Every time I've seen aWol's face lately, this is the background music:
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Over-used words
Today's candidates: "hero" and "miracle." The main stream media is annoying most of the time, but yesterday they surpassed themselves in the production of absolutely mindless gushing. I swear every sentence contained the words "hero" and "miracle," with both words being thoroughly trivialized in the process. (And, yes, I am aware I'm guilty, too, but I'll plead that my use of the word in the previous post was intended as irony.)
First, when did doing the job you're trained for qualify anyone as a hero? Are all jobs inherently heroic?
Second, why should having a piece of superbly engineered equipment perform the way it was designed make its surviving a water ditching a miracle?
I stand in awe of pilots, especially the ones who are trained to fly the really complex aircraft, such as military fighters and the large passenger jets. I respect their skills, I admire their dedication, and I am more than a little envious. I know they've elected to pursue a difficult, high-stress career, and, especially if they start off as military pilots, they've also elected a career that includes some personal risk. A small number of military pilots die in training accidents every year.
In any case, my reaction to seeing that US Airways Airbus floating in the river was, wow, that was one helluva pilot! He managed to put that plane down in the river so close to perfect it was unreal. Does that make him a hero? No. He did exactly what he was trained to do. The checking the cabin twice to make sure everyone really was out probably slides him over the line into the hero area, but the water landing? Not so much. Were the police department divers jumping out of the helicopter into the river to do rescue work heroes? No. They, too, did exactly what they're trained to do. Ditto the various other emergency personnel -- they were all just doing their jobs. Important, necessary work, yes. Heroic, no. (And I will confess to being a bit jaded about EMTs, police officers, and firefighters -- I've known way too many who chose the careers they did not out of any great desire to help people but because they were either adrenaline junkies or, in the case of cops, power tripping sadists.)
For me heroic implies doing something extraordinary, something where a person decides to put his or her own life at risk to help others when he or she doesn't have to: the passerby who goes into a burning building to get people out, the soldier who when confronted by overwhelming odds decides to keep on fighting rather than surrendering, the teenager who jumps into a well to save a younger child. Heroism is irrational. It's people doing things you don't expect them to do. And sometimes, especially in retrospect, it's downright stupid. (Update: It occurred to me after I wrote this that many times when a police officer or a fireman is hailed as a hero it's for doing something that their training very specifically told them never to do.)
As for miracles. . . well, as a commenter over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars noted yesterday, a true miracle would have been if the flight crew was dead or unconscious and the plane successfully ditched in the Hudson anyway. Something like that would definitely suggest divine intervention of some sort. As it stands, though, the event, dramatic though it was, simply stands as testimony to the combination of technology and human resources performing the way they were designed and trained to. Awesome piloting, yes. Proof of good aeronautic design and materials science, yes. Miraculous, no.
First, when did doing the job you're trained for qualify anyone as a hero? Are all jobs inherently heroic?
Second, why should having a piece of superbly engineered equipment perform the way it was designed make its surviving a water ditching a miracle?
I stand in awe of pilots, especially the ones who are trained to fly the really complex aircraft, such as military fighters and the large passenger jets. I respect their skills, I admire their dedication, and I am more than a little envious. I know they've elected to pursue a difficult, high-stress career, and, especially if they start off as military pilots, they've also elected a career that includes some personal risk. A small number of military pilots die in training accidents every year.
In any case, my reaction to seeing that US Airways Airbus floating in the river was, wow, that was one helluva pilot! He managed to put that plane down in the river so close to perfect it was unreal. Does that make him a hero? No. He did exactly what he was trained to do. The checking the cabin twice to make sure everyone really was out probably slides him over the line into the hero area, but the water landing? Not so much. Were the police department divers jumping out of the helicopter into the river to do rescue work heroes? No. They, too, did exactly what they're trained to do. Ditto the various other emergency personnel -- they were all just doing their jobs. Important, necessary work, yes. Heroic, no. (And I will confess to being a bit jaded about EMTs, police officers, and firefighters -- I've known way too many who chose the careers they did not out of any great desire to help people but because they were either adrenaline junkies or, in the case of cops, power tripping sadists.)
For me heroic implies doing something extraordinary, something where a person decides to put his or her own life at risk to help others when he or she doesn't have to: the passerby who goes into a burning building to get people out, the soldier who when confronted by overwhelming odds decides to keep on fighting rather than surrendering, the teenager who jumps into a well to save a younger child. Heroism is irrational. It's people doing things you don't expect them to do. And sometimes, especially in retrospect, it's downright stupid. (Update: It occurred to me after I wrote this that many times when a police officer or a fireman is hailed as a hero it's for doing something that their training very specifically told them never to do.)
As for miracles. . . well, as a commenter over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars noted yesterday, a true miracle would have been if the flight crew was dead or unconscious and the plane successfully ditched in the Hudson anyway. Something like that would definitely suggest divine intervention of some sort. As it stands, though, the event, dramatic though it was, simply stands as testimony to the combination of technology and human resources performing the way they were designed and trained to. Awesome piloting, yes. Proof of good aeronautic design and materials science, yes. Miraculous, no.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Miracle on the Hudson
Passengers were praising the pilot instead of Jebus. Didn't hear a single "God was looking out for us." Unreal.
Usually, no matter what the disaster, the survivors babble about God saving them. The question I always have, of course, is why didn't God simply not let the disaster happen in the first place?
Usually, no matter what the disaster, the survivors babble about God saving them. The question I always have, of course, is why didn't God simply not let the disaster happen in the first place?
Thursday, January 15, 2009
All about meme
I got tagged.
The Rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you. Done
2. Post the rules on your blog. Done
3. Write six random things about yourself. See below.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. Not going to happen -- it would be a violation of professional ethics. These memes are too infectious, and I work for a Large Nameless Agency dedicated to preventing contagion. (Besides, just about everyone I think would be likely to do it has already been hit at least once this week. I'm like the last kid in class to catch the flu, the poor sap who is home sick the day after the big exam.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. See above.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. Done
Six random things about me:
1. I am a former Baraga County Fair Homemaker of the Year and have a plaque to prove it.
2. I'm terrified of water and never learned to swim, thanks to my asshole cousin Jim tossing me out of a boat at Camp Nesbit when I was in about 5th grade. He was a believer in the "sink or swim" method. I sank.
3. My first (and still favorite) car was a 1973 Scamp. I paid $300 for it in grad school, then put over 100,000 miles on it before a part gave out that would have cost more to replace than the car was worth. I still miss it.
4. I used to love caving. Gave it up about the same time I stopped being able to crawl through a chimney block. I still like visiting caves as a tourist, but walking through a developed cave on a lighted path doesn't come close to being as much fun as crawling through spaces that only get a handful of visitors in a year.
5. I like to garden, but am not particularly good at it. The only vegetables I can be sure of growing with any success are green beans and potatoes.
6. Since achieving adulthood (chronologically if not necessarily mentally), I've had at least two dozen different jobs, everything from power sewing machine operator to newspaper reporter. The only employer I've regretted leaving was the National Park Service.
The Rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you. Done
2. Post the rules on your blog. Done
3. Write six random things about yourself. See below.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. Not going to happen -- it would be a violation of professional ethics. These memes are too infectious, and I work for a Large Nameless Agency dedicated to preventing contagion. (Besides, just about everyone I think would be likely to do it has already been hit at least once this week. I'm like the last kid in class to catch the flu, the poor sap who is home sick the day after the big exam.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. See above.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. Done
Six random things about me:
1. I am a former Baraga County Fair Homemaker of the Year and have a plaque to prove it.
2. I'm terrified of water and never learned to swim, thanks to my asshole cousin Jim tossing me out of a boat at Camp Nesbit when I was in about 5th grade. He was a believer in the "sink or swim" method. I sank.
3. My first (and still favorite) car was a 1973 Scamp. I paid $300 for it in grad school, then put over 100,000 miles on it before a part gave out that would have cost more to replace than the car was worth. I still miss it.
4. I used to love caving. Gave it up about the same time I stopped being able to crawl through a chimney block. I still like visiting caves as a tourist, but walking through a developed cave on a lighted path doesn't come close to being as much fun as crawling through spaces that only get a handful of visitors in a year.
5. I like to garden, but am not particularly good at it. The only vegetables I can be sure of growing with any success are green beans and potatoes.
6. Since achieving adulthood (chronologically if not necessarily mentally), I've had at least two dozen different jobs, everything from power sewing machine operator to newspaper reporter. The only employer I've regretted leaving was the National Park Service.
Feeding the C-SPAN addiction
I discovered this morning Large Nameless Agency's intranet includes links to half a dozen television news channels, including C-SPAN. I can listen to the conspiracy theorists and other lunatics who call in to 'Washington Journal' while I'm working -- I'll just have to remember to self-censor and not start yelling at the monitor the way I scream at the tv at home. Don't want to frighten my fellow cubicle rats.
I am a happy camper.
I am a happy camper.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Sad day at work
Our illegal microwave is gone.
It vanished yesterday, thanks to the idiocy of people unwilling to clean out the illegal mini-fridge.
An explanation: Our 5-story building has two break rooms, one on the third floor and one on the fifth. Each break room has one microwave, which kind of leads to traffic jams at lunch time when there are several hundred people working in this building. So naturally microwaves occasionally appear in places they're not supposed to be, and everyone politely pretends they don't see them while at the same time quietly taking advantage. Mini-fridges also pop up here and there, and the same thing happens.
Well, we'd had an unauthorized microwave in an alcove in a hallway on the floor where I work for almost as long as I've worked here. A few months ago a mini-fridge appeared in that same alcove. It started getting used, of course (saves a trip up the stairs). Then last week, while it was packed full of food, it was accidentally unplugged. It is absolutely amazing how quickly the contents of a mini-fridge can rot when there's no power.
On Monday someone opened the fridge. The stench was unbelievable. So a request went out for people to remove their rotting food -- but no one stepped up to admit that any of the decayed items were theirs. Similarly, no one would admit he or she was the actual owner of the refrigerator. The apparent choices were (a) live with the stench indefinitely, or (b) ask Maintenance to deal with it.
And how did Maintenance deal with it? By hauling it to a dumpster. And, as long as they were removing it, the building manager had them take out the unauthorized microwave, too. So now it's back to stair-climbing and queueing up at lunch time.
I won't miss the fridge -- I didn't keep anything in it -- but, as a basically lazy person, I am going to miss that microwave.
It vanished yesterday, thanks to the idiocy of people unwilling to clean out the illegal mini-fridge.
An explanation: Our 5-story building has two break rooms, one on the third floor and one on the fifth. Each break room has one microwave, which kind of leads to traffic jams at lunch time when there are several hundred people working in this building. So naturally microwaves occasionally appear in places they're not supposed to be, and everyone politely pretends they don't see them while at the same time quietly taking advantage. Mini-fridges also pop up here and there, and the same thing happens.
Well, we'd had an unauthorized microwave in an alcove in a hallway on the floor where I work for almost as long as I've worked here. A few months ago a mini-fridge appeared in that same alcove. It started getting used, of course (saves a trip up the stairs). Then last week, while it was packed full of food, it was accidentally unplugged. It is absolutely amazing how quickly the contents of a mini-fridge can rot when there's no power.
On Monday someone opened the fridge. The stench was unbelievable. So a request went out for people to remove their rotting food -- but no one stepped up to admit that any of the decayed items were theirs. Similarly, no one would admit he or she was the actual owner of the refrigerator. The apparent choices were (a) live with the stench indefinitely, or (b) ask Maintenance to deal with it.
And how did Maintenance deal with it? By hauling it to a dumpster. And, as long as they were removing it, the building manager had them take out the unauthorized microwave, too. So now it's back to stair-climbing and queueing up at lunch time.
I won't miss the fridge -- I didn't keep anything in it -- but, as a basically lazy person, I am going to miss that microwave.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Unbelievable
I didn't think much about the anti-vaccine movement before coming to work at Large Nameless Agency. I just took it for granted that my kids would get their shots on schedule. My childhood memories of various illnesses were not good, and I had no intention of reliving some of my mother's nightmares if I could avoid it.
My sister, the one who's having one of those over-the-hill birthdays today, almost didn't make it to her first one: she had measles when she was 11 months old and, based on what my mother's said, came really close to dying. So did my brother -- he wound up in the hospital in an oxygen tent when he contracted pneumonia as a secondary infection. I probably had the lightest case --there are no family stories about anyone being particularly worried that I was about to take a dirt nap, but I do recall being in bed for at least a week, confined to a darkened room, feverish, and the doctor making repeated house calls.
I also remember several childhood friends being really, truly, horribly ill with whooping cough for what seemed like forever. My mother tells stories about diphtheria epidemics during the Depression, and I've seen the headstones in the hometown cemetery providing poignant testimony to the families that went from having 7 or 8 kids to having 1 or 2 in a matter of a few days.
In short, I didn't hesitate when I had kids. They got their shots. No questions, no quibbling, no arguing with anyone. And once they had them all, I didn't think about immunizations again until I landed here in Atlanta and was amazed to see protestors regularly picketing the Centers for Disease Control and accusing the federal government, state health departments, pharmaceutical companies, and countless others of a vast cover-up regarding vaccines. I was astounded. Somehow I had managed to miss the Jenny McCarthy dog and pony show regarding what causes autism. (To be honest, I didn't even know she had kids.) According to Orac, Jenny's become the public face of the anti-vaccine movement.
In the past year-and-a-half I've learned there are lunatics out there who dismiss illnesses such as measles as merely "childhood diseases," and who are sufficiently brain dead to do things like deliberately expose their kids to mumps or chickenpox. I could understand the chickenpox parties back before there was a vaccine, but now? Chickenpox kills people. So does mumps. So does measles. So does rubella, or German measles, although it's more likely to just stick a person with a lifetime problem with arthritis. Nonetheless, the anti-vaccine movement is rolling merrily along, promoting pseudoscience while trying to blame vaccination for conditions such as autism that more and more research is indicating are primarily genetic in causation.
In an attempt to fight back against the anti-science crowd, Dr. Paul Offit has written a book defending vaccines. Normally when an author comes out with a book that discusses a hot topic his or her publisher will send the author on a multi-city book tour, arrange for appearances on Oprah or Ellen, readings and signings at major bookstores, and generally get the author out in front of the public. Not in this case. According to the New York Times:
But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats.
Unbelievable.
Note: The photo is of a child suffering from chickenpox. Why would any parent put a kid through that if they could avoid it? (The lesions can also occur on the inside of the mouth and the eyelids.)
Happy birthday, Nerf
It's my younger sister's birthday today. She's the short blonde in a dress at the end of the front row. I'll be nice and not actually state her age, but I think it's fairly obvious the photo was taken long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. She started calling herself Nerf sometime in junior high. No clue why, but at the same time her two best friends decided they wanted to be known as Piddle and Wump. Not quite in the same class as Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, but it worked for them. So, happy birthday, Nerf, and tell the llamas I wish them well, too.
Monday, January 12, 2009
What planet are these people from?
My brief post yesterday about lame advice got the S.O. going yesterday on one of his favorite rants: dumb advice given by people who don't have a clue. And magazines don't have an exclusive on it -- you see it all the time on television, the various morning shows having so-called experts on to give viewers advice on how to save money.
What sets the S.O. off is the fact is the advice always seems to be tailored for one extremely narrow demographic: upper middle class yuppies working at white collar jobs, probably in Manhattan. Example: "If you want to save, try brown bagging it one day a week instead of buying lunch every day."
You know, even when I was in an office environment that had a reputation for loving to lunch out, there wasn't a person in that office who went out to eat five days a week. And what about the zillions of people working at jobs where they have no choice, everyone from nurse aides to factory workers, where leaving the job site for lunch never has been and never will be an option? What can they do to save? Use fewer pickles in their sandwiches? Buy a cheaper brand of peanut butter?
What sets the S.O. off is the fact is the advice always seems to be tailored for one extremely narrow demographic: upper middle class yuppies working at white collar jobs, probably in Manhattan. Example: "If you want to save, try brown bagging it one day a week instead of buying lunch every day."
You know, even when I was in an office environment that had a reputation for loving to lunch out, there wasn't a person in that office who went out to eat five days a week. And what about the zillions of people working at jobs where they have no choice, everyone from nurse aides to factory workers, where leaving the job site for lunch never has been and never will be an option? What can they do to save? Use fewer pickles in their sandwiches? Buy a cheaper brand of peanut butter?
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The stupid, it burns*
Along with truly dumb diet tips, a staple of every women's magazine is money-saving suggestions. Woman's Day, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, you name it, they all talk up ways to find money you didn't know you had. Usually they're pretty innocuous and/or common sense tips -- step into a Dollar Store occasionally, use coupons, go to a lower tier cable service, comparison shop before making big ticket purchases -- but this one from the current issue of Woman's Day kind of floored me:
(*Orac probably has this phrase trademarked, but there are times when it's the only thing that fits.)
" Have your family swap one glass of juice per day for water. If everyone in a family of four makes the switch, you save more than $300 a year."WTF? And if we all eat one less meal, we'll save even more. The last time I checked, juice wasn't considered fat in a family budget. It's one of those things you push at kids, not take away from them.
(*Orac probably has this phrase trademarked, but there are times when it's the only thing that fits.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)