Every Now and Then, Things Work Out
My son is home sick today, so I get to watch the inauguration. I’m gobsmacked at how many people are already on the Mall. Holy crowd control, Batman.
Roosevelt Had The Fireside Chat
So let me be the first to attempt to coin a phrase and call the internet speeches that Obama is giving TubeSide Chats.
Hey, there are worse terms.
Update on the Steve Jobs Dead Pool
Back in this post I said that I thought the speculation around Steve Jobs health was his own fault, and that of Apple as well. Pancreatic cancer is not something that fucks around with you, it ends you, and gossip abhors a vacuum.
Given what Joe Nocera writes about, things are even worse than the well publicized “hormonal imbalance”.
So it’s time to go live with this, even for a Mac fanboy like me. Everyone sign up for their ticket to purgatory.
My date: May 27th.
No More Pussyfooting Around
I don’t think it is sufficient to look at the absolute carnage in Gaza without taking a look at our role in it happening. You often hear the phrase “Don’t fuck with the Jews”. The corollary to that should be “Because they have the America’s best weapons.”
We sold them every plane, bomb, tank, shell, and bullet that is being used on a huddled mass of civilians in a burned out ghetto. We could stop this right now, if we wanted, and political cowardice is in the way. Saying that you don’t want your citizens to live in fear is no excuse for bombing innocents on the other side to death. Israel is committing a war crime and America’s political class is stuck saying “It’s complicated”.
What is being done is wrong, immoral, criminal, whatever the fuck you want to call it. Anything else is chickenshit moral equivalence.
Khhaaaannnnn!!!!!
Time to mourn the passing of an Elegant Man.
And now, a clip from the best of all Star Trek movies, made so by Mr. Montalban’s over-the-top brilliance:
On Liberal Blindness
Part of the reason I am sensitive to things like this is because of the summers I spent in in Boulder, Colorado, working at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.
For those of you who have never been to Boulder. In many ways, it is the most liberal place in North America. Not for nothing is it nicknamed the People’s Republic of Boulder. Don’t get me wrong, I love it there. Bike paths as far as the eye can see, falafel everywhere, and hot hippie chicks. Oh, and panhandlers who say “Can I have some money to buy acid?”. That’s truth in begging and it usually worked on me.
It is, however, a lily white place where the son of a CU coach gets jacked up trying to play basketball. So I try to pay attention to more than rhetoric and look closely at the environment. Yeah, I guess I’m tooting my own horn a little bit.
I’m done now.
An Observation From the Supermarket Parking Lot
If you are going to be dickish enough to take a handicap parking spot, at least have the common sense not to run back and forth to your car.
Walk slowly, fake a limp; show me something that gives me the benefit of the doubt on your level of douchebag-ness. Don’t make it that easy for me. I need to keep my game sharp and shooting pigeons isn’t good practice.
A Tip For Those of You Who Are Still Single
Which I am not, and quite happily.
Forget complimenting a woman about her shoes. If she has them, tell her how cool her glasses are. Shoes change every day, but most women only have one set of glasses and she probably spent a lot of time thinking about how they make her look. They are an integral part of her personality. Besides, it shows that you are looking at her eyes rather than other parts of her anatomy.
I’m telling you, if I was in the field I would be scoring like a pinball machine using this approach.
Man, this some good writing…
There must be something to this Ivy League thing.
Question About My Moral Duty
Okay, so here’s my dilemma.
I was mostly out of work for the last twenty months. There was a good deal of free-lance work, but not a lot in the way of long-term security. Just at the end of last year, I hooked an excellent gig for a programmer such as myself. Better than average pay, a company using the latest tools, a minimum of legacy code to maintain.
Even cooler than that, this is a company dedicated to environmental good. From a social good standpoint, It would have been a hard time to pick something better suited to my work skills and my sense of ethics.
Save for the fact that I have seen only one black face in the company and that in a job that I am sure pays nowhere near as well as mine.
Now, there is no way I am giving up this gig. My family needs the money and that has to take precedence over my sense of moral duty on this score.
So I’m putting it out there: what do I do? And this, by the way, is why I am anonymous on this blog and so is the company I work for.