I’m not sure which recent news item boggles my mind more—the fact that that one in seven Americans now are living below the poverty line or last week’s evidence that enough people care what Sarah Palin thinks to vote for the loons she endorses for political office. I would suspect the two things are related—desperate people do crazy things—except that the Tea Partiers tend to be impoverished mainly in empathy and reasoning. From what I can gather, their primary money problem is that the Muslim socialist in the White House wants them to share their ducats for the common good, through outlandish schemes such as affordable health care for all.
The big local story last week was the defeat in the Democratic primary of Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose debatable success at improving city services and an abysmal school system was trumped by his unarguable brilliance at being an arrogant prick. So, goodbye Fenty and, it seems certain, his distaff twin in bedside manner, schools chief Michelle Rhee. Hello, incoming mayor Vince Gray, the weird-haired city council chair who’s about 30 years older, perhaps no wiser, but about 95% more amiable than the man he’s replacing.
But, enough of all that. Any idiot with a blog feels compelled to pontificate about the Major Issues of the Day, and I’m no less an idiot than anyone else with an electronic soapbox, so now I’ve duly weighed in. But what I’d really like to write about today is urinal etiquette.
I spotted this headline recently in the Baltimore Sun: “‘Hand-Washing Police’ Find More of Us Are Washing Up After Bathroom Use; Men Still Dirtier.” These were my initial thoughts:
· Law enforcement certainly is specializing these days!
· Really? and,
· Duh!”
What I mean is, I wondered, respectively, if:
· The NYPD now has an affirmative action program for applicants with OCD,
· The words “more of us are washing up” are supposed to jibe with the parade of guys I see walking directly from whiz basin to hot dog stand at any given sports stadium, and
· That headline writer seriously thought we needed to be told that men are grosser than women.
Anyway, this was how the article written by an Associated Press “medical writer,” started:
Researchers who secretly spy on people using public restrooms say that Americans seem to be washing their hands more often.
Checks during August in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and San Francisco found 85 percent of people washed their hands, up from only 77 percent in 2007.
It’s the best rate since these periodic surveys began in 1996.
One thing hasn’t changed. Men are still dirtier. About 23 percent of men failed to wash up, compared to only 7 percent of women.
First of all, where does one apply for such “research” spying? Who leads these studies—George Michael? Second of all, so, it’s really about a quarter of men who are exiting the loo with urine (or, um, worse) on their hands? Now, those are the guys I know.
What is it about men that makes them think it’s OK to whip out, zip up and walk away? I mean, full disclosure here, I don’t spend a fortnight at the sink vigorously soaping and rubbing together my hands (hand and stump), the way health officials advise. But I do think it’s important to at least wash off the basic residue of one’s bathroom visit and to be in position to assure any subsequent new acquaintance, upon shaking his or her hand, “‘That? Just water.”
Some subsequent Web searching netted further details about “the latest observational study sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology” (George Michael, chairman) “and the American Cleaning Institute” (that guy who spied on Erin Andrews, president). Not surprisingly, a lying 96% of adults contacted for a separate telephone survey said they always washing their hands in public restrooms. (The other 4% conceded, “OK, it’s not water.”)
And then I came upon this supremely unsurprising tidbit: The Atlanta site where the “researchers” had amused themselves watching fellas shake their weiners dry was Turner Field, and it was that venue that “by far fielded the worst percentage for the guys—barely two-thirds (65%)” washed their hands at the ballpark after going to the bathroom. Aha!
So, what can we cull from all of this, other than the depressing fact that the United States presumably is hygienically advanced compared to many countries, yet we (and I mean the male half of our population) are gross?
Well, all I can say is, if you’re sitting in a sports stadium and the guy sitting next to you has just returned from the baby changing station with his little son or daughter, whatever you do, do not high-five him when the home team scores a key run or a touchdown. Because only 80% of guys with kids who were contacted for that phone survey said they always wash their hands after changing a diaper. And God only knows how much lower the real percentage is.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Dynamic Doppelganger
There’s an old bit from Woody Allen’s standup act in which he recalls once having coped with a life-threatening situation by drifting into happy memories of his idyllic youth. He languorously ticks off the images that had filled his mind—“swimmin’ in the swimmin’ hole,” “buyin’ a piece of gingham for Emmylou,” “fryin’ up a mess o’ catfish.” There’s a pause that serves as a sighing tribute to those gauzy days of yore. Then he abruptly exclaims, “Suddenly I realize it’s not my life! I’m about to die, and the wrong life is flashing before my eyes!”
That ‘s sort of how I felt when I Googled myself the other day. I typed “Eric Ries” into the search engine and quickly discovered that Eric Ries is not, after all, “The Ungooglable Man”—the guy of no technological smarts and zero social-networking presence—with whom I’m so well acquainted.
Quite to the contrary, it develops that Eric Ries just about owns the Internet. He’s a hotshot entrepreneur and digital savant in California’s Silicon Valley whose how-to blog about technology startups, Lessons Learned, boasts nearly 60,000 subscribers and is quoted or cited seemingly a billion times across the Web. He has founded or co-founded at least three tech firms—included something called IMVU that Wikipedia describes as a “a 11 + 3D graphical instant messaging client” that hosts 90 million-plus users. He is credited with popularizing for Web applications something called the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. That’s described by Wikipedia as a strategy used in product development “for fast and quantitative testing of a product or product feature.” He’s written books with names like The Black Art of Java Game Programming. Needless to say, he’s got a Twitter account that no doubt is breathlessly followed by hundreds if not thousands of acolytes. He has given talks all over the world, many of which can be viewed on YouTube.
I could go on, but, frankly, in typing the preceding paragraph I strained my jargon limit and nearly bored myself to death. Suffice it to say, the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading right now scarcely could have less in common with the Eric Ries who BusinessWeek named one its “Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech” in 2007.
As if his professional history isn’t enough to distinguish us as polar opposites, consider the very first line of California Eric’s debut blog post, from October 4, 2008: “I’m one of those people who’s been programming since they can remember. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT: It was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the Internet.”
OK, just one question from me. That question would be: WTF?!
The only part of the italicized lines above to which I can relate is the lifelong relationship to programming. Except that in my case, it would TV programming. I can’t really remember an age when I wasn’t glued to the set, starting with black-and-white fare in the early 1960s. In my case, it was thanks to muds that I first discovered the back of my mom’s hand—I’d tracked some into the house from the backyard.
Sure, with a little more searching I could have gotten the skinny on the “old IBM XT.” (Which I’m guessing is nevertheless newer than some of my underwear. And yes, I really do need to hit Sears soon.) And I know that the mystery of the acronym “MUD,” similarly, lies just a few mouse clicks away. But the point is, there’s a reason California Eric's (let's call him Cal-E henceforth, like he’s from Krypton) blog is called Lessons Learned and explores innovation, proactivity and profit margins, while my blog is called Lassitude Come Home and more often than not is about how I wish things would slow the hell down and people like the Cal-E would stop hastening the death of newspapers, CDs, land-line phones, commercial radio, and all sorts of other staples I hold dear.
In case you’re wondering, I did watch and hear Cal-E in action in some of those YouTube clips. I would’ve attached a photo of him to this post, or the link to a video clip, except that I honestly don't now how to do either thing and am not much interested in learning. Which kind of hammers home the fact that the other Eric and I are very far indeed from being identical twins.
To that point, physically we’re both white, male, bespectacled and fairly lean, but he’s got short black hair, a somewhat more prominent nose than I, and a confident air that perfectly suits his PowerPoint presentations. As you might have guessed, of the two of us, he’s the one with a right hand to match his left. His voice is a little nerdy but otherwise unremarkable. And of course he’s considerably younger than me. How much so, I don’t know, but those BusinessWeek awards go to entrepreneurs who are under 25. Which means he’s 27, tops. I’ve got a quarter-century on him.
I might have shared with you here some of Cal-E’s key business ideas and theories, but I couldn’t watch more than a minute or two of any of the video clips. They all involve techie stuff (go figure) and are deathly dull to my ears. Standup without the comedy.
What would genuinely have interested me would’ve been some personal data on my namesake—the city he lives in, whether he’s married and/or has kids, if he pursues any hobbies that don’t involve high-tech gadgetry. (I somehow imagine he skydives or rappels, in keeping with the I’m-like-a-shark-and-must-always-move-forward stereotype I have of his ilk.) But search as I might, I found no such tidbits. Being Cal-E’s East-Coast, lassitudinous opposite, I lacked the skills and doggedness to ferret out all available databases until I found the answers I was seeking. In short—and notably unlike the Cal-E of my imagining—I conceded defeat and gave up.
Per my use of the word in the above paragraph, I freely concede that I’m completely stereotyping Cal-E, based on my preconceptions, prejudices, preferences and, above all, my desire to justify through humor and irony my own non-striving, lazy-ass existence. Cal-E may, in fact, be a great guy who in countless ways is making the world a better place. This seemingly doomed planet of ours surely needs innovation and know-how of the type Cal-E presumably can deliver much more than it does my offerings of humor and irony, which seem vastly unlikely to birth the great green technologies of the future. I assume Cal-E has plenty of family members and friends who love him, and have many compelling reasons for doing so.
Don’t get me wrong—I really do take a certain pride in being The Ungooglable Man. In my own crotchety way, the designation bespeaks refusal to engage in a bunch of (dad-gum) nonsense. Still, it was a little deflating the other day to scroll through screen after screen of “Eric Ries” listings on Google before finally encountering myself—way, way down at link 359. There, I appeared in an index of articles that had been published in my then-employer’s magazine in 1999. And even that mention proved isolated. I hadn’t reappeared through search result 400, when I ceased looking.
I know, I know: I can’t very well have it both ways. It’s unreasonable to both revel in and be annoyed by one’s electronic anonymity. Yet I suffer this duality. Well, I’m not so much upset about my own virtual nonexistence on the Web as I am steamed at Cal-E for so completely hogging our name. It smacks of market domination to me.
Which, come to think of it, probably is one of the strategic goals Eric the Tech Wiz regularly teaches and blogs about. Damn.
That ‘s sort of how I felt when I Googled myself the other day. I typed “Eric Ries” into the search engine and quickly discovered that Eric Ries is not, after all, “The Ungooglable Man”—the guy of no technological smarts and zero social-networking presence—with whom I’m so well acquainted.
Quite to the contrary, it develops that Eric Ries just about owns the Internet. He’s a hotshot entrepreneur and digital savant in California’s Silicon Valley whose how-to blog about technology startups, Lessons Learned, boasts nearly 60,000 subscribers and is quoted or cited seemingly a billion times across the Web. He has founded or co-founded at least three tech firms—included something called IMVU that Wikipedia describes as a “a 11 + 3D graphical instant messaging client” that hosts 90 million-plus users. He is credited with popularizing for Web applications something called the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. That’s described by Wikipedia as a strategy used in product development “for fast and quantitative testing of a product or product feature.” He’s written books with names like The Black Art of Java Game Programming. Needless to say, he’s got a Twitter account that no doubt is breathlessly followed by hundreds if not thousands of acolytes. He has given talks all over the world, many of which can be viewed on YouTube.
I could go on, but, frankly, in typing the preceding paragraph I strained my jargon limit and nearly bored myself to death. Suffice it to say, the Eric Ries whose words you’re reading right now scarcely could have less in common with the Eric Ries who BusinessWeek named one its “Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech” in 2007.
As if his professional history isn’t enough to distinguish us as polar opposites, consider the very first line of California Eric’s debut blog post, from October 4, 2008: “I’m one of those people who’s been programming since they can remember. I got my start programming on an old IBM XT: It was thanks to MUDs that I first discovered the Internet.”
OK, just one question from me. That question would be: WTF?!
The only part of the italicized lines above to which I can relate is the lifelong relationship to programming. Except that in my case, it would TV programming. I can’t really remember an age when I wasn’t glued to the set, starting with black-and-white fare in the early 1960s. In my case, it was thanks to muds that I first discovered the back of my mom’s hand—I’d tracked some into the house from the backyard.
Sure, with a little more searching I could have gotten the skinny on the “old IBM XT.” (Which I’m guessing is nevertheless newer than some of my underwear. And yes, I really do need to hit Sears soon.) And I know that the mystery of the acronym “MUD,” similarly, lies just a few mouse clicks away. But the point is, there’s a reason California Eric's (let's call him Cal-E henceforth, like he’s from Krypton) blog is called Lessons Learned and explores innovation, proactivity and profit margins, while my blog is called Lassitude Come Home and more often than not is about how I wish things would slow the hell down and people like the Cal-E would stop hastening the death of newspapers, CDs, land-line phones, commercial radio, and all sorts of other staples I hold dear.
In case you’re wondering, I did watch and hear Cal-E in action in some of those YouTube clips. I would’ve attached a photo of him to this post, or the link to a video clip, except that I honestly don't now how to do either thing and am not much interested in learning. Which kind of hammers home the fact that the other Eric and I are very far indeed from being identical twins.
To that point, physically we’re both white, male, bespectacled and fairly lean, but he’s got short black hair, a somewhat more prominent nose than I, and a confident air that perfectly suits his PowerPoint presentations. As you might have guessed, of the two of us, he’s the one with a right hand to match his left. His voice is a little nerdy but otherwise unremarkable. And of course he’s considerably younger than me. How much so, I don’t know, but those BusinessWeek awards go to entrepreneurs who are under 25. Which means he’s 27, tops. I’ve got a quarter-century on him.
I might have shared with you here some of Cal-E’s key business ideas and theories, but I couldn’t watch more than a minute or two of any of the video clips. They all involve techie stuff (go figure) and are deathly dull to my ears. Standup without the comedy.
What would genuinely have interested me would’ve been some personal data on my namesake—the city he lives in, whether he’s married and/or has kids, if he pursues any hobbies that don’t involve high-tech gadgetry. (I somehow imagine he skydives or rappels, in keeping with the I’m-like-a-shark-and-must-always-move-forward stereotype I have of his ilk.) But search as I might, I found no such tidbits. Being Cal-E’s East-Coast, lassitudinous opposite, I lacked the skills and doggedness to ferret out all available databases until I found the answers I was seeking. In short—and notably unlike the Cal-E of my imagining—I conceded defeat and gave up.
Per my use of the word in the above paragraph, I freely concede that I’m completely stereotyping Cal-E, based on my preconceptions, prejudices, preferences and, above all, my desire to justify through humor and irony my own non-striving, lazy-ass existence. Cal-E may, in fact, be a great guy who in countless ways is making the world a better place. This seemingly doomed planet of ours surely needs innovation and know-how of the type Cal-E presumably can deliver much more than it does my offerings of humor and irony, which seem vastly unlikely to birth the great green technologies of the future. I assume Cal-E has plenty of family members and friends who love him, and have many compelling reasons for doing so.
Don’t get me wrong—I really do take a certain pride in being The Ungooglable Man. In my own crotchety way, the designation bespeaks refusal to engage in a bunch of (dad-gum) nonsense. Still, it was a little deflating the other day to scroll through screen after screen of “Eric Ries” listings on Google before finally encountering myself—way, way down at link 359. There, I appeared in an index of articles that had been published in my then-employer’s magazine in 1999. And even that mention proved isolated. I hadn’t reappeared through search result 400, when I ceased looking.
I know, I know: I can’t very well have it both ways. It’s unreasonable to both revel in and be annoyed by one’s electronic anonymity. Yet I suffer this duality. Well, I’m not so much upset about my own virtual nonexistence on the Web as I am steamed at Cal-E for so completely hogging our name. It smacks of market domination to me.
Which, come to think of it, probably is one of the strategic goals Eric the Tech Wiz regularly teaches and blogs about. Damn.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Programming Head Axed
James Lee and I might have bellied up to the bar together and shared us a good rant, if not for that unfortunate homicidal nut job thing he had going on.
Lee’s the guy whose grievances against Discovery Communications brought him two days ago to the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he held three people hostage while armed with a handgun and explosive devices. Police shot and killed him after he allegedly pointed the gun at one of his captives.
A big part of Lee’s beef with Discovery had been his contention that its TLC cable TV channel irresponsibly promotes population growth by airing such shows as Kate Plus 8 and 19 Kids and Counting. Well, see, this has been a soapbox on which I’ve been standing for years—albeit not one I’ve ever accessorized with lethal weaponry and lugged into an office building, or expressed on the Web in a grandiose and bilious manifesto (at www.savetheplanetprotest.com) that megalomaniacally concludes, “These are the demands and sayings of Lee.”
Why, not a week before the gunman’s demented overkill got him killed, I’d e-mailed a friend that day’s Dilbert cartoon, under the subject line “Why I Hate the Duggars.” (The Duggars being the contraceptive-eschewing clan that’s documented on 19 Kids and Counting.) Dilbert has been asked by a female co-worker to “bring an appropriate gift” to the baby shower of a colleague who is having triplets. In the closing panel, the honoree opens the present and observes, “It’s a … book on how to lower my carbon footprint?” Am unsmiling Dilbert responds, “You’re killing us all.”
Ha! Now that’s funny!
OK, OK, before I start getting angry posts from ... well, I’m not sure who’d write them, because if you’re reading this you’re one of 15 or 20 friends of mine who know that I don’t hate kids, and that I in fact encourage controlled procreation so there’ll always be younger generations to help share my tax burden and, eventually, change my adult undergarments. But still, I feel compelled to state clearly that, unlike James Lee, I’ve absolutely no interest in (again from the manifesto) “stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”
While anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of poopy diaper readily would concede that human babies can, indeed, be disgusting—and while I agree that overpopulation is killing this planet—I strenuously draw the line at such solutions of Lee’s as encouraging mass sterilization and increased infertility.
Can I say this, though? As an aging technophobe, I’m slightly endeared by the late maniac’s apparent conviction that simply airing a revamped program lineup on a basic cable channel will turn the environmental tide. As if a twittering and texting nation will look up from its tiny illuminated screens long enough to watch and absorb the lessons of such James Lee-endorsed fare as The World Without Us—Seriously!, Breakfast with the Barrens and Zero and Stopping.
Lynn and I are childless by choice, so I can’t profess to personally “get” the allure of parenthood. Cats strike me as much more fun and considerably cheaper than children, if perhaps equally destructive. But hey, to each his or her own, I say. Many people consider children life's greatest blessing, and parenthood life’s crowning achievement. Also, some folks are allergic to cats. Whatever. It’s all good.
It’s all good until, that is, we start rewarding people for having kids by the busload, by making TV stars out of them. That seriously gets my goat. The same goes for when some fertility drug-happy couple in the Midwest drops a seven-spot, appears on the Topeka CBS affiliate, becomes a national story and ends up with so much cash and corporate help that they’re set from Pampers through college. Do you want to know what I’d like to send that mom and dad? Back in time, with a starter kit from Planned Parenthood.
So, I hear what James Lee was saying about the super-breeders. And I don’t dispute that “population growth is a real crisis,” that “humans are the most destructive creatures around,” or that the world’s wildlife is being needlessly sacrificed to ever-growing amounts of farmland. (All of those are among Lee’s better-reasoned and less hysterically expressed points.) However, had old James and I ever sat down at the bar together to rail against the stupidity and indefensibility of Kate and its TV ilk, I might in a very gentle way have suggested to him that he’d do better to push such things as veganism, safe sex, and family planning than those dreadfully draconian solutions of his.
Except that, oh yeah, that particular conversation might’ve ended with him going all James Lee on my ass. You see, that’s the crux of the problem. Your Unibomber types seldom are 100% wrong about things. But they do tend to be 100% crazy.
Lee’s the guy whose grievances against Discovery Communications brought him two days ago to the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he held three people hostage while armed with a handgun and explosive devices. Police shot and killed him after he allegedly pointed the gun at one of his captives.
A big part of Lee’s beef with Discovery had been his contention that its TLC cable TV channel irresponsibly promotes population growth by airing such shows as Kate Plus 8 and 19 Kids and Counting. Well, see, this has been a soapbox on which I’ve been standing for years—albeit not one I’ve ever accessorized with lethal weaponry and lugged into an office building, or expressed on the Web in a grandiose and bilious manifesto (at www.savetheplanetprotest.com) that megalomaniacally concludes, “These are the demands and sayings of Lee.”
Why, not a week before the gunman’s demented overkill got him killed, I’d e-mailed a friend that day’s Dilbert cartoon, under the subject line “Why I Hate the Duggars.” (The Duggars being the contraceptive-eschewing clan that’s documented on 19 Kids and Counting.) Dilbert has been asked by a female co-worker to “bring an appropriate gift” to the baby shower of a colleague who is having triplets. In the closing panel, the honoree opens the present and observes, “It’s a … book on how to lower my carbon footprint?” Am unsmiling Dilbert responds, “You’re killing us all.”
Ha! Now that’s funny!
OK, OK, before I start getting angry posts from ... well, I’m not sure who’d write them, because if you’re reading this you’re one of 15 or 20 friends of mine who know that I don’t hate kids, and that I in fact encourage controlled procreation so there’ll always be younger generations to help share my tax burden and, eventually, change my adult undergarments. But still, I feel compelled to state clearly that, unlike James Lee, I’ve absolutely no interest in (again from the manifesto) “stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”
While anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of poopy diaper readily would concede that human babies can, indeed, be disgusting—and while I agree that overpopulation is killing this planet—I strenuously draw the line at such solutions of Lee’s as encouraging mass sterilization and increased infertility.
Can I say this, though? As an aging technophobe, I’m slightly endeared by the late maniac’s apparent conviction that simply airing a revamped program lineup on a basic cable channel will turn the environmental tide. As if a twittering and texting nation will look up from its tiny illuminated screens long enough to watch and absorb the lessons of such James Lee-endorsed fare as The World Without Us—Seriously!, Breakfast with the Barrens and Zero and Stopping.
Lynn and I are childless by choice, so I can’t profess to personally “get” the allure of parenthood. Cats strike me as much more fun and considerably cheaper than children, if perhaps equally destructive. But hey, to each his or her own, I say. Many people consider children life's greatest blessing, and parenthood life’s crowning achievement. Also, some folks are allergic to cats. Whatever. It’s all good.
It’s all good until, that is, we start rewarding people for having kids by the busload, by making TV stars out of them. That seriously gets my goat. The same goes for when some fertility drug-happy couple in the Midwest drops a seven-spot, appears on the Topeka CBS affiliate, becomes a national story and ends up with so much cash and corporate help that they’re set from Pampers through college. Do you want to know what I’d like to send that mom and dad? Back in time, with a starter kit from Planned Parenthood.
So, I hear what James Lee was saying about the super-breeders. And I don’t dispute that “population growth is a real crisis,” that “humans are the most destructive creatures around,” or that the world’s wildlife is being needlessly sacrificed to ever-growing amounts of farmland. (All of those are among Lee’s better-reasoned and less hysterically expressed points.) However, had old James and I ever sat down at the bar together to rail against the stupidity and indefensibility of Kate and its TV ilk, I might in a very gentle way have suggested to him that he’d do better to push such things as veganism, safe sex, and family planning than those dreadfully draconian solutions of his.
Except that, oh yeah, that particular conversation might’ve ended with him going all James Lee on my ass. You see, that’s the crux of the problem. Your Unibomber types seldom are 100% wrong about things. But they do tend to be 100% crazy.
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