Monthly Archives: January 2015

An Inspirational Leader

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Friday at my group’s morning status meeting we spent a lot more time talking about the odds and ends of life than about actual work. One of the topics: what sports my boss’s newborn son would participate in. The Official Boss of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas believes her son’s reckless and pain-oblivious behavior makes him a good candidate for hockey. That gladdened my heart.

I don’t think I brought up martial arts, but I did have something to contribute on the subject.

Before I get to the specific advice I dispensed (at no charge), I’d like to point out that martial arts are an excellent choice for a kid. Way better than gymnastics, especially for girls. Why get them started on something they will have to abandon when they weigh more than 100 pounds? Better to get them into a good dojo and learn confidence and skills they can take to the grave. I think black belts would look fantastic on grandmas and grandpas alike.

But the phrase ‘good dojo’ brings me to my specific advice. On my Wednesday morning route I pass a fitness/martial art studio. Jiu Jitsu is mentioned in one of their signs. In the gray light of early dawn the lights of the studio spill out into the street. This week as I passed I looked in and saw a collection of young students doing exercises on the floor, all clad in their white robe-thingies. Seated next to the mat on a folding chair was the instructor. He was slouched down, his arms folded across his nearly-horizontal chest.

Wow. My first thought was how disrespectful this was to his students, then I thought about how disrespectful it was to his dojo, and to his discipline. Martial arts have a strong spiritual element; training is focussed on the mind as much as it is on the body. At least when it’s done right. Thinking about it now, I think an instructor has two options: Stand over the students, attentive and engaged, and correct their form, or do the exercises with them. The dude may as well have been smoking crack in front of his impressionable charges.

So my concrete advice to my boss was simply, “don’t let a dude like that teach your kid.” I think that message can be applied in a much wider context.

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Ripoffs are Relative

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Most days on my way to work I pass a Shell station that advertises a price per gallon almost a full dollar over the going rate. These days, that’s almost a 50% markup. When I pass in the early-rush-hour morning, there is almost never anyone filling up there.

Across the street is a Chevron station which charges twenty cents less per gallon. That’s still a huge markup over the average price in the area, but I do see people filling up there. The price looks pretty good when compared to the Shell station.

Which makes me wonder…

What if the Shell station was only keeping a token amount of gas in its reservoirs for the occasional blind idiot customer, and the owners of the two stations split the profit on the sighted idiots who purchase the slightly-less-outrageously-priced fuel at the Chevron?

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The Last Thing You Do

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A few years ago, a friend of mine was at a funeral. There’s a part of the ritual in which you sit in climate-controlled comfort and gaze upon the corpse, then there’s a procession from that place to the plot where those remains will be interred. Well, slippery roads, a steep hill, an idiot in an SUV, etc., led to the hearse getting t-boned in dramatic fashion. Before the procession could proceed, a new corpse-buggy had to be called for.

It arrived, and that’s when the powers that be discovered that the coffin itself had also been damaged. The seals had been broken. The body had to be taken back to the mortuary to be reboxed. Why? Because the mortal remains of a fine person had been converted to toxic waste, so people could look at the dead person before those remains went into the ground. Really.

What an insult to the soil. It angers me to think that my body may not in its own turn nourish the planet that sustained it. I want to be fertilizer. I should be fertilizer. Run me through a wood chipper, dump me out over the roots of an apple tree, and I promise you I will do my best to make those apples taste better than any others.

Cremation is less of an insult to our planet, I suppose, but it’s hardly carbon-neutral.

I was mighty happy the other day when after a high-fiber meal I had more time for Facebook than usual and I came across a link to this: What to do When You’re Dead: Science Edition. Here’s your chance to make the last thing you do something constructive. Apparently liquid nitrogen is better than a wood chipper. While less dramatic, I’m good with that choice. Note that launching yourself into space is not terribly environmentally sensitive, either, what with the rocket exhaust injected directly into the ozone layer. But it would be cool to be a meteor. With the proper preparation, your friends could watch you streak across the sky and vanish into nothingness. That would be a hell of a way to leave the building.

But whether you choose any of those alternatives or come up with one of your own, think about it: What do you want that last thing you do to say about you?

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Grotesquely Obese Men and Urinals

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You know, I’m going to leave it right there. I’ve seen things.

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Rough Draft of a Letter to the Editor of the Local Paper

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Recently Park Avenue in Santa Clara had some work done. The sequence went like this, with roughly two weeks between each step:

1) Scrape off most (but not all) of the markings on the road. Result: a less-safe road.
2) Repaint most (but not all) of the markings scraped off in step 1, right in the grooves left by the scraping machine. Result: step 1 is rendered moot, but the road is still not as safe as it had been before.
3) Scrape off the entire road surface and put down new asphalt. Result: steps 1 and 2 are rendered entirely moot. The road is now a wee bit better than it was before.

What did steps 1 and 2 accomplish? Nothing. Nothing at all, aside from putting my money into the pockets of corrupt contractors and the people who are supposed to be preventing this sort of shenanigans. How much, I wonder, was the government billed for the completely unnecessary work?

At this writing, not all the markings have been restored, so the road is still not as safe as it was. And honestly, there are many less visible roads that could have benefitted from the upgrade much more than that stretch of Park.

Now let’s shift our focus to Miller Ave. in Cupertino. After the ritual pointless scraping of the bike lanes, a new surface was laid down, and it is simply awful. Already there are troughs in the road, and water collects in traffic lanes on days with no rain, presumably from the gutters. As I ride up the street I can see cracks forming in the asphalt already. This work isn’t an investment, it’s an ongoing liability.

Who checked this work? Who said, “Good job, guys! See you on the next project!”

Stepping back, who authorized this work in the first place? To my untrained eye, Miller and Park did not need resurfacing, and as a bicyclist I’m particularly bitchy about road conditions. I could suggest several more-deseriving stretches of road. Or, better yet, let’s put the money into the crumbling school that the unnecessarily-resurfaced road passes.

But the federal money geyser says to mortgage the future to invest in infrastructure now, and somehow spending money resurfacing already-serviceable roads, at maximum inefficiency, is investing in infrastructure. The theory is that such work will pay dividends long into the future, yielding returns greater than the debt incurred. I have no problem with the theory, but that is not what is happening in my town.

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Dammit, Lyle!

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Were you to record the grunts and mutterings I emit as I pedal to work, you would hear me talking to Lyle. You might also hear, “Aw, come on, Victor!” and “Stay with me Johnson, stay with me.”

You might think, listening to me, that I rode with a posse of rather annoying people, but you would be wrong. Lyle is a traffic light. He wears his name on a large electrified sign hanging from his crossbar, the ultimate bling. Most days, Lyle waves me on with a cheery green, which only compounds the feeling of betrayal on those mornings that Lyle chooses to stop my progress to let some chump in a car turn safely onto the main road.

Sooner or later you learn who your friends really are.

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