Career planning exercise

It's said that one must be prepared for opportunity. So, over the years, I've been accreting a mental checklist for such time as the people of the world come to their senses and elect me El Supremo Presidente for Life.

Until last night, I had overlooked one Cabinet Position that now seems like such a no-brainer--de rigeur, even, for an Enlightened, (mostly*) Benevolent Dictatorship: A Politeness Czar! Why didn't I think of it before? [insert obligatory auto-smacking of forehead] Give Judith Martin powers that barely fall short of my own [insert mental image of subpoenas engraved on vellum parchment], and public discourse would clear up immediately. Well, nearly immediately. After a few (ahem!) "examples" are made of the most egregious offenders.

For instance, Ms. Martin would have the power to schlep the Fred Phelps clan, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, et. al. off to the newly-established Witless Protection Program. Then, still on the government nickel, alter their appearances via cosmetic surgery. (In Ann's case, that might not require too much work: leave her there long enough for her roots to grow out and the years of bulb-tanning to run their course--it shouldn't take long, from the looks of it.) Nationalize their assets, and require them to spend the rest of their lives actually working for a living. Preferably in low-end retail.

See, I think that the essential problem with the way that Western-style executive "Cabinets" are arranged is that they address the symptoms and not the underlying disease. When I'm elected Autocrat of damp little planetary jewel that we like to call "Earth", the arrangement would be significantly different. The Cabinet positions on my informal laundry-list include:

• Ministry of Fair Play (the largest and most powerful office). The Ministry has the responsibility to ensure that your access to education, health care, clean air, safe food and water, housing, and other vital services( private or public) is not affected by the color, gender, ethnicity, or neural wiring you happened to be born with. The Ministry is charged with making second-class citizenship unequivically verboten. Lobbyists will be required to wear armbands onsite, and have all communications with public officals immediately made public. The office bears some of the burden, also, for stopping the rich and powerful from squishing the poor and the voiceless, although some duties are shared with the Ministry of "Stop Acting like You're the Only Person On this Planet, D---it!".
  
• Ministry of Personal Accountability (the second most powerful office). This office has the entire judiciary system under its purview. It is additionally charged with the mission of ensuring that professional athletes, actors, supermodels, quote-unquote celebrities, rock stars, and corporate malfeasants lose both their position and public recongnition, similar to the treatment prescribed above for hate-mongering "provocateurs". The educational system is also the baliwick of this Ministry. Literacy rates will soar after underachievers are sent for six-month stints in the industrial concentration camps otherwise known as sweatshops for a "lesson" in the workings of The Real World. Additionally, the public service currently being done more or less pro-bono by the folks at The Darwin Awards will be underwritten by public funds.
  
• Ministry of "Stop Acting Like You're the Only Person on this Planet, D---it!" Given how many wars are started by epidemic levels of ego-poisoning at the upper eschelons of government, the military, logically, answers to this office. In lieu of a large standing army/navy/air force/marine corps, the military will instead heavily emphasize Navy Seal-type teams whose mission is to kidnap the sabre-rattlers and demogogues of this world and bring them to top-secret "training" facilities. In lieu of more mundane forms of torture, detainees will instead be subjected to communication style self-assessments, anger-management group therapy, and nonsensical team-building exercises such as building hats with spaghetti and masking tape. Detainees who show progress will be spared the ultimate horror of the Office Christmas Party. The responsibility for enforcing environmental protection laws also falls under this Ministry. Greenpeace will be issued submarines and torpedoes. Lastly, conspicuous consumption will be permitted in the name of libertarian principles, albeit in a heavily taxed form. Additionally, purchasers of goods designated as conspicuous will have pigs Barq-tooed on their foreheads.
• Ministry of Politeness - This, in spirit, could well be described as the secular version of the Unitarian Jihad. As The Police so rightly observed in the early 80s, "Poets, priests and politicians/have words to thank for their positions." Poverty and hopelessness cause quite enough collateral damage, thank you very little, without REMFs upending their gasoline cans on already-flammable situations. In the same spirit, road rage will be punishable by the offending party being forced to bike or bus for six months. And, in the interest of checks and balances, El Supremo Presidente has very little sway over this office, and merely claims the humble title of her U.J. name, "Sister Molotov Cocktail of Fairmindedness".
  

Now, the pettifoggers may complain that the categories represented by these Ministries seem somewhat vague in name, and perhaps even an organizational chimera in practice. Yet, I posit that the world's problems cannot be truly compartmentalized. I've maintained for nearly twenty years that our worldly ills can be distilled down to morons and @$$holes. Criminalizing arrogance and stupidity themselves in lieu of their (random) subsets seems to make more sense somehow.

But. (You knew that there had to be a "but," didn't you?)

As important as it is to minimize the (alas, inevitable) damage done by the morons and @$holes, it is drop-dead critical that no one is exempted from taking responsibility for their knowledge and beliefs, as well as their actions (and inactions). Simply put, there is no point in levelling the playing field for bench-warmers.

I suspect that the blowback from the "personal accountability" initiatives may actually be more severe than that from divesting the robber baron thugs of their ill-gotten gelt and influence. But once the bullhorns of demogoguery have been turned off, the warlords defanged, the monopolies disenfranchised, the oligarchies disbanded, the castes homogenized...who knows? People might actually get a little used to relative civility in addition to calling the shots in their own lives. And I even dare hope that a taste for real achievement (even failure at something that you put your heart and sweat into IS an achievement) will supplant the addiction to the soma that so many have a vested interest in spoon-feeding us. [insert wistful, misty-eyed sigh] An aspirant to World Dictatorship's gotta have her dreams, y'know...

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* Some restrictions on benevolence apply. El Supremo Presidente for Life reserves the right to muzzle loud drunks, cellphone-addicts, incessantly barking dogs and bratty children at will.

A hodge-podge...even for this blog

This version of classical Rome ("Rome Reborn") seems far, far too surgically sterile, but makes the ancient city seem more tangible than anything short of an extensive museum exhibit (such as the Pompeii/Herculaneum one that Dearest and I saw in Quebec two summers ago).

During yesterday's "book bender," I couldn't resist adding "Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day" to the stack. I was so stoked that John Julius Norwich has another sweeping history (the kind he does best), this one on the Mediterranean. I typically revel in rediscovering his "Venice: a History" every few years, but haven't been able--shockingly--to justify the expenditure for all three volumes of his "Byzantium".

A friend sent me this link, "Women in Art", which is an animation of a different sort. I had a laugh at how many I recognized via costume research. There is also much to chuckle about in how men want to perceive women. Do they mentally airbrush us in real life? I can't help but wonder. There's more than a little irony in the fact that the friend who sent it to me has such an incredibly keen eye for beauty, except where he himself is concerned.

And, sort of on the same theme of beauty and perception, I darned near Snoopy-danced in my chair when I learned that the thought-provoking "Evolution" ad that Olgivy and Mather did for Dove won a Grand Prix.

Intelligent selfishness

Is there such a thing as "intelligent selfishness"?

That's a rhetorical question, but only in part. Yesterday (Saturday), I made the decision to work on a frivolous project rather than do most of the things that I should do. As a result, I have enough fabric pieces cut to keep my needle busy for, quite possibly, months. Frivolous stuff, mind you: It's not like I'm sewing clothes for the poor. But this brand of laziness is somehow different than if I had intended to spend the weekend in "virtuous" work, but instead crawled into a book that I've read a dozen times.

"Frivolous" as the weekend was, I still did go to the bank, pick up finch kibbles, attend a two-hour meeting, type and post three-and-a-half pages of meeting notes online, and ship my Dad's birthday/Father's Day present. But it still feels like I've thumbed my nose at adulthood. And y'know what? That feeling is just The Bee's Knees.

Yet all day I've worn a trinket-necklace that my Grandfather brought home from the First World War (as a present for whom, we don't know--he didn't marry my Grandmother until 1929) . The little blue glass dog is usually my talisman against whining, remembering that he walked in the bitterest Minnesota weather to break rock for the pittance that fed his family during the Great Depression. (It is necessity trumping nature that has kept me from sloth in the last decade or so of my life: Such a talisman is a practical matter, not a fond memento. Trust me on this.)

Grandpa died in my first year, Grandma after I started Kindergarten. I didn't have the luxury of knowing them as anything but a child. To this day, I wonder whether they'd be proud of me for things like my schooling and being able to support not only myself, but another person if need be. Or whether they'd be too scandalized by my unrepentant insistence on living on terms much different from what they were raised to believe are the "right" ones. Either way, I think that they understood that living entirely for others--even with the best of intentions--is ultimately counter-productive.

So, as much as this sounds like a self-excusing rationalization, I honestly don't believe that they would begrudge me the day that I confiscated. For the first time in well over a month (nearly two, actually), I don't feel the press of the wall against my back, though none of the things that I'm supposed to be doing have mysteriously vanished.

A tree-hugging double-header

At work, we're being more or less strongarmed into learning about building buildings along "green" guidelines. Which, in principle, is fine for this aging liberal. Although for a shop that's mostly programmers and CAD drafters, certification as a "green" builder is really just lipstick on the proverbial chicken. So, as you might expect, this latest putsch is ad majoram gloriam the Glad-hander in Chief.

But despite the cynicism, I'm actually putting my back into the wheel for this, on three counts:

1. It allows me to annoy the Alpha-Secretary, asking why we don't "walk the walk" with organic shade-grown free-trade coffee, or unbleached napkins/paper plates, or recycle more than just cans (which wouldn't be done if yours truly didn't take care of it), etc.
   
2. It's a chance to show up the intellectual prima-donna(s) of the office with a better score on the certification exam.
3. It's easier than Real School. And--for a change--the firm pays for it.
   

So in the spirit of sustainablility, thinking outside the proverbial box, and the guerilla mentality that this so often requires, here's a link to greywater treatment for the average homeowner (as opposed to the terminally dollar-goggled contractors my parent firm typically deals with).

And, with complete lack of segue, I've sworn off soft drinks for good. I never made time to corroborate the accounts of Coca-Cola's terrorist--in the fullest sense of the term--tactics in union-busting for their South American bottling plants. This barbarity, on the other hand, was enough to push me back to water, tea, coffee, wine and the occasional shortlisted beer. Coke's only been around for--what?--like a hundred years or something? Yet somebody still feels the need to test it on animals? To the point of cutting open chimpanzees' faces to study nerve impulses? WTF?!??!?!

I suppose that I can at last count my allergy to NutraSweet a blessing: I at least haven't directly subsidized this bull$#!+ in just under two decades. And it's not just the fluffy tree-hugger in me that freaks out at these monstrosities, mind you. The sheer gratuitous, asinine stupidity of it galls me as much, if not more. D'you mean to tell me that corporations have NOTHING better on which to squander their gelt than funding (ahem) "studies" of fruit juices treating artificially induced erectile disfunction in rabbits?!?!?!?! (No, seriously. I am not making this up. Read to the end of the article.)

“It’s very easy to characterize scientific research like this in a bad light,” said Dr. John A. DeSimone, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who had been working under the Coca-Cola grant. “To do medical research, you sometimes need an animal model.”

Well, excuse the @#$%% out of my simple layperson's understanding, but this is hardly a "medical" matter. This is NOT a cure for cancer, AIDS, diabetes, heart disease, et. al. If anything, these products are inducing medical problems, not solving them. You just have to boggle at the Wal-Mart prices for which consciences are bartered. And Dr. DeSimone's is unmistakeably one of them. Characterize it in a "bad light"? As if there's any "good light" for this. Oh, please...

That's enough ranting for one evening. Those links have been cooling their proverbial heels in my GMail account for nearly two weeks, so I wanted to pass the first along as fodder for thought, and rant about the second.

Reading

A little bit of serendipity in my reading life: I snarfed the new translation of Elie Weisel's "Night" within a few hours of picking it up. And days later, another testament from that era is unveiled for the world at large: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070604/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_holocaust_diary. The relapsed English major who lives inside me was spinning a few alliterative comments ("courage and cravenness", "humanity and horror"), but, on second thought, that would be like pasting rhinestones on a priceless work of art. Rutka and Elie do quite well without my embellishment.

Speaking of books, I stayed up until nearly two in the morning a couple weeks back to polish off "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell". I'd been gape-jawed enthralled with Strange at the Battle of Waterloo, and the Venetian meeting of Strange and Drawlight was nearly as powerful. The denouement was quite well-done, with everything coming together to its bittersweet ending. Yet, oddly, the sense that the story is truly "over" is missing. Mind you, there's not much wiggle-room for a sequel; still, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell" had the feel of being merely a chapter in a larger book not yet finished. Apart from too much ink given to the incredibly tedious gentleman with the thistle-down hair, it's a glorious read. If I hadn't been running short on lucidity at that hour, I probably would have sniffled a few times at the victory of love over pettiness and ego.

And, lastly, a link to an LA Times article about a (re-)re-discovered manuscript of Archimedes. Science nearly stifled by religion and chicanery...until science comes to its rescue: How apt. And, by the bye, if the git who forged the paintings that covered part of the text is still alive, I'll pay to be first in line to smack the effin' twit into his/her next incarnation. Moron.)

I left it too long between the essay-chapters of "Why I am not a Christian," so I'm missing some of the full effect. I personally think that Russell uses an ever-so-slightly oversized hammer on religion, even making allowances for the historical context. I'm not sure whether Marx and Engels could have more deeply despised the poison-laced Ovaltine the bourgeoisie claim as "morals" than Russell. Yet, surprisingly, the "Nice People" chapter wasn't nearly vicious enough--not for me, at least. I like Bertrand Russell because he is spot-on in calling out Fascism and Communism as competing religions, not outgrowths--and especially not the "logical" conclusions--of atheism itself. Once the Church is dismantled as an obstruction to the revolution, the wrecking crews can't seem to resist building a similar structure on the site, can they? The state is merely swapped in for God, its bureaucracy for the priesthood, and its perpetrators for prophets. Perhaps Russell speculates on the "why" of this elsewhere. Sadly, I haven't encountered this yet (and I'm almost finished with the book). Perhaps between different covers...

That's all the book-related goodness I have at my to pass along just now. Further reading will have to wait until after this coming weekend, when people with DNA similar to mine will be congregating some three hours away. I have promised to be among their number, and will be hosting a few fellow pilgrims besides.

Party checklist

Just back from helping two friends paint their house in preparation for selling it. Dearest and I owed them big-time for helping us move several years ago.

During the wall-washing and taping and such, I compiled a mental checklist of how do do a painting party or moving party the right way. Or at least my idea of the "right" way. So I'm posting it as a public service to anyone who has to call in friends, rather than pay professionals, for these unpleasant (though karma-building) jobs:

___ Don't procrastinate on the prep-work. It won't kill you to have it done ahead of schedule, for pity's sake. If your friends think they're coming over to help you move, they should not have to help you pack.

___ For love of the FSM, have a Plan. Then make a backup Plan in case the original Plan goes astray due to mishaps or people not showing up.

___ Clean the place thoroughly. "Thoroughly" as in, "We could perform surgery in the bathroom and pre-wash our scalpels in the toilet." Moving and painting are sweaty, ooky jobs as it is.

___ Arrange to have children and pets out of the house, or at least out from underfoot for the duration.

___ Stock the refrigerator/cooler with beverages and have munchies at the ready, even if you're feeding folks later on.

___ Have enough equipment and supplies on hand for everyone.

___ Take responsibility for being the straw boss, knowing what has to be done, and communicating that to everyone else. Don't just get stuck into your piece of the job and ignore what's going on around you.

___ Better still, have a checklist posted. (H/t to Dearest for the idea)

___ If possible, have another person designated as gopher, namely the fetcher and finder of things, who orders the pizza, restocks the 'fridge, etc.

___ Take care of yourself, but also expect to work harder than what you ask of anyone else.

___ Understand that the people helping you are working for YOU, not for beer and pizza. They can buy their own freakin' pizza and beer, and have the rest of the day/weekend/whatever to do something they'd really rather be doing. Don't undermine the karma--you might need to ask these same people for help again soon.