Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

You couldn’t pay me enough

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Ever since I started working here, I’ve been able to watch day by day as a new skyscraper is built about two blocks away from my building. When I started last August it wasn’t much more than a hole in the ground as they worked on the foundation; now there is a steel framework stretching up about 25 floors, with a central concrete core that’s going up what looks to be at least another ten floors or so. Pretty much anytime I look out my windows I can see construction workers scurrying around this thing looking like ants on playground monkey bars, flashes of light and sparks from the welding — and one of the most fascinating pieces, the tower crane that’s hauling all the steel beams up from street level up to wherever they need to go on the building.

Of course, those cranes have to get taller somehow as the building goes up — a process which I’d never completely understood. Today I get to watch it happening, and there is no way you could ever pay me enough to be part of an operation like this! I’m pretty convinced at this point that you have to be certifiably insane to become a high-rise construction worker — this stuff is just crazy. Since you obviously don’t have one taller crane avaiable to help raise the crane, the contraption has to ‘grow’ as the project gets taller. This is done by an outer ‘raiser’ unit that detaches the top of the crane from the mast, lifts the top up about 24 feet, then sets it back down after a new 20-foot section is slipped into the gap (this page has some pictures of the operation). Just amazing…they’re in the process of lifting the top of the crane here at the moment, with the new section poised to go in — and a second section hanging from the crane waiting to be added next. Meanwhile, the entire time this is going on, there are workers climbing all up and down both the riser unit and the top of the crane, getting everything set to slide the new piece in.

Yup. They’re all insane. And I’m quite happy to keep all of my jobs with my feet planted firmly on a solid surface.

More political cartoon uproar

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Back on Sep. 12th I mentioned a couple political cartoons that I thought were interesting for their different takes on the attacks of the day before. Since then there have been the occasional political cartoons appearing here and there that have raised a bit of commmotion for one reason or another.

Today, Fark pointed to a Yahoo! news story about an editorial cartoon that ran in a New Hampshire newspaper that has prompted a denouncement by no less than the White House.

© 2002 Mike MarlandThe cartoon depicts President Bush’s budget plan as an airplane veering towards two buildings labeled “Social” and “Security”. Not surprisingly, this has led to a fairly large uproar, to the point that White House spokesman Ari Fleischer issued his denouncement to reporters. The furor continues to go, also, as evidenced by this Fark discussion (which, to it’s credit, has stayed surprisingly civil through most of it). The editor of the newspaper that ran the cartoon has since apoligised, saying that to run it was a mistake.

This may be my biggest problem with the situation so far. According to the Yahoo! article, the same day the cartoon ran, the paper ran an editorial taking Bush to task for deficiencies in the current budget plan — an over-emphasis on the crusade against terrorism, while cutting benefits to people here in the U.S. who need it. The editor obviously had to see the cartoon prior to publishing and approve it, and I find it hard to believe that he didn’t realize that there would be an uproar once it was printed. I’d be far more impressed with the editor if he had stuck to his guns — he obviously felt the cartoon was worth printing at the time of submission, and to have him back down now is somewhat distressing.

I certainly realize that many people will feel that the cartoon is in bad taste and may disagree with either its message or the manner in which the cartoonist chose to depict it. However, political commentary is often meant to shock, provoke commentary and debate, and make people think — and I for one think the cartoonist did an excellent job on all levels.

I’m not sure if I want to ramble on much more about this at the moment. Suffice to say that not only do I not diasgree with the sentiments expressed in the cartoon, I’m rather impressed that the cartoonist felt strongly enough to express himself this way, and I’m saddened that the editor has felt the need to react as he has. If he’d found a way to apologize for any perceived (though I’m sure not intended) disrespect towards the victims without feeling he had to brand the decision to run the cartoon as “a mistake,” I’d have been more okay with that. Ah, well — at least it got people talking, and (at least in most cases), thinking. That should be the point, right?

Word of the day: amanuensis

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I generally think of myself as having a fairly good vocabulary, but yesterday at a department meeting Carrie tossed out a term that I hadn’t ever come across before — amanuensis, which she said was a synonym for secretary. We weren’t sure how it was spelled (I had guessed amenuensis, guessing that the amen used at the end of prayers could mean something like ‘the word’ [as in ‘the word of the Lord’], which could tie into a secretarial profession), but Lee was able to look it up and send us the correct spelling via e-mail. I just looked it up on dictionary.com, and here’s what they returned:

amanuensis Aman`uen”sis, n.; pl. Amanuenses. [L., fr. a, ab + manus hand.]

A person whose employment is to write what another dictates, or to copy what another has written. [Latin amanuensis, from the phrase (servus) amanu, (slave) at handwriting :a, ab, by; see ab–1 + manu, ablative of manus, hand; see man-2 in Indo-European Roots.]

I just thought it was interesting, and another two-cent word to toss in every so often. Apparently mom’s been an amanuensis for most of her working life!

Apparently I was pretty off-base about ‘amen’ having anything to do with ‘word’, however — I just looked it up on dictionary.com, here’s the result for that:

amen A*men” (?; 277), interj., adv., & n. [L. amen, Gr. ‘amh`n, Heb. [=a]m[=e]n certainly, truly.]

An expression used at the end of prayers, and meaning, So be it. At the end of a creed, it is a solemn asseveration of belief. When it introduces a declaration, it is equivalent to truly, verily.

I still think my ‘amen/word/word of God’ guess was a good one, though. :)

It does snow here!

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Snow in Seattle!I just thought this was pretty nifty, and funny too. Seattle actually got some snow this weekend! I snapped this pic of it just to prove that it actually can happen here. Of course, it’s nothing like Anchorage — but from the reactions down here, you’d think it was the Apocalypse!

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating just a little bit, but…it’s still funny. Candice and I walked down to Westlake Center (one of two main shopping malls in downtown Seattle), and were both amazed at how dead it was for a Sunday afternoon. Apparently nobody thought they could actually make it out of the house.

Flaming down Broadway

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Passing the torchI’ll expand this entry more later on tonight with pictures and such, but last night the Olympic Torch relay came through Seattle. I’d already checked the route maps provided by the Seattle Times and King 5 and seen that the route was scheduled to go within a block of my apartment at about 5:45pm! Since the walk home from work only takes about 20 minutes, I knew I’d be home in time to wander down and watch the relay come by.

Just before 5:45 I left the Shoebox and wandered down the hill to Pike Street. There were already a few other people standing on the corner of Pike and Boylston waiting for the relay to come by, and we chatted off and on for the next few mintues as we waited. Round about 6-ish or so some trucks came by handing out noisemakers for us to play with as the runner came by, so we each grabbed a few and kept waiting. And waiting. Apparently the procession wasn’t exactly keeping to schedule.

By 6:15 or so we were getting a bit chilly — though the temperature last night was in the mid-30’s, which isn’t too bad, there was a fairly constant wind that made things a bit colder — when a couple ladies came by selling t-shirts. We asked them if they knew how far along the runner was, and they said that he was still working his way through downtown Seattle! At that point, we all decided that a stop by the Rosebud to warm up sounded like a good idea, and off we went. I grabbed a table right by the street so I could keep an eye on the crowds still gathering along Pike Street to get a feel for when things were coming our way, and nursed a very nice Malibu Rum and Coke.

It was probably around 6:30 or so when we noticed that the news helicopters were now hovering almost directly overhead (side note: even when you know they’re news choppers, it’s a wee bit disconcerting to be able to look in the sky and see three hovering helicopters with spotlights trained in your general direction), and a few minutes after that people on the street started pointing down the hill. Everyone waiting in the Rosebud took that as our clue, and headed out to the street.

The next runner gets readyI hadn’t known this before, never having seen the Torch relay before, but it’s not done with one runner from start to finish through each town. Rather, they have multiple runners, each one carrying a torch for a short distance, at the end of which the flame is passed on to the next runner with their own torch for the next leg. As it turns out, they were switching runners just a block before the Pike/Broadway intersection, so I was able to get a couple shots of the new runner getting ready to go, the passing of the flame, and then the previous runner getting his congratulations. It was a pretty cool thing to be able to see — I’ll try to get my pictures up this evening.

Karl got fat! Er…phat? Um…

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Quite nice — just a quick note to say congratulations to Karl on his new Harley Davidson!

This is one of those things that mom would kill me for admitting, but I’ve occasionally thought that getting a motorcycle would be a lot of fun. However, should that ever happen, it’s a long ways down the road…but for now, congrats, Karl!

Greeneyes rocks too!

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I’ve been promising to do this ever since I made my Belinda rocks! post — and since that was back in late November, it’s probably about time I actually did it, huh?

Anyway, GreenEyes rocks too ! Another instant celebrity, courtesy of lil’ ol’ me!

Never let it be said that I won’t whore myself out for attention.

What the heck is this from?

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I stumbled across this little exchange today, that sounds extremely famliar from a long time ago….

Wanna buy a duck?

A what?

A duck!

Does it quack?

Of course it quacks, it’s a duck!

For the life of me, though, I can’t pin down where in the world it comes from. Doing a Google search doesn’t help much either — it pops up around the ‘net, but never attributed to any one thing, always just listed as an ‘in joke’ or as a party game or some such.

Anyone else remember this, or have any idea what it’s from? It’s stuck in my head and driving me mildly batty….

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Free association, job possibilities, and haiku

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Hrm. Sorry ’bout the lack of updates recently, but things have been a bit busy. Not the kind of busy that would really be worth writing about, either, which is the bummer. If I’d been kidnapped by alien space pirates and forced to endure hours upon hours of back to back Hardy Boys television episodes overdubbed in Tagalog in a devious attempt to brainwash me and force me to assassinate Sonny Bono (a difficult prospect, considering I’d have to resurrect him first) with nothing but a Ronco Turnip Twaddler, three jars of Neutella hazelnut spread, and a 5-inch length of dental floss — that would be worth writing about.

Unfortunately, life just isn’t that interesting.

Instead, it’s been pretty much the same old day-to-day existence that makes up the majority of anyone’s life. Get up, go to work, come home. Repeat ad naseum.

There may be some interesting options on the job front, however — who knows if this will actually pan out, but if it does, it could be fairly cool. Yesterday word came down that Jenne, one of the people in the Report Production department, was being transferred up to take over the position of a departing Executive Assistant. I’ve inquired about applying to take that position, and have gotten support from the rest of the Report Production people that I work with every day, so as soon as Lee (my Anderson supervisor) has the job posting written up, she’ll pass it on to me so I can formally start the application process. If all goes well (crossing my fingers), I could in theory be hired on into that position and become an actual Andersen employee, rather than my current temp status with three levels of beauracracy to deal with. I’m hoping this can actually happen — it’d finally get me out of copying and into something more office- and computer-related…and the accompanying hike in the payscale would be nice, too!

Other than that…well, there just isn’t a whole lot other than that. I’m kind of killing time right now — my main production machine went down, and I’m waiting on a service call to Xerox to go through so I can get things running again. Until that happens, I’m kind of dead in the water, so it seemed like a good time to finally babble here for a bit. Fun, huh?

Oh, here’s something I was wondering about — are there any decent specifics of what kind of casualties we’ve got in this whole ‘War on Terrorism’ thing right now? From what I remember hearing, so far we’ve been told of one sodier killed by enemy forces, a couple friendly-fire incidents, and then today’s reports of a KC-130 that went down with seven soldiers aboard. We may be taking Al-Quaida soldiers out (either through killing or capturing them) right and left, but have we really been doing a better job of killing our own personel than the enemy has? Kinda makes me wonder. If there’s any better or more accurate info out there, please feel free to share it with me (oh, and as one disclaimer, I’ve yet to really start researching any of that, it’s all just off the top of my head — so if I’m way off base here, feel free to correct me there, too).

And to close for now, an amusing little haiku I found in the comments to a post on Fark:

Nipples; ninja: both
Are difficult to capture
Without an ambush.

The new album from M.C. Escher, ‘Please Escher Don’t Hurt ‘Em,’ featuring the hit single, ‘You Can’t Draw This!’

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Okay, I’m kind of frightened — as I was making my paper deliveries, the girls up in HR (Can I say ‘girls?’ It’s probably not politically correct, but at only 28, it seems kind of funny to call people within a few years of my age either direction ‘ladies’ or ‘women.’ Not that they’re not ‘ladies,’ I’m sure…it just seems a bit too formal. But I digress….) were listening to MC Hammer‘s 2 Legit 2 Quit. Kinda scary. Kinda funny (especially since all four of them still remembered all the movements…but then, so do I…), but kinda scary. Weird stuff.

Hmm…if I didn’t babble so much, the title of this post would probably be longer than the post itself. Score one for being talkative!