May 15, 2021
Sometimes
when I see a satellite moving through the sky, I try to plot its trajectory. It’ll
look like it’s on track to go through the handle of the Big Dipper, for
example, but in the end it grazes the top star of the bowl. I once told someone
that I’d have to work on my astro-geometry skills.
But when the Chinese satellite was scheduled to fall to Earth, even the best scientists couldn’t pinpoint a location for touchdown(s).
So, now I don’t feel so bad.
May 27, 2021
Did you ever stop to think about how unfair men's business fashions are? They're forced to tuck their shirts into their pants, long after the pants have given up the struggle to actually fit around the waist; and then, to highlight the disparity between the girth and the actual pants waist, they have to cinch a belt under that waist.
Do men ever long for the good old days of tunics? Think of the impressive figures of yore: Henry VIII, all those burghers in paintings...All with their share of embonpoint, but none squeezed into pants that were several sizes too small for their midsection. Or if they were, the tunic covered it up. They even looked good sideways.
How about it, fashion moguls? Give the guys a break. Stop making them cinch those belts below the waist. Let them breathe again, and stride confidently around, knowing that they look their best from all angles.
May 25, 2021
Undeterred
by the objections of law enforcement groups, the Texas legislature has decided
that people can carry handguns without a license, background check, or training.
Good luck keeping
the populace safe.
May 25, 2021
I’ve
finally figured out why I suddenly started craving Coke at work. I’m not much of
a soda drinker, and certainly not at work, so this sudden need for Coke was
driving me crazy. (To my credit, I never succumbed to the urge.)
But then the light dawned. Somebody at work brings in deep-fried something every day. I smell it in the morning, and I smell it at lunchtime. And just smelling the grease makes me want a Coke.
Pavlovian
advertising at its finest.
May 24,
2021
I watched a disaster movie the other night. A comet heads toward Earth, breaks up in the atmosphere, and pretty much wipes out most of the life on Earth, but not all at once; people have to live through it in stages.
I was
expecting a typical disaster movie: Cheesy plot, great special effects,
impossible rescues…You know the drill.
Instead, it had decent special effects, and a family-drama trope; but instead of multiple impossible rescues, it did an excellent job of showing how people would behave in that situation. Some were very nice, and some were very bad.
At first I was sorry that it wasn’t the mindless adventure I’d signed on for—I had thought that it would be more fun. But I ended up being impressed with how they portrayed the people; so it wasn’t a total disaster.
May 20,
2021
The natural gas company in the St. Louis area lost a discrimination lawsuit brought
by a former employee. Now they want to build the legal fees into their next
rate hike, so the customers can pick up the tab instead of the shareholders.
Clearly, whoever did their sensitivity training did a lousy
job. As did whoever trained their public relations people.
May 20, 2021
I don’t think
I wrote about TV last season or this one.
That’s because there was only one new show that impressed me, and that was “The Unicorn.”
Naturally, it’s been canceled.
On the other
hand, “Chicago Med” (or, as I call it, “The Young and the Self-Righteous”) got
renewed for another season, despite that fact that almost every character on the
show is annoying, stereotypical, and shallow.
I guess that’s where the advertising dollars are.
May 21, 2021
I was listening to “Under the Sea” from “The Little Mermaid”, and I thought, “Huh. Whales, dolphins, squid and octopi are very intelligent. How long before they form alliances to rid the seas of all the garbage humans put into it?”
I picture them cultivating a special kind of seaweed that they can use as nets—or just using old fishing nets that get left in the ocean—rounding up the trash, and depositing the packages on our beaches.
I hope that they can come up with something soon, before we choke all the oceans with trash.
May 20, 2021
Before the pandemic made the Muny cancel its entire 2020 season, it had a full slate of shows prepared. They were carried over to the 2021 season, but because the Muny shortened its season, it cut 2 shows.
Unfortunately,
one of the ones they kept was “The Sound of Music.”
I don’t have anything against the show. But I would have preferred one that I, and possibly the rest of the audience, hasn’t seen a hundred times.
If they had
to cancel a show, why not that one?
May 16, 2021
The
Missouri legislature has passed the Second Amendment Protection Act, which
would nullify federal laws that restrict gun ownership, and would allow for the
prosecution of law enforcement officials who confiscate firearms while following the federal regulations.
The Majority Floor Leader voted for the bill, because he believes that it protects the constitutional rights of Missouri citizens.
He was undeterred by the fact that police were stationed outside his house because he was receiving email threats from those very citizens—the ones who wanted the bill passed.
Apparently
his firm principles outweighed his logic.
May 15, 2021
When
businesses write disaster plans, they include general items like “Disruption to
supply chain.”
But here are some specifics that I’ll bet few of them could foresee:
May 13,
2021
Well, I’ll be darned!
I was
writing a complimentary post about Governor Mike Parson (yes, really!), because
although the Missouri legislature ignored the voters’ mandate to expand
Medicare, Gov. Parson was going to move forward with it anyway. “Way to go,
Governor Parson!” I was going to say. “Congratulations on doing the right
thing.” I had even typed in the title of the post: Governor Parson Steps Up.
But after I typed the first sentence, I went to the internet to check my specifics. And instead of the article I had previously read, I saw a more recent one that said that the governor has decided that he can’t expand Medicaid without the funding, which the legislature denied.
So, never mind.
May 10, 2021
The Arizona
Senate is demanding access to routers used by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office,
in order to audit last November’s election ballots. What would be available in
that database? Social Security numbers and protected health information, among
other things.
At one time, Arizona lawmakers voted to prohibit the state from complying with the Real ID Act on the grounds of (drumroll, please) PRIVACY ISSUES.
But, I
guess they’re pretty flexible these days.
May 10, 2021
A ballot-auditing
firm hired by the Arizona GOP is looking for traces of bamboo in the paper ballots
from the 2020 presidential election. They say that finding bamboo will prove
that the ballots came from Asia, and were therefore fraudulent.
And an Arizona GOP official is warning people not to get vaccinated for COVID-19 because he claims that the vaccine has turned people into vegetables. (The mental kind, not carrots.)
Florida
Man, look out! You’ve got some competition in the Goofiness Stakes.
May 9,
2021
There have been YouTube videos posted by COVID sufferers and by people who lost loved ones to the disease.
I was thinking how powerful it might have been to see one of those posted as a PSA on network TV. It might have been a little long for a typical ad, but the networks could have made it work.
The videos might have made an impression on people who don’t watch YouTube, and so couldn’t see the poignancy, or really feel the danger posed by the disease.
I tend to record shows, then fast-forward through the commercials, so I very likely would have missed it; but did anybody see anything like that? (Or maybe the networks are on to me, and figured that nobody else watches the ads either.)
May 8,
2021
In “The
Inefficiency of -Isms” (June 10, 2020), I mentioned that racism was inefficient
and costly.
Now Heather McGhee has written a book called The Sum of Us. As quoted by Leonard Pitts, Jr., she says,
“It’s increasingly clear that racism is not in our national interest, and it’s costing us so much, whether that’s calculated in the trillions of dollars lost to our economy because of the racial-economic divide, or it’s the lives lost in a pandemic that was made worse because of the vulnerabilities and dysfunctions of a racist economy and public health system.”
So, now you’ve heard it from someone who was willing to do the research and get actual statistics, and who’s actually published a book, instead of just randomly throwing out opinions.
May 8, 2021
Headline from Friday, May 7, 2021:
“Jobless claims
hit pandemic low as pace of US hiring keeps rising” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
for an AP article)
Headline
from Saturday, May 8, 2021:
“Weak jobs
report spurs wave of bickering on recovery plan” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for
an AP article)
“…the employment report failed to show that the U.S. economy was accelerating so much as stutter-stepping along, as the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1%.”
It’s a
little bit of Apples and Oranges—Joblessness vs. Spending—but it shows that you
can take a statistic, plug it into your pre-set conclusion, and make it say
anything you want.
April
29, 2021
I have frequently
lamented the fact that I don’t have any imagination. I can’t create, I can just
report. So you wouldn’t want me on your advertising team, or planning your
glitzy event, or writing what you hope will be the next best-selling novel.
What I do have, though, is Vision. I can see how to use things in a way that many people don’t think of.
The most recent example occurred during a job interview. The company makes refrigeration units, and mentioned that they make the coolers that hold sodas in stores. They said that the units save quite a bit of money in electricity, and they mentioned a few chains that they work with.
I asked if they had ever thought of going into rural areas. Individual store owners would probably welcome the cost savings. Electric companies would probably prefer to use their resources in urban areas, where demand for power keeps growing as people build new houses, with new air conditioners and other appliances; and it would keep them from having to update their infrastructure for a while longer. There might even be grants, I said, that would help the small business owners defray the cost of the new units. After all, utility companies currently buy back energy-sucking refrigerators from residences; why not kick in some cash to relieve some strain on the power grid?
Less than a week later, the power grid in Texas failed. I felt like calling the company back and saying, “See what I mean?”
It feels like I’m surrounded by unseen opportunities that are whizzing by; all I have to do is grab them and make connections. I always took that for granted, until I saw how much other people weren’t doing it.
You want your students to practice their martial arts forms? Sign your school up for one of those events where people get to be the entertainment—a Christmas festival, for example, where groups come and get 20 minutes to sing, or dance, or play instruments; their parents will by golly make sure that they’re prepped and ready to go. So your students will practice their forms and, in addition, you’ll get advertising for the school.
Etc.
It’s not as much fun as Imagination; but Vision is actually a pretty useful thing to have.
(You’re
probably thinking, “Well, this is a pretty self-congratulatory thing to write.
What do I care?” But sometimes I need to articulate something nice about myself.
And it’s my blog, so why not?)
May 3, 2021
In the
original post, we kind of thought that the birds might be doing a mating dance.
However, this story is definitely about a rumble.
A man reported seeing a male robin fly back to the nest he was building, carrying some straw. Another male robin chased him, grabbed his head, and shook it.
The man wasn’t sure if it was a territory dispute,
Or if the nest-building
robin had cheesed off the second robin by stealing his nesting supplies.
May 2,
2021
In one of those horrible “I hoped it only happened on TV” moments, I read Tony Messenger’s column in today’s Post-Dispatch about a man who has been proven innocent but can’t be released from jail because of the way Missouri law is written.
When is
somebody, somewhere, going to make it illegal to hold a person who has been
proven innocent?
In the meantime, Governor Parson, use your powers for good, and grant a pardon.
May 2, 2021
Post-Dispatch columnist David Nicklaus pointed out that Josh Hawley, who is filing bills to bust Big Tech under antitrust laws,
Is using
Twitter to hype his new anti-tech book,
which is on sale at Amazon.
May 1,
2021
I was talking
with a hair stylist whose philosophy is that your hairstyle reflects what’s
going on in your life; and that the right hairstyle can set you free
spiritually.
I said that my philosophy of hair is that, no matter what else you skimp on, pay for a good hairstyle. That way, even if you’re wearing cruddy clothes, people will know that you’re still somebody to be reckoned with. You may be dressing down, but you’ve obviously got some clout.
She wasn’t
impressed with my spirituality, but she did say that it made good sense.
May 1,
2021
I just saw
a Facebook post of a sign that says,
“Don’t
mess with me. I’m a…
Wooden
Spoon
Lead Paint
No Car
Seat
No Bike
Helmet
Pickup Bed
Ridin’
Garden
Hose Drinkin’
SURVIVOR”
I posted
back,
“Yeah, but if all that’s true, you’re older’n dirt.”
April
29, 2021
Some things
are inevitable.
Some
things are, apparently, evitable.
But when was the last time you saw somebody evit something?
March 23, 2021
A woman
emailed me that she wanted to talk about a project I had mentioned to her (also
by email; we’d never met in person). Could she call me at such and such a time?
I was ready, but my phone didn’t ring, for some reason. We played phone tag a
few times, and I got bored and texted that she should move on to someone else’s
project. She texted me, “I just wanted to set up a time when we could talk.”
Wait: You’re calling me to SET UP a time to talk???
What do
you think texting is for?
