Observation

Watch people walk by, immersing themselves in too-often vicious social media, inattentive to all but their mo' bile devices.

Speeds

When I learned to type we measured speed in words per minute. Did Incan scribes measure their quipu speed in knots?

Naval engineer's prayer

Drachinifel says this was a real plea by midget submarine engineers.

Staying attentive

We got to talking about the difference in preaching between your typical anglo congregation and a black one. I suspect that the more congregation-interactive approach ("Can I get an Amen?") in the latter leads to less of "Beautiful Dreamer".

Fast Breaking News

often reminds me of Twain's story of The Admiral in Roughing It.

Not the optometrist's waiting room

Hold your breath

Wok

The subject of exercises for balance brought up The Ministry of Silly Walks. Naturally my contribution was to suggest using a bundt pan.

I wonder who picked it

It wasn't yet 8 this morning. I needed a few small items and Walmart was close, with an almost-empty parking lot.

The speakers were not playing Christmas music. Yet. Possibly they have some choice what to play on the night shift, and in honor of Black Friday somebody wanted Ballroom Blitz. Or maybe it was coincidence.

Rapid humor

The other day in a conversation at Dr Boli about clever game shows, one commenter said of "8 out of 10 Cats" that it would "take people who are already known to be clever and humorous and put them into situations that encourage them to be humorous and clever."

Season 1/Ep 1 of "8 out of 10 Cats" was available, so I gave it a chance. The contestants were very fast with their quips, no question--faster than I generally am.

Unfortunately the fastest way to come up with quips is to use cheap shots; joking about sex, joking about the pope -- maybe some of the obscure references were too, but I've never been in close touch with UK pop culture.

Celebrity teams nominally competed to see who could best guess survey results, though the real contest was to see who could come up with the best quips. Which sounded better than it was. Maybe it got better in later seasons, but my curiosity doesn't reach that far.

Motto

The informal motto of our IT group was "We do this, not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."

Seriously, when it comes to maintenance, "easy" is very important. You don't want to spend days futzing around every time somebody needs a software version change.

Burnout Prevention and Recovery

A few decades ago I read rec.humor.funny (rec.humor was mostly trash). Some of that is archived at a non-https site (www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q3/msview.html), so I can't insert a link without blogger throwing a fit, but one post reminded me a bit of grad school.

10. TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY. Don't skip meals, abuse yourself with rigid diets, disregard your need for sleep, or break the doctor appointments. Take care of yourself nutritionally.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: Your body serves your mind, your mind serves the company. Push the mind and the body will follow. Drink Mountain Dew. (it's free.)

11. DIMINISH WORRY AND ANXIETY. Try to keep superstitious worrying to a minimum--it changes nothing. You'll have a better grip on your situation if you spend less time worrying and more time taking care of your real needs.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: If you're not worrying about work, you must not be very committed to it. We'll find someone who is.

The internet

I wonder what Dr Boli has been reading lately. FWIW, some of my scratch paper notes have become blog posts. And other things.

Meanderthal

They walk among us. The most famous is no doubt Jim Blaine, but there's a touch of the breed in all of us whose websearching guideline is "Squirrel!"

I wish I knew to whom to give credit for the term.

Illiterate Digest

I hadn't thought of Will Rogers in years. Here he is helping Ziegfeld Follies girls do their income taxes; one of the articles he wrote for the Illiterate Digest. I'm not fond of trying to parse his dialect, but if you read it as though spoken he has some good lines.

Some of it slides past me, as it references events of the era. "I am following the Kaiser, who rewrote his life after it was too late."

"Please don’t consider these as my memoirs. I am not passing out of the picture, as men generally are who write those things."

Sloppy language--I think

A few blocks from me a tax prep place has popped up (it's that time of year), with a big banner titled with "MAX YOUR TAX". I don't think I'll be doing business with them.

For fun

"don't spoil the denouement"

Ogden Nash. There's a slight typo in the web page's version.

Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

One of the sessions:

De Santo

Grim's Hall had a post about Nicholas De Santo, so naturally Youtube took the hint.

He illustrates why having everybody hate you isn't proof of your virtue, and then explains where, appropriately enough, the attitude came from.

The Provincial Letters

I'd read Pensees, but not The Provincial Letters. It seems some things don't change much. A sample:

"Do not flatter yourself with that," said the father; "there are still such things as mortal sins- there is sloth, for example."

"Nay, then, father dear!" I exclaimed, "after that, farewell to all 'the joys of life!'"

"Stay," said the monk, "when you have heard Escobar's definition of that vice, you will perhaps change your tone: 'Sloth,' he observes, 'lies in grieving that spiritual things are spiritual, as if one should lament that the sacraments are the sources of grace; which would be a mortal sin.'"

"O my dear sir!" cried I, "I don't think that anybody ever took it into his head to be slothful in that way."

"And accordingly," he replied, "Escobar afterwards remarks: 'I must confess that it is very rarely that a person falls into the sin of sloth.' You see now how important it is to define things properly?"