

The original posting listed an hourly rate of $25-$35/hour. Which is certainly more than minimum wage, even in San Francisco. But it’s nowhere near what a top-notch PA gets, much less the dog wrangler, cook, meal planner, contract negotiator, body guard and all the rest of it.

And there is no mention of PTO or health insurance.

But throughout yesterday, the ad was apparently amended a couple of times, lowering the wage twice before raising it to a wider range.

And the last time I looked at the posting, they’d also included a very interesting datum about what they do that makes them unable to have a life:

They’re in biotech, folks. They’re #PharmaBro, x 2.

 ,

We can only hope that whoever takes this job doesn't give them enough time to reproduce.

And someone should rescue that dog. From them.

Birds of a feather

A funny thing happened on the way to nuclear Armageddon: a guy bought a large,  inflatable chicken with Klepto-like hair for $1300, and installed it behind the White House. No word on whether it's associated with Klepto's love of KFC, but I like to hope.

You know—some days, you just put your inflatable chickens in the win column and close the door behind you.

But also: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team staged a pre-dawn raid on Paul Manafort’s home and seized a shedload of records. That and the White House chicken make it a good day, all in all.

Off pitch

Okay, campers. The good news is that the pitch is over. We had a number of very good, business-viable ideas, with an interesting mix of old tech, new tech and new business models, and the double conference room was chockablock with people who came to watch.

So, hurrah.

The bad news is that I am, once again, a “finalist”, which means I once again have to make a [expletive modifier] video.

I think my mistake was in using an attention-getting visual aid, in the form of Alex, here:

Alex was one of the similarly-clad spokesmodels that Dice.com used on billboards around the Bay Area. Dice.com was proud of Alex. So they put him as a mural across an entire wall in their headquarters, in an open office, where everyone could not help but see him.

I should have just told my story without trying to doll it up.

Oh, well—live and learn.

Don't call me...

Sorry folks, but yesterday I was in full-on pitch panic mode, so this is all you get today.

I just thought it was funny.

Perhaps by tomorrow I’ll be capable of being amusing on my own. But perhaps not.

Gratitude Monday: Spirit of the pitch

I’ve been dodging the knowledge that, come tomorrow, I’m going to have to once again  Pitch an Idea as the culmination of the ideation course we’re running at work. As I (as always) would rather swallow ground glass than go through this, I’ve just been doing my Scarlet O’Hara imitation and putting off thinking about it until the next day, and the next.

Look: I have an idea—a good one—but the challenge is to make your case to a panel of judges inside two minutes. I can’t even set the stage for the problem to be solved in two minutes.

But on Friday I just couldn’t put it off any more, and the enormity of my shortcoming hit me, and my commute home was not uplifting.

So imagine my delight at finding a package on my doorstep, and picture my happy dance when I unwrapped the contents, an amazing give from one of my spirituous advisers:

Point of origin, from left, Ireland, Scotland, North Carolina.

(I opened the latter during my biweekly call with the giver, and let me just say, it was mighty, mighty fine. The aroma filled my living room, even with the windows open, and it went down a treat.)

So mega gratitude today for friends with superb taste, for unexpected gifts, and for getting this bloody pitch over with.