All material and characters ©2006-2009 by Scott Alton-Thomas Burns all rights reserved
12/24/09
I have holly on part one and ivy on part three. Bonus points?
Merry Xmas everyone; I am having a great time. Last night there was a panel discussion on the origins of Santa… it was great. I learned about my new favorite character: In many Protestant European countries, they banned the Saint Nicholas character as pagan in inspiration, and tried to replace him with the Christ Child, but there were two problems; part of the function of St. Nick had been to scare children into being good, and the baby Jesus couldn’t POSSIBLY carry that HUGE BAG. So they compromised, and gave the baby Jesus an assistant; the presents came from the baby, but his helper carrying the bag was sort of sinister looking and handled the threat part. The original “good cop bad cop”. So, the character (I don’t know yet from which country) is “Aschenklaas”, “Ashen Claus”. He was like a skinny Santa with big eyebrows and smudged all over with ashes. He’ll be part of my décor next year.
☺
12/15/09
That line, “making a list, checking it twice”, it always sounded so OCD… did that occur to you? I admit, I pay attention when people are singing. It’s so easy to get a really catchy tune and people stop listening to the lyrics until they notice they’re singing along to something really awful. Ask Deborah Kay about the Pogues. (Deb, how’d the Isis Wings work out? Call me.)
12/04/09
Okay, so maybe I’m going a little overboard with this energy thing… but MAN are we just throwing energy away. Maybe we should invent something, some system where people all get together and work for the common good… we could call it… society. Wow, what a concept. Where are my notebooks? There’ll need to be rules…
11/26/09
Happy Thanksgiving! If you go to NPR.com you can see my recipe for Albuquerque Turkey… but you’ll have to go there next year. Most people who tell you where to find something don’t also tell you when. It’s all part of what sets the service at Official Rocket Science apart from the usual reality star fare.
11/25/09
Okay, I’m assuming anyone even remembers shiatsu massage. The fads we go through; every business in the country was gung-ho on “Total Quality Management”, the community colleges were giving degrees in it, and then two years later no one even mentions it, the new flavor of the month is “continuous flow” which disappears as fast as you can say “six-sigma black belt”. I have two economic theories that I think need mentioning:
The first is serious. “Unified Purse Theory”. So many companies have divided the budget up into pockets, and one of those pockets is almost always the “Daddy Warbucks” pocket; the one where all the big costs get hidden. Sometimes this is the budget for an actual division, but smart managers will not note that and ax the division; I mean, you can kill the scapegoat if you want to, but that just sets the machine looking for a new one and it might be you. I’m just saying.
The second is more of a smartass kind of theory; I have three current divisions of management style; management by science (good), management by math (not bad if you do it right, i.e. if it’s real math) and management by English (chancy). In management by English you assess things on the basis of the story they make. A team leader is “a good guy, a work horse, our kind of fella” no matter what the assessment of his job or the numbers about his output might say.
Well, to those three I have to add “Management by physical education”. Phys Ed is a class where you come in every day, flounder around a bit, and the next time you come to class you’re playing a different game. The rules change every session and the whole object seems to be that you look like you’re moving. Sometimes the rules change to a game you know and you get to shine; other times, not so much.
11/13/09
One of my series of “whiteboard” moments… it all started when I didn’t care about public opinion much at Delphi. If they thought I was a doof, so be it… so I put “Dept. of Redundancy Dept.” on the board, and then a cartoon of Joe Camel in a sombrero selling pot with the caption “…forced to find work in a related field.” And now, here we are… My favorite part: “Teecher is a gurl”. I love when people who aren’t really good at it try to come up with crushing insults.
11/11/09
The date today is 11 11. Deborah Kay says that people think of this as a disaster kind of date, way moreso than Friday the 13th…(I suggested that it was because it would be said as “Wun! Wun! Wun! Wun!” and maybe you could even add “Wun for your wives!”) and she herself thinks that 11/11/11 (2011) is going to be way worse than 12/21/2012 (or even 12/21/2112, which Savannah says is what the Mayans meant to say). Well, I don’t like dates having badness attached to them; I mean, they’re just numbers, and BLOODY arbitrary, too, the whole world is not in the agreement we seem to think. So Deb came up with this idea instead… from now on, 11/11 is the day that you make resolutions. New Year’s Day, many of us are in no condition to enter into contracts, and so often our resolutions are clearly guilty attempts to improve what we think sounds like a plan. 11/11 is way better than 1/1… for one thing, it’s got twice as many 1s.
Happy Resolution Day, y’all. Oh, and hey… it just occurred to me that “One For Your Wives” is a HELL of a name for an album…
☺
11/10/9
“Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… Liftoff!” Hey, when did they stop saying “Blastoff” and change over to “Liftoff”? And WHY? Did they feel Blastoff was too violent? Was there a Russian scientist working at NASA named Blastov and every time they said it, he said, “What? What?” Was it really all about the relativity of intent, like from the viewpoint of the earth we’re blasting away from it but it’s not really leaving the earth that’s the point, it’s lifting ourselves toward our destination? (Advertising makes you think about things like that.) Oh, and about the countdown; today is 11/10/9. I felt it was a good thing to continue the process. More tomorrow…
11/08/09
God, is it even Ohio Power anymore? Am I that old? <checks self out in mirror> Oh, yeah… It’s probably “Enercorp” or something now. Oh well… I’m happy here in my little world, listening to my internal re-runs of the Flintstones and Gilligan’s Island.
My horoscope today said “Chaos this fertile is hard to come by.” I really like that.
10/22/09
Wow, it’s been a month. Sorry… on the other hand you should SEE the trees they’re having to kill to keep up with my ability to generate paperwork.
We seem to be having a lot of these guys in Salt Lake. Maybe they’re counting on the generous hearts of the Holy Joes to bail them out of a life of servitude.
9/23/09
Apparently among mosquitoes, the mating process includes the male (who usually has a low level buzz going on) changing his tune. Females, who are more high-strung buzzers, won’t pay attention to males who continue to buzz low in their presence; the male has to raise the pitch to match hers. This song puts her in the mood. I once knew a girl who got turned on by the dial tone… maybe she was part mosquito. Guys, note: Don’t think you’ll get anywhere by imitating her voice. It gets an entirely different response from human girls.
9/20/09
“No, really Johnny, that was… fantastic.”
This was Savannah’s idea. I actually like my Human Torch. By the way, if anyone is reading this who doesn’t know me, there are often messages in the “mouseovers”. These show up automatically in Explorer, or you can right click and see them in Firefox.