Oh the irony of this one. Europe's most famous xenophobes, the French, champions of any and all things French, claim that their homegrown Peugeot marque can't seem to make a car fast enough for their police.

Being highly vocal members of the EU, you might think they would look around the rest of Europe, and at least consider something from another EU country such as Italy or Germany. Mais non, mes amis. Okay, then maybe something nice from, oh, say, Sweden? Encore, non.

So what did these masters of doublespeak and pretzel logic do in their quest for a car that can go over 150 mph? They went to the next most xenophobic nation in the world--Japan. That's right, folks. Subaru, a division of Fuji Heavy Industries, won the contract. Apparently Subaru can pull off making a fast car for a few hundred thousand apiece less than Maserati, Lamborghini, or Ferrari.

So can Porsche, BMW, Audi, Mercedes, and Saab (which also makes nifty turboprops and jets), to name a few. I sense a theme here. Saab is 50% owned by GM. Then there's whole Mercedes connection with Chrysler. Porsche, aside from that fugly SUV is has, is known for its sports cars. Can't have your police force driving anything connected with America, for chrissakes, can you? Can't have your cops driving a 9-11 or a Boxster with no room for all that police equipment, can you? Besides, they'd look ridiculous with the requisite roof lights, and the boards flashing at motorists to pull over in several different languages.

So Subaru fit the bill. The cars are nondescript enough to not cause public outrage about cops driving luxury cars, especially while the current public outrage is about 20-somethings not being guaranteed jobs they won't perform and can't get fired for not doing. Yes, the labor law riots are just the thing to provide a well-timed smokescreen for buying Japanese. Sneak in a contract like this while the public's attention is diverted, and hope it's forgotten before the public moves on to some other petty thing about which to be outraged.

I love it. This particular story was just to juicy to let fall by the wayside without a little commentary from yours truly. Bear in mind that there are not that many European and American car accounts I didn't work on at one time or another, back in my ad agency days.

Sayonara,
Froggie

Who Says Americans Are Obese?

And who says an Asian diet will keep you skinny?

This is a nine year old Chinese cat. He weighs 33 lbs!?!?!? Gadzooks!

Here is a nine week old American cat. Big difference, huh? Or is that a tiny difference? Note the clock-radio and the pen that the mighty mite is standing in front of, for a reference point. Try translating that difference into human sizes and you basically get a really skinny short lady looking at a hulking sumo wrestler-type.

Britain's on strike. This is the paragraph that caught my attention:

The unions are protesting at plans to scrap a so-called rule of 85 which allows council staff to retire at 60 if their age and length of service adds up to 85 years.

First of all, you need to realize that it's not just union members or government employees in Europe who receive pensions. Corporate drones do as well. They by and large think white collar Americans are greedy cusses when it comes to demanding decent salaries, but when you explain to them that there is no such thing as a 30% pension after you retire, and you have to live on your savings and 401k plan, then then "get" it, and say "Oh!" Oh, indeed. No social security check is going to even cover property taxes around here, let alone living expenses. There is no pension check. A few dinosaur companies such as Ford and United Airlines had them, but they are what crippled the companies.

Second, if such a rule existed stateside, I figuratively could have retired five years ago, and literally could within another decade, well short of the traditional retirement age of 65, which only became a "tradition" perhaps starting in the 1950s. That age has now been extended to 70 or 75, depending upon the employer. No employer can force you work until that age, but
unless you're independently wealthy, you've got to take the money while you can get it. It won't roll in automatically, otherwise, while you sit on your butt, sip tea, and weed the garden.

Don't even get me started on the French, who think it's their birthright to hold down a job from which it's nearly impossible to get fired. Where I'm from, jaywalking is our only birthright. We are entitled to nothing else. And jaywalking can, in theory, get you arrested.

Okay, my rant is finished.

Somehow I think it would not be cool to be on a conference call from the safety of my den, with our sales people and a client trying to troubleshoot a numbers issue they have that I can't replicate on my machine. "Actually folks, I'm home sick today, and oh, can you excuse me for a moment while I throw the cat off my lap and dash to the powder room to dry heave over the toilet?" I can't see that going over too well.

Fortunately, I was able to avoid getting stuck in that situation by explaining to our sales people that it's virtually impossible to do any troubleshooting from the confines of my den when I can't even replicate what the client's seeing when I'm logged into my office computer. It's just going to have to wait until tomorrow morning. But that didn't hold up our sales folks with getting them my methodology document this afternoon. I found it on my office computer's hard drive and copied it up to the network for one of them to make a couple of minor changes, save it, and convert it into Adobe .pdf format for the client.

Then the EVP of programming in Utah was all over me this afternoon with flying email. I don't think he even realized I was working my office computer and email from home. He probably assumed I was right there in the NYC office. It really is best to try to fly under his radar as much as possible. I don't have that much actual contact with the guy, but he is prone to pop up out of the blue and go on an email bender like he did this afternoon.

Working from home is convenient, and saves 3-4 hours that would otherwise be spent commuting, but has drawbacks as well. The cat can't leave me alone, and I have to keep tossing her off my lap or drag her off my computer mouse, which she likes to sit on, just so that she has my attention. Then there's the neverending back and forth from my lap across my keyboard to the file cabinet and windowsill. Back and forth ad nauseum. The little pill. It's none too easy to be trying to reply to my office email via remote connection with a bundle of fur that won't just park it in one spot and be done with it. Running Notes remotely means that the text is so tiny on my monitor at home that it's tough enough to read, let alone compose a reply and be able to tell the difference between a comma and a period.

My boss was out of the office on business, I was home throwing up, my assistant's cruising the Caribbean this entire week on a vacation he booked months ago, and the only guy left holding down the fort today's a part time employee who's already got one foot into retirement and plans to get the other foot there, too, in a few months.

Something's bound to snap, and if it turns out to be my sanity, then for all practical purposes, we don't have an analytics department anymore. My boss and to some extent, sales, are out selling our services, but there won't be any warm bodies to produce the deliverables. And my department is being relied on to singlehandedly increase the company's revenues? Not with the staff we have, we can't. And every client project that sales saddles us with takes three times the amount of time and labor that anyone anticipates. We each have our own expertise, and we've been short one body for three months now, which leads to situations in which if somebody's out of the office, there's nobody who can cover for that person. Nobody can afford to get sick or take vacation, which is why between bouts of throwing up this morning, and dry heaving a good part of the afternoon, I was working my computer as if I were there in the office. This job's sucking the life out of me.

From Copyranter With Commentary

she won't WHAT?!?

For a limited time, any man who buys a De Beers diamond engagement ring and is subsequently rejected by any woman will receive a full refund of the purchase price, no questions asked. That's the De Beers DeDifference.

(Note: I don't see any asterisks. Though, I suppose that big-ass diamond at the bottom of the ad could legally serve as one.)

posted by copyranter @ 8:30 AM 10 comments

Personally, I hate diamonds. I asked for an emerald for my engagement ring, and got a really gorgeous 2.5 ct. one custom set in white gold. Platinum would have been okay, but it looks the same to me. Yes, my engagement ring is an emerald. I was years ahead of my time. If you want something that looks like a diamond, you can find a sapphire in any color from clear to yellow to pink to green to blue. You need Queensland for that, not South Africa, and not DeBeers.

The point of this entry is what, you might ask? Well, we discussed getting engaged and married ahead of time, so nothing I didn't want got sprung on me out of the blue. There was none of this on the knee with a ring bullshit, nor did I have to break a tooth finding it in my salad at some fancy dinner at a restaurant. Why guys pull stunts like that is beyond me.

The last time I even went to somebody's wedding, Jordan almonds were there in the room for me. I broke a tooth eating them that ended up requiring $2000 worth of dental work to repair. Yes, two thousand dollars. That wasn't a typo.

No diamonds. No Jordan almonds. Can we stick with emeralds, sapphires, or rubies, and maybe some white chocolate dipped strawberries, please?

Denny inspired me to find this one. How could any cynic not love it?

The cynic in me says that Steve will bring home some more Korean stuff from his trip, but the kitschier it is, the better I will like it.

Forget Korean chocolate. I don't like chocolate, no matter what the country of origin is. I don't think Koreans are famous for black licorice or white chocolate.

The rice wine he brought back last Fall is still there. The bottle is artwork, as are the accompanying tiny cups used to drink it. Those may eventually go into my hutch as objets d'art.

But I loved that little lacquered temple god carving that he brought back for me. It was inexpensive, and spooky looking, with the bug eyes.

Can you tell that my taste runs slightly on the kitschy side?

Who knows what the Koreans will send him home with, but dammit, I intend to spend Memorial Weekend with him at The Sagamore, at Lake George.

Dateline, Saturday, March 25, 6:45 am. I forgot to turn the darned alarm clock off, so I got blasted out of bed by Live at 6:30 this morning. Noooooo. I sooo didn't need that. But by then, the cat was bugging me for breakfast, so there was no rolling over and pulling the covers up over my head.

I fed her, got my morning coffee, and checked my email. The picture you see was waiting for me in my inbox.

Every once in awhile, a friend of mine goes on a joke forwarding email rampage. Sometimes they're funny; most of the time they're schmaltzy. They're never dirty. She's almost my mother's age. But cuss words are allowed in Arkansas. This is one of the funnier ones she sent along to me. Considering what time I got up on a weekend, losing precious sleep, because of Bose user error, this was just what I needed to see. It looks scarily like me, at the moment.

From Nickie the Pooh's DeadJournal. (picture pixelized to protect the guilty)

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
12:40 am - my contest is live

LAKE FOSSIL FAN FICTION CONTEST

There is a contest on my site and I am giving writers a chance to be published legitimately for it as long it is based on my three Lake Fossil stories. No using Lake Fossil IV, V, etc since I will be doing those in sequels, best story in the fan fiction will be invited to be a character with their characters in a Lake Fossil story down the road. The characters they are allowed to use are the city of Chicago and the creature. The reason I am doing this is because I am curious to see who can step into my shoes as a Science Fiction writer. I got one entry so far from a contributor from the magazine -- now I am just trying to get the word out about the contest and will take snail submissions as long they are a floppy. The fee to get in is $5 and that will give you access to the other stories in the series. The email address to mail them to is lakefossil@mad.scientist.com. .Doc format please -- entry fee for fan art is $25. Send all artwork as .png format. Why I did I decided to do this contest for my site -- I noticed the bullshit one that went on last year and I want to do one that I actually sanctioned myself and what makes it more legit is that I am takign snail mail submissions too as long they are on floppy disk.

(comment on this)

**************************************************

Wonders never cease. This self-published twit who calls himself a horror writer and more recently, a sci-fi author, is having a contest for authors to get their stories published in yet another one of his anthologies. He sees this as mentoring other authors, "taking them under his wing" so to speak, and giving them the opportunity to get their work published. Thath's hith thawry, and he's thicking to it.

Granted, every last contributor writes better than this hack, and certainly doesn't need his mentoring. I actually like the work of one such author, and bought her first novel. I enjoyed it immensely, and look forward to her next one; in the meantime, we've become online friends. But I digress. The real point for this hack to be running these contests and taking submissions is so that he can merely contribute one short story, and claim that he's published a book. Heck, he's completely incapable of editing his own work, let alone anyone else's, so that part is for sure a joke.

He's handicapped by mental diseases, although he can't decide whether he's bipolar or depressive--his story changes back and forth--and claims his IQ is 76. He brags about this; no doubt he thinks 100 is a perfect score, as if it were a pop quiz in school. In any event, he can't hold a job, and is living on government disability checks, in his grandparent's basement. He's 29. Claims he had to drop out of community college because of health issues--yeah, hospitalization for a psychotic episode, and he's been in and out of the nuthouse most of his adult life. But the bottom line is that if he were serious about getting an associate's degree, he would have re-enrolled, after he got out of the psych ward.

I realize it's not kind to make fun of the mental midget, but he is so obnoxious to everybody else, and actually writes on one of his 3907 blogs in his profile that he enjoys pissing off everybody who's on his radar. They steal his blog entries (even if they merely post a link), e-pirate his online fiction which he has posted for all the world to see under creative commons, which allows others to use it as long as they credit him. We've ruined his book sales, time and time again. Obviously nobody's really doing this--it's merely that nobody will buy his crap with its lack of plot, lack of grammar, and myriad misspellings. You'd think the guy could at least use spell-check on his own work. If I copy and past even a paragraph of it into MS Word, it looks like a frickin' Christmas tree with all the red and green squigglies.

That having been said, this guy, who is the butt of jokes throughout the real horror writer's community is actually asking that people pay him an entry fee for submitting an entry, and art work costs five times the fee of a manuscript to submit? All it gets the contestant is a converted-to-.pdf format document back from The Pooh? Anyone with Office 2003 or Office XP can do the conversion from .doc format themselves. Gee, the lucky recipent of said .pdf file can also read the other contestant's stories. While there are sleazebags in the publishing world who do this sort of nonsense, it's basically not kosher among proper publishers.

My take on this is that he's having trouble paying for his nightly pizza fix with only his gub'mint dole money.

Heck, I could pay lulu.com to print up a bunch of my blog entries, bind them, hold my own book signing from a lawn chair at the end of my own driveway, and claim I'm a great author. I don't have to rent a booth at a horror convention for $300 for a day, hold a book signing there, after leaping up on the folding table screaming "Wide the thawm!" making a total fool of myself in front of hundreds of people.

Technically, by even posting a blog entry, I'm a self-published author. It's a meaningless term. There are good authors who publish their works print-on-demand, but if they want to be
legitimate about it, they will at least cough up the $25 fee to get an ISBN number for it, and get a real editor.

Why do I think this guy is such a Pooh? He's accused me in the past via emails and IMs of e-pirating his short stories and anthologies. In fact, I read a short story he posted himself on one of his blogs, and actually paid $2.95 to Lulu.com for an e-copy of one of his anthologies, before he made that option unavailable, and made it hard copy only for nearly 10 times the price. However, the guy told me to drink bleach, get "some" AIDS, and get hit by a car (the latter on the very same night I saw someone get hit by a car and killed). This is normal for The Pooh. He does it to everybody he thinks is ruining his book sales, whether or not that person is actually a writer.

Read this forum thread if you think I'm kidding. It's vastly entertaining. I know a number of people on that forum, who are also members of another forum I help moderate.

Okay, this is pretty funny. I used to live in the same apartment/flat building as Cliff Richard in the mid-late 1970s in Regent's Park, London.

http://www2.b3ta.com/spot-the-clifference/

OMG, this is so bad that it's funny:



If you're Irish, you'll understand.

This clip's sort of cute. The theme music certainly caps off my work week well. The entire week was a mad scramble from start to finish, and it did feel like I was in a time warp, but I managed to make all my deadlines.

This is kinda cool. Harks back to playing Space Invaders, Centipede, PacMan, etc., back in the days of the early electronic arcade machines, and for that matter, their primitive DOS and Unix computer game counterparts. I managed to knock out all but a handful of greeblies before I met my death (I only tried once), and the last time I played anything like an arcade game had to have been in college, so we're talking early '80s at the latest. Click on the blue link above (not the picture) to have fun with it.

***Video clip cross-posted from my Xanga***

Some of these AMVs are too cutesie, some are annoying, some are boring, and some, like this one, are just plain clever and hilarious. Wait until you see the "sponsor's" clip "Brought to you by..." at the very end.

Okay, this is an ad, but it's cute, and I always liked the song. It's not very long.

Why do people always think that the way to make you work faster on their pet project is to bug you every hour or two for a status update on it, as if it were the only thing in the world you're trying to get done? How does pulling me away several times a day to spend 20 minutes a pop answering their email or phone call about it increase productivity? It doesn't--it decreases it by the sheer volume of time wasted on the distraction. All it serves to do is make the other person feel like he or she is "on top of things."

When you're a sales person, the less you know about the status every fucking hour or two, the better, IMO, because all your itchy trigger finger will do is pick up the phone and call the client, or send email to relay the information, and paint the whole company into a corner when you can't deliver on whatever deadline you thought to make up regardless of reality.

Torpedo Tits laid a really huge egg Thursday morning by emailing a client that Quality Assurance and Analytics (my department) were both numbers testing some software we developed for him, and that he could have access to it by the end of next week. She never checked with anyone in either of our departments before sending that email. We didn't even have anything yet from programming to test when she did that. The next day, when QA got access, it wouldn't even generate numbers. Therefore, back to programming to fix the bugs, and I have nothing to numbers-test if QA says it won't generate numbers. Torpedo Tits totally lied to the client, and told him what he wanted to hear, with complete disregard for the truth. It wasn't as if she knew the truth and sugar-coated it--she didn't even feel the need to find out the truth before going off half cocked.

Fat Albert got yanked off all West Coast sales duty, and shoved into client support full time, instead of doing a bit of both. He doesn't belong in sales, so that aspect is good, but he doesn't belong in client support, either. This is a guy who can't even figure out how to install our software on his own laptop, and he's going to man the client support hotline in LA? Every goddamn question he gets is either going to be given a wrong answer, or he'll simple email or call NY to get an answer. I'm not in client support at all, yet this jerk expects me to use industrial strength baby wipes on his double-wide for him, whenever he lays a turd. Mostly, he doesn't know how to use our software, and thinks everything's a numbers issue. Hell, he thinks there's a bug in a program whenever he or a client forgets to specify a demographic target and the system can't generate numbers--even though the error message clearly states that you need to select a demographic!

And don't even get me started on the sales person who works out of her home in suburban St. Louis. She was just given additional sales responsibility beyond her region. She tries hard to understand, but she has a mind like a sieve, and doesn't write things down. She got promoted into her boss' position, when the other woman got assigned business development instead of just media sales. Nobody deserves the business development position more than the woman who got it, but it means her previous position is being filled by a semi-incompetent person.

What planet are these people living on? They'll envision a product called Schuyler X, sell it to a cleint, and come back saying you figure out how to do it. I sold it, and we'll look really bad if you can't deliver. I'm so fucking sick and tired of it. We get many more projects like this, and I'll quit. In the old days we used to have interdepartmental meetings to discuss the feasibility of a project before submitting a client proposal and contract. Now it's ass-backwards.

Okay, rant over. Have a good weekend, everyone.

This is not a sign I really want to see this time of year. Miraculously, the next town over from mine actually repaired a bunch of nasty deep potholes on the bridge over the train tracks in the middle of town. The southbound lane wasn't too bad, but the only way to dodge them in the northbound lane was to wait until there was no southbound traffic and use half of that lane. Both lanes are very narrow.

Since using half of each lane is seldom an option during evening rush hour, the trick is to take them slowly enough that it barely registers on the speedometer. Let the hotshot jerk behind you bust a trans-axle on the bridge bombing through them as if he was on the Paris to Dakar rally; that's his problem. Or hers. I often find the soccer moms to be the most aggressive drivers. They think they're intimidating tailgating you in their Suburbans and Lexus SUVs, but I digress...

What in reality happens after pothole repairs this time of year, is that the asphalt doesn't set properly, and within a week, the repair job has been obliterated, and the original pothole was only half the size of the new one. Or, if we have a few days above freezing that allow the asphalt to set and stay put, new potholes pop up elsewhere.

The result looks something like the picture to the right. Maybe we can catch a catfish or a bullhead in that one. Maybe a few crawdads, too.

I'm quite convinced that those ubiquitous road repair signs this time of year simply mean that the town's busy moving the potholes from one location to another, so that motorists no longer know where they are until they hit them.

I hope this March is better than last March. The old saying "March comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb" should have been revised to "March comes in like a lion and leaves sometime in mid-May," for 2005.

Today's entry features cast iron cookware. Sure I have a couple of anodized aluminum sautee pans which are great for meats that you want to simmer in a sauce, but for some things, nothing beats cast iron skillets or dutch ovens.

Breakfast foods are great in cast iron because if it's properly seasoned, nothing sticks: pancakes, hash browns, fried eggs, omelettes. But I wouldn't scramble eggs in a cast iron skillet; a plain old Revere Ware frying pan's better for that. For the dutch oven, swiss steak, pot roast, and things like stews or chili, or baked beans work really well. No need for a crockpot.

Any sort of cookware that I can start on the stove top, then pop in the oven to finish off is fine with me. Skillet cornbread is great to go with the chili. I don't have to worry about whether the handle will melt over 350F. And it can be used over a campfire or on a Coleman stove just as easily as at home.

Probably the only other kitchen items I like better than my cast iron cookware are my set of Henckel knives, and my food mill. Maybe also the mandoline, which makes really short work of slicing or julienne-ing root veggies compared to say, a box grater. Potatoes au gratin, anyone?

Believe it or not, this is very nice. It's red, obviously. Drier than expected for a California merlot. Sometimes you just have to tuck up your nuts and ask the sommelier. That's what they are there for...

State your preferences, and bingo.

This is a worker fire ant. I work with upwards of 100 of them every day. They bite. They bite especially hard when I work from home, because if I'm not available to chew on in person, I'm fair game via email or phone. If I don't respond within five minutes, I'm goofing off. Nevermind the conference call I was on with another client when they tried to call, nor the WebEx I was on with another one when they tried to send me email.

Guess what? The information and connectivity age is great, but NO, you may NOT have my full attention when I'm busy taking a 15 second break to go pee.

Oz thinks these imported fire ants are the biggest pest since rabbits. Since rabbits can easily be shot, and fire ants are normal in the South (although I'd prefer not to have to shoot a 7-iron off the top of a mound full of them, which I HAVE had to do in Kiawah, SC), pfft.

What? The fire ants are going to kill all the sheep and roos there? I think not. If this is all they are worried about, in a government-issued photo about what to look out for, they don't know fire ants from Aunt Mathilda. THAT'S supposed to be a fire ant mound? Um, wait until it's four feet tall. THEN it's a fire ant mound.

Believe me, I've been stung by them and had to swat them off my legs with my bare hands and a golf towel. They are nasty little b@stards, but they aren't the end of the world.

They're called sales people. Hate them as you will, but live with them.

Six to eight inches of snow? I don't think so, but it was a good day for the UGG Fluff Momma boots, inasmuch as I had to trudge through the snow and slush to dig my car out. I'd wanted a pair of these boots since the 1970s when they were last popular at ski resorts, but my parents bought me Moon Boots instead. The insoles on those long ago turned to cement and the metal a rusty mess, so I replaced them with the Sasquatch boots. I think it ended up being more freezing rain than actual snow today, because I spent more time chipping ice off the car than I did brushing off the snow, although it really wasn't too bad.

Three good things about a Saab: Swedes know their defrosters and defoggers, the heat comes on really fast, and the fan at speed four pumps some serious air up to the windshield. It only takes a minute for the ice to start melting enough that the ice scraper makes short work of it. Oh--and heated seats that could scorch your buns on the warmest setting, but that's an option, not standard.

The roads hadn't been plowed, and were pretty slippery during both morning and evening rush, yet I've never felt compelled to get snow tires for this car, nor my previous Saab. A lot of schools were closed, and possibly some local businesses, but NYC was open for business, and most suburbanites made it in from CT, NJ, Westchester, and LI. A guy I work with didn't bother coming in, and waited until 10:30 to email me that (surprise!) there was snow on the ground in Westchester, so he decided to work from home. Wuss. There was snow on the ground at 7:30, too, and the rest of us drove to the train station. Evidently, he planned to do this yesterday because he emailed himself some files he needed to work with today. He's the only one who has no office connectivity from home other than Webmail. We really should force him to use LogMeIn and share his office hard drive, if as he insists, VPN makes his machine at home crash.

Heard from my boss who's at the 4As convention in Orlando, and actually had some good news for him today, and some reasonably good numbers for him to look over, so I sent him a .zip archive with a couple of small Excel spreadsheets, a Word document, and a Powerpoint slide for him to look over this evening, as he requested. I expect he's already looked them over by now. No advertising industry organization would dare host a convention at a hotel that didn't have at least plug-in broadband, if not wi-fi. Not in the U.S., anyway, where even Hampton Inn motels have wi-fi. Overseas is a completely different story regarding connectivity, although Korea's pretty good about it.

Passed along to me by Denny Shane. Thanks Denny. I believe J.D. Salinger mused about farts being funny in The Catcher in the Rye during a scene set in Holden Caulfield's school's sports stadium/arena. Let's just say that even though I knew how this video clip would end, I couldn't help but almost bust a gut laughing. Enjoy.

Had to tweak the HTML source code a little to get it to fit properly.

***edited to remove autoplay***

Click on this link instead to see it.