Strange Conversations

I'm just back in the office after an offsite meeting, the door is closed, and somebody knocks.



There is New Executive Recently Promoted, doing a tour of the building. NERP asks for a brief tour, then says "how do you know when all this stuff is ready for you to take?"



Well, here's a pretty how-de-do.



So I explain briefly about Records Managers and how they feed things to archivists, and see to it that records make it through their life cycle, and end up in the archives when they're ready.



Mind you, I've been asking about getting an RM here for 5 years, so it's a little shocking to have such a conversation out of the blue. I don't know if this will lead to anything, but I'm glad somebody took an interest for five minutes.

Science!

Toddler Study Proves Humans Outsmart Apes



"In other Sciency-type stuff, Apes clearly still lead by a wide margin of intelligence over reporters and headline writers."

Don't you Hate When that Happens?

Study: Wrong fish used to save species



You're all set with a 5/8" fish, and it turns out you needed the 1/2".

Well, Duh.

You Are a Grilled Cheese Sandwich

You are a traditional person with very simple tastes. In your opinion, the best things in life are free, easy, and fun. You totally go with the flow. And you enjoy every minute of it! Your best friend: The Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Your mortal enemy: The Ham Sandwich

What Kind of Sandwich Are You?

Any idiot would know about my issues with Ham Sammiches. From Jordana, via Diane. Mind you, I don't actually like cheese at all, grilled or otherwise, but I guess that's besides the point.

Left Coast Blogging

Out to the wilds of Californy to visit the in-laws, and thus I have some time to blog. Flight was not bad as these things go - we had a power outlet in one of our two rows, and I was able to compute some while flying. I'm the web guy for two archivists groups, and with the annual meeting happening next week, there's a lot to update. Plus the kiddies could watch movies and leave us be.



Things seem tough on the airlines - they're now charging for ALL food on board. Though they haven't figured out how to charge us for what we bring on our own. That's coming, I imagine. No room in the seats, long waits to get in to the waiting areas, long waits to take off, no food, lousy movies. There's not a lot to recommend flying any more, other than if you got to get from one place to another, it's a way to do it.



Either way, both we and our luggage made it. I'm here until next Tuesday, when I'm off to the aforementioned conference in Chicago. Mrs. and family stay until Sunday of Labor Day.

The weekend

is sort of a long, drawn-out blur. We had lunch on Shabbos with some friends, which started somewhere around noon and ended around 6PM. I don't think we were eating the entire time, it just felt like it. Our hostess is a good cook, which explains partly the length of the meal.



Not content with a full prandial day, I decided like a moron to stay up half the night editing our latest podcast. The sound quality has improved dramatically, but I still had to splice together a show out of 7-8 takes, and that took until 2AM. As it turned out I had no other time to edit anyway, so I'm glad I got it done so the rest of the group can review it. Still, there wasn't as much sleep as there ought to have been. Last week was among the longest, and most difficult in the 6 and 1/2 years I've been here - just a lot of grief from a lot of people, and a lot of work. I should've used my opportunities to sleep better, but that's life.



Sunday was jam-packed - I joined Mrs. at the picnic for her local La Leche League. I was surprised too - it isn't a group for leering at women! Mrs. has been crazed in preparing for this, which is why a) she was painting a banner at 4PM on Friday instead of getting dinner ready, and b) she stayed up 'til 2AM herself on Saturday night. The picnic was nice, but I was ready to go home before she was. I did take the time to try and continue working with oldest on learning to ride a two-wheeler (as we had a lot more open space at the park) but I'm afraid it didn't go all that well. She gets going, and then just stops pedaling. I'll take advice on strategies if anyone has them.



Home for a brief rest, then across the street to start preparing the surprise barbecue for the other neighbor in the house next door. Poor guy turned 50 yesterday, so we all assembled and I got grill duty. It came off without a hitch, I burned very little of the food, and Mrs. Skinny brought out a tray of blondies (which I made, incidentally - it was one of four trays made this past weekend) on which she wrote "Happy Not 50^th Birthday Dan." For which I am grateful - mostly the not 50 part.



Home, kids to bed, watched Water, which turned out to be as funny as I remembered it, and collapsed into bed. All in all, a good if not exactly restful weekend.

Karl Rove Behind Another Plot!!!

You have to know that's actually coming:




Karl Rove to resign at end of August



One can only assume he wants to depress the nutters who will now have to change the tinfoil in their propeller beanies.



Unless he's secretly not leaving, and will be conducting his super-secret plot to destroy the world (women and minorities suffer most^®) in an even more super-secret way...

Best Birthday Card. Ever

To protect the Guilty

I will not go into details here. But I hate my job, or at least the people who are making it unnecessarily difficult. The wrong people are making decisions, and other wrong people are getting on my boss' case about me. Despite the fact that the time pressure is their fault entirely, not mine.



I'm not quitting, but it does make me wonder why I don't sit on my tuchus and do a lousy job the way some other people do around here. Failure to act gets no one fired, so why should I bother trying to accomplish anything?



I don't mean to get whiny, but it's been an unpleasant few days at work lately. I know, boo-frickin'-hoo, but this is the bulk of my waking hours, and I'd like to think I'm not a completely useless lump of employee.

Bias? What Bias?

So National Review has been making note today of an incident in the House last night where a vote was gaveled, meaning, I take it, that it is final. The Dem in charge thought it was a tie, when in fact it was passed. They then held the vote open so that enough people could switch their votes to the Nay side.




Republicans Angry Over House Vote



So the problem is it took me almost ten minutes to find a story about it in the mainstream media. Including the site I finally dug it up on, Fox News. Elsewhere, I get the standard fodder of "Administration screws up" "Gonzales must go" and "Bush Lied, People Died." But a mention of a flagrant violation of the rules by Democrats? Not a peep.



Leaving aside the particular importance of this vote, which appears to have been procedural rather than substantive, I can find no clearer demonstration of the crap that politicians play. Did the guy screw up and gavel too soon? Sure. Had he said "my bad - I screwed up, and I won't do it again" - no big deal. But to actively change the vote after? Criminal in my estimation, and worthier of censure than anything I've seen the libs claim about the administration.



Why? Because, for good or ill, there are supposed to be rules. They can be gamed, and bent, but they should not be broken in such a cavalier and clearly partisan fashion. Your elected government and mine is a cesspool of scheming dishonesty, and I'm embarrassed to be represented by such filth.



The press is aiding and abetting this kind of behavior, and they wonder why they are ranked so low on the trustworthy scale. Yes, this is a small issue. But you learn a lot more about people by how they handle the little things than how they manage the larger issues.

How's this

for a personal recommendation?



Sean Penn praised by Venezuela's Chavez



One can only assume that Ahmedinajad and Osama himself are also writing letters on Mr. Penn's behalf to all the colleges he's applying to.



Remember, folks - who you idolize and associate with says a lot about who you are.

IT'S...JUST...NOT...FAIR!!!

The great grand-daddy of us all (many of us, anyway), El Possumo, Dr. Possum hisself, is hangin' it up.



Personally, I fail to see why something as meaningless as a job is more important than the way I waste my day when I should be working.



The fact is, Terry blogs in part so I don't have to. Looking around here, you can see I've fallen off the wagon a bit myself over the last few months. But I could always count on Possumblog to check three or four times a day to see something weird, interesting, intelligent, or ever so slightly off color. And that was only in the quotes he put up every week.



I'm only blogging here because of him and Jim Smith - the two of them noodged enough that I started this here steaming pile of crappy electrons. Though truth be told we can lay some blame at Jordana's feet - I only found Boss Possum after seeing a link to her blog from National Review's Corner blog. It seems odd that I should continue when he stops - seems like the chain, broken at the top, should fall apart.



But that, in essence, is the point of blogging - once started, no matter who egged you on, you're on your own. This isn't meant to be a moralistic tale of an aging, balding Jew, raised by his PossumPappy to finally blog on his own two feet. The heading for this post is, in fact, completely mistaken. It is fair. It's entirely fair that the real Terry - not the entertaining raconteur of my bloglife - should continue to grow as a person and live the life he needs to lead for himself and his family.



That it will impact part of my life is noticeable, but in essence irrelevant. Blogging is a pastime for most of us, not a fungible career. And when advancement calls, pastimes have to take second place. I will miss the daily conversations of Possumblog, which is where the real fun was for me. It was a chance to talk to folks I find entertaining, a place to trade one-liners and gently snide insults with a group of people I would never have met otherwise.



Look, nobody died here. Terry remains around, and emails are always available. Heck, I might even start blogging regularly again, in the hopes that I won't lose touch with the crowd I "met" over at PB. It's nice to call you folks that I've never even met in person friends, leaving aside the oddities of a New York Suburban Hebrew palling around with a Southern Rednecked Christian Goober (hmmm - I sense a sitcom plot in there somewhere...)



Life will continue, and there's no "forever" here in the blogosphere. There's no reason Terry won't someday return, even on a semi-regular basis. But in the meantime, the internet has just become a less interesting place to hang out, and that makes me sad.



Shalom, Possumblog.

The Truth

will set you free:



A Senate Immigration Update



Or just prove that you're the big babies we all knew you were.

Well that's peculiar

The appearance of the word "crap" is apparently no longer damaging to young ears.



As a Noble Captain once said, "Damme, that's too bad."

Speaking of Medical Issues

Is the detail in this story really necessary?




Bush to have colonoscopy at Camp David



While I appreciate knowing that the President is being cared for, and that he's taken care of the constitutional needs of the nation, how much value is there in knowing that "The 2002 procedure began at 7:09 a.m and ended at 7:29 a.m. Bush woke up two minutes later but did not resume his presidential office until 9:24 a.m., after Tubb conducted an overall examination."



It's wonderful that the procedure only took twenty minutes, but let's face it - that's one event I for one would rather not have covered in quite such minute detail.

I'm sorry, did you say something?

Terry notes in an email that there have been no updates to you, my great unwashed masses, about my ears. The fixed one is in fact working perfectly fine, though I think the change is less noticeable than it was in the beginning. I notice things are much clearer in noisy situations than they were, although there are still times when conversations are a little hard to make out. I'm probably going to get the other one done at some point, which should help.



Updates on other body parts as events warrant.

Now, I like

Harry Potter as much as the next Muggle. I just finished rereading the first six books in anticipation of the last book in the series (though I have to wait until probably early next week for our British edition to show up). But this is a bit much:



U.S. college students seek the magic of Quidditch



I guess there are stupider ways for college students to entertain themselves, but is this really why these folks are spending upwards of $30 grand a year? I like geeks well enough, but can't they just go out and play an actual sport?



I can only imagine it's a short time before the "Co-ed, Naked Quidditch" t-shirts and sweats start appearing on campus.

Hee hee hee

I love people with a sense of humor:



AIRPORT ATTACKERS TO BE CHARGED UNDER ANTI-SMOKING LAWS



It all comes full circle (H/t to the Corner)

Homina Homina

Check this out:



Drury, Gomez agree to deals with Rangers



This is unbelievably big - they were two of the top three free agents available, and the Rangers got them both. But it's a LOT of freakin' money, and long freakin' contracts. I think I'm happy about it, but the Rangers have gone this route in the past with terrible results (Eric Lindros / Theo Fleury / Valery Kamenski etc., etc.) They have to sign Lundqvist, and I really want them to sign Shanahan and Avery, so I have some concerns that they've picked up two guys and ignored the rest.



What's also up in the air is Jagr's desire to play with either Drury or Gomez. He played well with Nylander (who I am sure is now gone), and he can be tremendously temperamental. If the pouty, whiny Jagr shows up instead of the committed player of the last two years, it's two steps forward, one step back.



I'm pleased with the signings, but concerned. Thus a word to the lunatics - let's not award ourselves the Stanley Cup just yet. Buffalo's performance in this most recent season should serve as a warning - unbelievable regular season, followed by a disappointing post-season. When Drury and Gomez help the Rangers win the whole shooting match, I will happily apologize for being an unbeliever at the start of this.

Your Government InAction

Friends are scheduled to leave for an international trip this week. Friends sent in passport applications (renewals, I think) more than 14 weeks ago.



Friends do not, as of this moment, actually have passports in hand.



10 Hours in line on Friday in a building where no food is allowed, the guards are well beyond rude, and they still have nothing to show for it. With any luck, after a return trip to the office today, they will get what they need.



This is a basic document here, folks. I can't imagine any way this entire transaction should take more than an hour and a half. You should walk in the door with two passport photos, a birth certificate, proof of current residence within the US, and walk out the door with a passport. You could build a house in 14 weeks if you needed to - you can't print up a document in less time?



I'm telling you - they should have just gone to Tijuana and entered illegally - they'd have been welcomed with open arms by our federal government. Actual citizens? %$#@ you, get in line and wait like the losers you are.