The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
What Glenn Greenwald and TBogg said.
Rightwingers, meet Karma and the actual results of awful policies you’ve been championing for years.
BTW: It’s cool that Tea Bag Day or whatever they’re calling Republican Astroturf Festival ’09 falls on a Wednesday this year, because on Wednesdays I eschew my now-usual green tea at work and indulge in coffee.
Linkage, linkage, linkage….
:: So maybe the Rodent Alliance are still out there, despite the Empire’s best efforts. (So does all this photography make SDB a Bothan spy?)
:: She claims that the mystical orb she holds is the key to spiritual enlightenment, but its roiling inky blackness tells a very different story. (God, I love Comics Curmudgeon.)
:: You know, most women I know never use coy or silly euphemisms for their period. They just say, “I have my period.” Or, “I’m on my period.” Why is it, then, that we have a cornucopia of slang terms for, well, that time of the month? And are they insulting or funny? I can’t decide. But I can list them. (OK then. I worked with a woman once who referred to it as “Betty”. As in, “Leave me alone. Betty’s here.” This got really confusing when we actually hired a woman named Betty.)
:: “Ohhhhh yeahh… yeahyeahYEAH!… oh, this is good…this is really, really good, Mommy! Ohhhhh yeah baby… Hehehehehehehehhhhh.” (It’s not what it looks like.)
:: Do you know the best thing about living in the Boston area? It really is the Athens of America. (So what does that make Buffalo? The Budapest of America? East Berlin, before the reunification? Hmmmm…new blog to me, by the way.)
:: In a weird way, it was a lot more fun to be a geek back then. It was kind of like Fight Club, something you experienced but didn’t talk about. The pleasure derived, in part, from keeping the secret. Now it’s mainstream; geeks rule the world, and we don’t have to be uncomfortable about people mocking us for liking the weird stuff we like, and in fact it seems like more people like that weird stuff than ever before. Maybe our culture has outgrown the need for magazines like Starlog. And isn’t that a sad thought? Because with mainstream acceptance comes a certain loss of specialness. (I loved Starlog, back in the day, especially when the mag was more focused on more esoteric areas of SF-dom. I haven’t picked up an issue in many years, but I liked that it’s still on the magazine racks. Alas. I will note that I like geekness now more than I did back then; I like feeling more mainstream for once. I never totally grokked the whole “outsider” thing about geek culture, and I for one am glad that geek culture is a lot more mainstream now. Note to self: subscribe to Geek Monthly.)
More next week!
Here we go! Last week’s UI 62 is as yet Unidentified, with one erroneous, but astute, guess. We’re looking at a place that holds a world record in that entry. UI 61 was identified, once we reached the “hint” stage, as Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town that no longer exists because the coal mines underground beneath the town caught fire years ago and have rendered the entire town unfit for human habitation. We actually drove through Centralia years ago, my family and I; it lay on one route we would occasionally take between WNY and the Philadelphia area where my grandmother and aunt lived at the time. The town was dying even then, and it was surreal to see smoke venting from pipes stuck in the ground in an attempt to allow the gases below to escape.
UI 58 was also finally pegged as Mt. Sunday in New Zealand, which was the site of the Edoras set for The Lord of the Rings. So, I believe that makes us up-to-date. Time for the new puzzler!
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, please!
Oddities abound!
:: Well, the track listing for the score CD for Star Trek is out there, and…well, let’s just say that these track titles don’t make it easier to take this movie seriously. Do we really have a Trek score with track titles like “Hella Bar Talk”, “Run and Shoot Offense”, and “Does It Still McFly”? Sorry to geek out here, but come on now.
(The music is by Michael Giacchino, J.J. Abrams’s composer of habit. I’m of mixed mind on Giacchino: he writes decent enough music, but each time I hear him I get the sense that he’s doing more pastiche of other composers than producing his own work in his own voice. So I’m concerned that this score will consist of him aping Jerry Goldsmith.)
:: I know that Republicans have pretty much gone batshit insane over the last year, but now they’ve reached a point where Little Green Footballs is saying “Whoa Nellie, we need to stop being so crazy”. Wow.
That’s about it. It was a slow week for funny weirdness, I guess. (And one of these isn’t even funny weirdness, just me enjoying a political trainwreck.)
Ken Levine has a gripe about restaurants and the seating of customers:
I’m one of those people that hate to be shown to a bad table. In addition to the discomfort of being by the kitchen or next to the screaming baby, I always take it as a personal insult. The host just assumes I’m an idiot and doesn’t know the difference. Or I’m too unimportant to be shown a decent table. Better to leave the good one open just in case the Pope should happen in off the street.
This caused a number of bells to go off in my head, as a former restaurant manager, so here’s what I wrote in his comments thread:
Not sure if this has been mentioned in the thread (I did read through it all but may have missed it), but all restaurants have bad tables, and all restaurants are aware of their existence. The problem is that bad tables are unavoidable; if you open a restaurant, you WILL have a bad table or two somewhere in your dining room. It’s a fact of life. Like gravity.
The big factor that isn’t mentioned here, I think, is that many, if not most, restaurants divide their dining rooms into “sections”, with each server taking a particular section. This is to avoid the servers having to bounce all over the entire dining room and helps to ensure that no customers will be overlooked (if a server knows that this cluster of tables right here is his responsibility, then he presumably won’t fail to notice a new group of people sitting in his station).
Now, most restaurants I’ve worked in rotate the stations so that you don’t have the same person waiting the same section of the dining room each and every night. Thus, every night, someone else gets the section with the bad table or two. But here’s the rub: hosts are trained to avoid filling sections too quickly — i.e., you try to avoid giving a server two or three new tables in succession, which suddenly causes them to get overworked and make it possible to overlook customers.
This also implies that hosts will attempt to seat customers at the bad tables. They do this not to screw those customers, but to try to keep the serving staff evenly worked through, and to make sure that the poor server who has the crappy table(s) that day still gets a chance to earn some money. Believe me, if you’re the server whose section includes the table everybody asks to be moved from, you take home less money that day than you would otherwise, through no fault of your own.
All I’m saying is that when you get put at a crappy table, there’s a very good chance they’re not assuming that you’re too stupid to know it’s a crap table.
Restaurants have crappy tables for the same reason that hotels in the Bahamas still have rooms that overlook the parking lot instead of the ocean. And they try to get customers to use those tables for the same reason that those hotels book those rooms.
One of my favorite albums from the 1980s is Genesis’s Invisible Touch. I think a lot of people probably think of this album, if they think of it at all, as basic 80s pop, but I was strongly attracted to it because it’s really a fairly gritty and depressing album. The two “up-tempo” songs, the title track and “Anything She Does”, are peppy enough, but that’s about all the pep that you’ll find on this record. “Anything…” is about pin-up girls and their static, unattainable nature (“Fiction/That’s all you really are I know…”), while “Invisible Touch” describes an infatuation with a woman only seen from afar (“Well I don’t really know her / I only know her name. / And though she will mess up your life / you want her just the same”).
After that, the album’s themes get more serious. “Land of Confusion” is a cautionary song about life in the nuclear age, with that famous video using puppets to perform satire on the geopolitics of the time. The album’s two ballads, “Throwin’ it All Away” and “In Too Deep”, are both about failed love affairs, one from the point of view of the person ending the affair and the other from the POV of the person being left. Both are beautiful songs, but both are quite sad. The first asks “Now who will light up the darkness / and who will hold your hand? / Who will find you the answers / when you don’t understand?”, while the second has Phil Collins meditating thusly: “I gave you too many reasons, being alone, when I didnt want to. / I thought youd always be there, I almost believed you, / All this time, I still remember everything you said, oh / Theres so much you promised, how could I ever forget.”
One of my favorite rock songs of all time is “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”, which to my ears describes the harrowing night of a strung-out drug addict (“I got some money in my pocket / about ready to burn, / I don’t remember where I got it / I gotta get it to you.”). This song is sometimes heard in a shortened version, but it just doesn’t sound right to me outside its eight-minute length with the long instrumental interlude in the middle. And then there’s the two-part, eleven-minute “Domino”, all of eleven minutes long. I have no idea what “Domino” is about — maybe nuclear annihilation? It’s a very strange song, but deeply compelling, as well, with some of the album’s finest imagery in its lyrics: “Sheets of double glazing help to keep outside the night, / Only foreign city sirens can cut through, / Nylon sheets and blankets help to minimize the cold. / But they cant keep out the chilling sounds.”
Rounding it all out is a vocal-less techno track, “The Brazilian”, that was actually used in a gritty episode of Magnum, PI. For all the pop sound on the Invisible Touch album, the songs themselves are not pure pop at all. There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of this record.
Anyway, here’s one of those two ballads, “In Too Deep”.
I remember how a lot of the kids I hung out with in high school and college had specific pop or rock albums that they listened to on their Walkmen at night, with all the lights out. Invisible Touch was mine.
The other night, while IM’ing on Facebook, Belladonna asked me to wish her luck in her job interview the next day. I did, but as many longtime readers of this blog know, my luck tends to be, shall we say, questionable, so Belladonna apparently had a rough time of it in the interview. Alas…but she also asks for tales from readers of their own experiences in interviews, so here is a repost of a post I wrote back in 2003 when I got home from a highly odd interview for a job while we lived in Syracuse. I don’t normally do reposts, but this one seems appropriate.
(And reading all those old posts sometimes makes me cringe a bit. Some of those posts are awful.)
Anyway, the old post, revisited:
Clear your mind, if you will. I would like to take you on a journey.
Imagine you’re going to a job interview. First, imagine that when the guy called to set up the interview in the first place, you asked him what his company does, since it wasn’t clear from the newspaper ad. He tells you, “We’ll discuss that at the interview.”
OK. Now you’re walking into the place. It’s in a not-run-down, but not particularly nice office complex out in one of the older suburbs. You notice that the company name on the door you’ve been directed to is not the same as the company name in the advertisement you answered. This is probably the reason why, in the phone call, the boss-guy told you to go to the door with a picture of a rhinoceros on it. (Forget the rhinoceros. No explanation is ever forthcoming.)
You walk in the front door, into the reception area. Here you are greeted by a receptionist who looks barely old enough to drive or vote, and she is bundled up just shy of still wearing her parka because the office is kept quite cold, despite the sounds of air blasting from the vent overhead. Her desk appears to have nothing on it save one (1) binder, a few file folders and clipboards, a fax machine, and a phone. No computer, no photos of the dog or boyfriend or goldfish or mother or parish priest.
You look around at the reception room. There are some chairs — standard waiting-area chairs that will be found in any dentist’s office or LensCrafters. There is a table with the requisite selection of magazines, none younger than one year and none remotely interesting. There is a single potted tree that looks like it needs water, and the sole decoration is a map of the United States from National Geographic, complete with fold-lines, pinned to a dingy-looking bulletin board. The map sports a collection of pushpins inserted over every major metropolitan area in the United States, conveying the impression of a wide-ranging, national company. And yet, this office has no company literature of any kind to be found anywhere. Nor is there a logo to be seen.
The receptionist has you fill out an application. Fair enough. When you finish that, you give it back to her and ask to use the rest room. She directs you to the “girl’s room”, because “the boy’s room is broken”. (Those are exact words. You note “girls” and “boys”, not “women” and “men”.) So you obediently use the women’s room, noting that (a) the fluorescent light does not turn on all the way, but merely flickers at half-light; (b) there is no toilet paper; (c) there are no paper towels; (d) the hand-sink has no soap. You finish your business and go back to the waiting and reception area. where you sit and await your 1:00 interview, for which you were on time although it is now 1:10.
While passing the time between 1:10 and 1:25, you observe the arrival of five other people to fill out applications for open positions. Busy place to be doing all this hiring, and sure enough, the receptionist takes a lot of phone calls from people apparently answering the ad in yesterday’s paper. (You had answered an ad two weeks prior.) The receptionist answers a LOT of these calls, and only later do you realize that in the roughly 30 minutes you were in her company not once did she field a call from a customer of whatever company this is.
So, the boss-guy finally comes out and greets you for the interview, apologizing for the 25 minute wait and claiming it’s because of his heavy interview schedule that day — which is odd because (a) you have noticed no one leaving his office, and (b) he later confirms this by informing you that you are in fact his first interview of the day. Ever the professional, you don’t give the obvious rejoinder that he is off to a great start, even though it is painfully obvious that he is at least six years younger than you. (This, too, is later directly confirmed.) He takes you into his office, where you again notice the complete lack of personal items on the desk. He does have a picture of Derek Jeter on his wall, but this does not necessarily imply that he’s a Yankees fan, because said picture has one of those inspirational business-world slogans that are all the rage these days. What’s more, his desk doesn’t have a computer either, and you’re wondering just what kind of business this guy is running with no computers at all.
During the interview, you are never asked a single question about your background or work experience, other than the standard “I see you’ve worked at X, Y and Z companies.” No “What did you like best about those companies”; no “Tell me about your responsibilities”; no “Tell me about a problem you faced and solved”. Then you get to hear the boss-guy’s background, which involves him buying his favorite college bar, running it for three years and eventually selling it, and then joining this company, the name of which he still has not said. The only reason you know it is because you read it on the door coming into his office. The receptionist doesn’t even use it when answering the phone.
The interview process, as described by boss-guy, involves a preliminary interview — that’s today’s interview — followed by a second round with the “top candidates”. This seems perfectly normal, although you wonder how much of an impression he’s forming given that he is not asking any questions. But then he describes that the second round involves candidates coming back in to spend an entire day on the job with this guy, essentially performing job duties so that he can decide who he wants to hire permanently. This strikes you, a former manager who is no stranger to staffing and selection processes, as very odd. After all, when hiring a server at a restaurant you managed, you never brought a potential candidate in to wait tables for a day before hiring him/her.
So you leave after ten minutes of being talked to by this guy, and he seems perfectly pleasant and nice….but you still have little idea of what the job entails. At no point has he mentioned things like wages, hours required, duties…he does indicate that all the people now flooding the reception area are prospects for his warehouse positions, which is further confusing because this place is certainly no warehouse. It’s a run-down office suite with exactly one office apparently in use.
So you leave, sit in your car for a moment basking in the warm air issuing from the heat vents (which after 45 minutes is still warmer than the air inside the office suite), marveling over the surreal job interview you’ve just experienced. Then you shake your head and drive off, a bit flummoxed and thinking of that scene in “The Fugitive” where Tommy Lee Jones gets annoyed over someone’s use of the word “hinky”.
And you certainly don’t hold your breath waiting for the call for your “trial day”.
Yeah, that was a weird one. Despite my use of the second person here, all of these things really did happen.
UPDATE: Of course, this is the canonical weird job interview:
Hee hee!
So, I become a Beatles fan at long last, and now they’re remastering the entire Beatles catalog. So if my fandom, or the lack thereof, was the hold-up on this for millions of Beatles fans throughout the world, I apologize!!!
Well, now I officially want to see the damned new Star Trek movie. I still have my misgivings and I’ll probably bitch up a storm about it afterwards, but I genuinely want to see it in the theater now.
Over at AICN, there’s all kinds of coverage of last night’s surprise premiere in Austin, TX. What happened was this: the audience there was supposed to see a preview chunk of footage from the new movie, which would then be followed by a screening of a restored, pristine print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Well, instead, they showed ten minutes of Khan and then pretended to have a projection problem, during which Leonard Nimoy came out and asked the audience, “Wouldn’t you rather see the new movie?” Audience goes nuts, and the new flick is screened.
Now that’s the way to do it, huh?
As for the new movie, here’s an interesting and non-spoiler review that is positive, but not gushingly so. But I still want to see the movie…not so much because of Trek, but because, I think, it’s four years since Revenge of the Sith. I need a good dose of big screen space opera, and Trek seems to be the only game in town.
