500th Post

Well, this is my 500th post. What has been accomplished over the course of this blog? A quick survey of my previous posts indicates that this blog consists of:

1) Reviews of films, both brilliant and downright horrible.

2) Complaints about stupid idiots that piss me off.

3) Politics, which is basically the same as (2) but with more anger.

4) Longing for food.

5) Cultural criticism.

What will I cover in the next 500 posts? Will they include creative writing? Poetry? Intricate discussions of controversial economic models? Only time will tell! Bear with me for the next 500.

Xmas Tree Time

Ah, the Yuletide season, when we sit by the Yule Log, we sing Yule Songs, and we watch Yul Brynner films. What could be better than the twinkling of strung lights and the cooking of seven fishes and the inevitable Xmas hangover?

Of course, a key part of this all is the tree. Now, Xmas trees have changed a lot over the years, from the natural trees brought inside and decorated with real (and quite dangerous!) candles, to the aluminum silver colored trees of the Eisenhower era, to new fangled contraptions like "upside down" trees that hang from the ceiling (bonus for these--less floor space taken up, decorations easier to see, and more room for presents!). My own fambly used to always use natural trees, and over the years the number of homemade ornaments increased until the damn thing looked like a garbage can was emptied on it. Then, one year my dad thought he'd be clever and buy a realistic-looking fake tree, to save us from the trek up to Dutchess County and having to pick out and cut and haul a tree back home with the inevitable cries of "can't we stop at that diner to eat?" He even went and bought fancy ornaments to class the tree up--only white lights, and everything silver. The sort of tree you might see in a corporation's lobby.

Of course, a few snide remarks from the kids and ole dad had to go and pick out a real tree as well, so each year we became a fambly of two trees--one fake but nice looking one, and one real tree covered with our homemade tacky ornaments. The number of presents though, did not increase.

In our current apartment we have a red aluminum tree, which I insisted on keeping up after the holidays last year and as a result it has remained up the whole year. This meant not having to go through the trouble of taking it down and putting it back up again, so in a way you could say I beat the system.

When I have kids, though, my plan is to draw a big picture of a tree and put it up on the wall in the den. I can even draw in little presents below the tree, and tell the kids that if they're not good then I can easily erase the presents.

Yes, I do plan on saving up for my own retirement home....

Undercover Boss!

I've been recently catching up on this show "Undercover Boss" and have to say a more brilliant piece of public relations I have yet to see! The idea behind this reality show is that each week, a large company will send its CEO undercover (with disguises, fake names, etc.) to work each day at an entry level job at some part of the company to get an idea of what the bottom level employees go through and what's on their minds. The excuse for the camera crews following them around is that there's a documentary being filmed about entry level jobs, so the hope is that the CEO then gets a better sense of the challenges facing their workers and can improve the company with this new perspective. Brilliant, eh?

It seems to follow a very set formula--the boss fails miserably at each entry-level task, looking foolish on the camera and demonstrating just how much better the day-to-day employees really are. (I think the bosses sort of intentionally screw up--the show would go very badly if the boss was excellent at working a lathe, for instance, and then comments "hey, this is easier than they make it look! Why am I paying my people so much???") The boss (in the guise of a "new guy") also chats with the employees, finds out what makes them tick (one may have financial difficulties, a bad back, or overcome some other disability), and we get to see the boss feeling bad about what their people have to go through. In the end, he (so far, it's always a "he") reveals himself to the employees, talks about what he's learned, and explains how he's going to improve, and usually does something nice for the individual employees he worked with (a vacation, a promotion, etc.). (In some cases, a boss will catch an employee being rude to customers and staff, and have to chew them out in the end, but this is rare).

The brilliant PR part of it? An hour episode of free advertising for the company, making the boss and the employees look like good people doing good work (the cameras never catch anyone doing a half-assed job or stealing, obviously). I'd say it'd be nuts for any company NOT to go on this show.

Of course, the formula will get old quick, so I can see some ways to spice it up:

1) Undercover Crime Boss. See what happens when the Godfather of the Gambino Fambly decides to see just how hard his hired goons have to work, muscling in on local retailers.

2) Undercover President. See Obama pretend to be an entry level staffer at the Department of Energy, and find out the waste and corruption that needs to be fixed.

3) Undercover Bad Boss. See the boss find out how much life sucks for his employee with too many mouths to feed--and then decide to fix it by kidnapping the extra kids.

Snow....Damn Snow

So, they're predicting snow today. Lovely. I get to spend my evening sitting on the highway behind severe traffic backups because some mouth-breather in their SUV decided to speed on the ice and create a wreck, shutting down a lane. This, my friends, is the suck.

I have come to dread snow as an adult, because snow doesn't mean not having to go to school, or making snow forts, or sledding. Besides kids, the only people who can possibly enjoy snow are:

1) Ski bums. Yeah, they just love their cumbersome hobby that requires serious equipment maintenance and access to chair lifts. This is probably because they haven't discovered drinking by a fire. They'll learn!

2) Russians defending themselves from the Nazis. However, while Jack Frost did help save Russia in WWII, the Russians were still stuck with a problem. They lived in a frozen hell that only a nut like Hitler would want.

3) Midwestern serial killers. These guys love hiding bodies in the snow, which can hide evidence for long enough to flee the country. But I have no plans to move to the midwest. Or, er, become a serial killer.

Sadly, leaving Maine I must have brought the winters with me. At least the Mainers can rejoice in milder days!

Office Dress Code Nuttiness

The creation of an office dress code can be a tricky beast, as you want to straddle the line between letting your workers be comfortable and maintaining an appropriate businesslike appearance--all while avoiding any rules that could lead to discrimination claims. But it seems like someone in Human Resources at Swiss bank UBS has taken this full retard. They now have a 43 page manual outlining their dress code, with items such as "don't eat onions" and "cut your hair once every four weeks".

Now, part of me thinks a lot of these rules are probably borne of necessity--some guy wears loafers with no socks, then you gotta make a rule, some woman has her thong poke up over her dress pants, gotta make a rule--but 43 pages? I don't think I could come up with 43 pages worth of dress code discussion even if I listed every type of inappropriate style of footwear (open toed sandals, clown shoes, platform shoes with fish tank bottoms). This is clearly a level of micromanagement that makes you wonder why UBS didn't finally just decide to issue uniforms to all employees and shave them all bald each morning before they marched in unison to the work plant for soulless banter followed by rote work.

What's the right mix, in my view?

1) Get rid of neckties as a requirement. They're literally nooses, and send the wrong message. Plus they get in your food way too often.

2) If you can't tell they're sneakers from a distance, they'll count as work shoes.

3) I don't understand pantyhose requirements. If you're looking close enough to tell whether a woman at the office has bare legs, you're doing something wrong anyway.

4) It's sad that anyone should have to point out that clothes must be clean, but there we are.

5) Pajamas are ok if you've been having one hell of a week. Don't judge.

Clockwork Orange

I'd seen the movie "A Clockwork Orange" years ago, but only just now finished reading the book it was based on. For those who haven't read or seen it, the plot is this (SPOILERS AHEAD): Alex, a rotten youngster, gets into all sorts of hijinks with his thug friends, attacking and robbing innocent people and other thugs alike, and when Alex's friends betray him he ends up in prison as a result of one of their attacks. In prison, the government decides to "reform" him by conditioning his mind and body so that he would become violently ill at the thought of violence or sex (a side effect was that during the conditioning--which involved forcing him to watch violence and sex on film while injected drugs were making him ill--they were playing the films to the sound of classical music, which made him also react horribly to the music he once loved). Once "reformed" back into society, Alex becomes easy prey for his traitorous former friends, who attack him while he is unable to defend himself due to his fear of violence. Badly beaten, Alex staggers to a nearby home, which turns out to be a house in which he and his friends had previously committed a vicious attack. The owner of the house takes Alex in and nourishes him, before discovering that Alex was one of the attackers from years ago. To get revenge, the owner locks Alex in a bedroom and blasts classical music, forcing him to jump from the window to take his own life. The suicide attempt fails, Alex ends up in the hospital, and the government decides the "reform" was an embarrassment to them and they de-program him while he's convalescing. The film ends with Alex realizing that he "was cured, all right..."

The book goes on to have Alex out of the hospital and a little older, still a bit of a ruffian, and discovering that he was aging and would need to make the conscious choice to change his life. This more upbeat ending (for the book, compared to the film) does fit more with the book's theme that depriving a person of the choice to choose good will make them less human (hence taking a living thing, like an orange, and making it "clockwork", that is, machine-like). But that's not the only significant difference between the book and the film. In the film, Alex appears to be in his 20s or late teens, and at one point seduces a couple young women close to his age. The book makes Alex start at 15, and the women he "seduces" are actually 10 or 11. The book also has chapters taking place in prison, where Alex kills another prisoner, and the chaplain objects to the "reform" procedure. But Stanley Kubrick (the director) managed to tighten the story a bit, not only with the darker ending (which sends the message that one can't reform the bad, the bad shall remain bad) but with other clever tricks. During his attack on the house owner and his wife, Alex is singing "Singing in the Rain", a creepy version that must have haunted Gene Kelly more than the film "Xanadu" ever could. When Alex is being cared for by that same house owner later in the film, he sings the same tune while resting in the bath--the fatal slip that lets the house owner know Alex was one of the thugs from before. And of course, while the movie did use a bit of the "nadsat" (teenage slang) such as "in-out" and "ultra-violence" and "welly welly welly well", it doesn't go nearly so heavy on it as the book does. (At times, the book requires the reader to make a lot of guesses as to the meaning of the slang words that Alex, the narrator, uses)

On the whole, this is one of those rare instances where the book and the movie are both excellent, and one can't really judge that one is superior to the other.

But it also got me thinking--was the real problem that they were trying to reform Alex, or was it teh nature of how they did it? By making him averse to any violence, they made him defenseless. Perhaps the "conditioning" could have been done in such a way that he would have reacted aversely to offensive violence rather than self-defense. If such a thing were possible, you'd still have the issue of taking away his moral choices, but would that have been such a bad thing--especially when it was clear that as a youngster Alex had been making all the wrong moral choices?

My Hibernation Plan

Sure, if you were to ask me when I'm wide awake and at work or home, I'd probably say that I can function just well in the winter, but during those first few moments of getting up in the morning a strong case can be made for hibernation. The bears are onto something--just pre-pay your rent and utilities for a few months, bundle up and shut down completely. It's not like you're going to miss much:

1) Xmas--yes, colored lights and food and drink, the sound of carols on the radio for a bit before they get annoying--okay, maybe hibernation can wait until after December 25.

2) New Years--the taste of bubbly, a fine meal put together, and ringing in another year with loved ones. Surely another week before hibernation can work.

3) Super bowl. Ok, good things are being done with nachos these days, and you want to see the best commercials the ad industry can put together. Plus, there's some football. That's about another month delay for the hibernation.

4) Presidents Day. Who doesn't rock out on Presidents Day? And, before you know it, we're into spring again.

Maybe they can invent some sort of hibernation where you wake up a bit every now and then.