“Here, here’s a machete, collapsible fishing pole, a few other odds and ends I stuck in there for you.” – Into the Wild
Pa Wilder said, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” which was an odd way for him to tell me I was adopted.
WRSA is back online here (LINK). Bookmark it.
This will be and odds and ends post, so, be warned.
Normally by Sunday night one of four things is the case, and they are in descending order of preference:
- I’ve written the general outline of the post either earlier in the day, on Saturday, or on Friday. Last week, for instance, I started writing with a “near publish” draft that only needed a few more jokes and meme creation.
- I’ve got written notes on what I’m going to write about. This works, because writing is just taking notes vivifying them through the addition of 3,000,000 volts of electricity with the help of Igor.
- I’ve been working on the post in my head for a day or three. I might miss on a few ideas or points, but I’m generally okay about getting most of them in there.
- I develop a strong idea that I want to write before it’s time to start writing. This is dangerous, because I’ve written somewhere near 1,000 posts, I might have written it before. I actually had to go to a Lame Repost once because this happened and it was 1am and I was not gonna write another.
Now, that’s my order of preference. One several occasions, I was frustrated with what I had written, thought, “Pffft, close enough,” and hit the go button. Those have been, more often than not, some of the most popular posts. I assure you, before I hit the go button, I have no idea if the post will elicit commentary or not.
When I met The Mrs. she said, “Let’s exchange numbers,” and I responded, “Won’t that just confuse people trying to call us?”
So, I sat down. No idea. Normally I keep a bank of those, and there was one really good one, but I’m saving that for the next Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. I thought about a Lame Repost, but I sifted through several candidates, and none of them felt right.
I do have several ideas, but each of them would take in several hours of research. Why so long? Because I’ve learned one very important truth: I have to have my facts right to write for this crowd. If I make an error in logic or fact, I’m called on it.
I appreciate that – it’s made me work to be better.
But to hit on a topic what will require a few hours of work to get up to proper speed on is one I typically don’t want to start at 10:28pm on a Sunday. I’ve done that before, and finishing when the Sun is coming up sucks, because it will mean I’m going to be tired all week long. I might even have given that a shot tonight, but last week I was under the weather and was dragging just a bit.
How many ants does it take to rent an apartment? Ten ants.
As in: drastically better in one night. One night, go to bed feeling awful. Next morning? Felt like I could chew rebar and spit nails. Metaphorically, I mean. My teeth aren’t nearly as strong as steel. Except for the one.
But the dragging had a backlog effect – the ideas I normally jot down during the course of a week just didn’t make it to paper or electrons, since I didn’t really have any. On almost every day I have tons of ideas, but the last week, blah. Thanks, virus.
Okay, that’s how the dog ate my homework.
Comments – normally I run a few rules that have (probably) cost the blog on the Google® counter – I mainly let people share most ideas they want to share in the comments. Do I agree with all of the ideas? No. I don’t even agree with myself from week to week, and I certainly would love to have a heart-to-heart with John Wilder from a decade or two ago.
The comment moderation software is strong. I have no idea how to de-tune it farther than it is. In most cases, I can see the comments for moderation. In some cases, I can’t, and the machine buries them, sometimes so far deep that I don’t find them unless I spend time in the moderation software.
That’s not a Crocodile Dundee reference . . . THIS is a Crocodile Dundee reference.
The comments I leave moderated (when I find them, often these go straight to the spam filters) are generally personal attacks that don’t add to the debate. Oh, and the debate? If commenters are talking to each other, I rarely step in. It’s a food fight, and I’ll let it play out. All I ask is that we attack ideas, not people.
Except the GloboLeft. Make fun of them however you want.
That’s it for tonight – odds and ends over.
Your opening illustration reminds me of a very important story. Back in the 1980s I was very interested in working on the fledgling NASA Space Station project. Way back then it was called Space Station Freedom and was gonna be a Reaganesque All-American project on several levels – technical and psychological. This was before the Freedom version died a budgetary death only to be brought back to life by Clinton as the current International Space Station to give post-1989 Russian tech people something to do besides help Iran build The Bomb.
So anyway, I moved to Denver in April 1985 to go to work at Martin Marietta’s aerospace group. It was a bait-and-switch. I went with the impression I was gonna work on their Space Station proposal team. Once I got there, I was immediately transferred to their Star Wars orbiting missile interceptor program, doing orbital constellation optimization. I immediately put in to transfer out of that group into the Space Station proposal group. So naturally they put me to work doing Titan IV launch trajectory analysis. Sigh.
Then Boeing won the NASA proposal award, not Martin Marietta. So I put in a resume and application to leave Denver and go to work for Boeing in Huntsville, AL. And I was immediately hired. Of course I was hired immediately, I thought smugly, I Am That Special. (It was several more years before I slowly realized that no, I’m not.) And I moved to Huntsville in Feb 1988 and I’ve been here ever since. Nice place.
Anyway, shortly after I arrived in Huntsville as a newly minted Boeing employee, our office workhorse Marla said we needed to hire some more people and asked if I would help her go thru some resumes. I said sure. She takes me across the parking lot to a new building and into a big conference room. Around the perimeter of the room are portable tables, each under a pinned wall page listing a job specialty, bowing and groaning under the weight of literally tens of thousands of resumes.
I was in shock. So many people wanted to work on Space Station! I turn to Marla. “Did you find my resume in here?” Yep. And we continued to follow the Marla procedure – take a random resume off the top of a random pile, scan it for 10 seconds, discard it if it didn’t meet our needs, on to the next one, here’s one that fits, OK, we’re outta here – leaving thousands of resumes untouched and unviewed. I had only gotten the job because I was randomly near the top of the pile Marla had randomly chosen from numerous other ones on the table. Merit had a little to do with me leaving my miserable life in Denver and moving on to my subsequently wonderful decades here in Huntsville – but luck had a LOT more to do with it.
I often reflect now that all of my happiness and good fortune over the past three plus decades is due to a single hand of poker at a resume table with Marla as the dealer.
Meanwhile, from a Zero Hedge article out today…
“While the official unemployment rate remains at a low 3.9%, there is an epidemic in the US and other Western countries of men — and now increasingly women — without work. These are currently 10 million of otherwise able-bodied working age US adults who have given up on finding work, often driven to do so out of frustration and despair. It’s gotten to the point where 1 in 6 prime working age men has no paid work at all.”
I was leaving Huntsville about the time you arrived. Maybe you saw my U-haul it trailer on the way in? I Loved Huntsville though as it was a great town.
I too have had to deal with the drudgery of resume reviewing. I wish I had met Marla as we ultimately went through all of them with lots of phone interviews. It always amazed me how many people outright lied on their resumes (more typical with foreign applicants who were mass mailing applications everywhere to stay in the country). Caught one guy in a phone interview who couldn’t even remember the details of a poster session award he had supposedly won the previous year. I learned to immediately discount any race/gender related “awards” and the alphabet of acronyms/clubs that every student was involved in and was essentially meaningless. It also always amazed me how many managers would “ooh and aahh” over a candidate because they did something unrelated like charity work, but would completely overlook the fact the fact they didn’t have the actual skills needed for the job . When we got down to the last few resumes I’d go pull up any papers or patents they had coauthored and skim through them only to find most of the work was poorly done and/or they were the last of 10+ coauthors). Really gave me a jaded outlook on the state of universities in general and many supposed top tiered grad schools in particular.
Anyway, it was apparent as far back as the 90’s that the country was headed for a steep decline in expertise and competency.
Huntsville is widely recognized as a great place to live. In the latest USN&WR listing it came in #7 overall as “Best Place To Live”…but was the hands down #1 winner in “Value”. That won’t last much longer. Everybody moving here is driving housing prices to the stratosphere….and bringing “Blue” values with them. Just like what is happening in Nashville just up the road.
Ack, forgot the link.
https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/best-places-to-live
…and yet, there are more job openings available for anyone that’s willing to work – than I can ever remember seeing.
The company my wife works at is having unfilled openings that remain unfilled for literally years now. It’s a machine shop (specialized – mostly short run high precision and/or military stuff) that needs more than just ‘spindle jockeys’. Sure, it’s all CAD/CAM based – so if the programmer does their job correctly, the milling machine will do the same (generally), but sometimes – it *REALLY* helps if you know what you’re doing (i.e. – intelligence and experience).
Specialized skills aside, nearly every retail organization has job openings as well. Don’t know if they just don’t pay well enough to take, the work ethic/’need’ to work isn’t strong enough (i.e. – they’re not hungry enough), or if the jobs are perceived as somehow ‘below their dignity’ to take. It’s hard to tell, but at least there’s lots of part and full-time openings for a geezer like me (besides just being a Walmart greeter/receipt checker).
That is one of the great modern mysteries our esteemed host has looked at, where are all the workers? These people are out there but tons of jobs remain unfilled. Maybe we just don’t need most of those jobs….
I don’t know why people question so many being out of work, as if motivation is lacking. Of course people don’t want to go to work; that’s why the call it ‘work’ and have to pay us to show up.
The real question is how are all these people managing to pull off not working while still paying the bills? I’d love to know…
“…shortly after I arrived in Huntsville as a newly minted Boeing employee…”
“Merit had a little to do with me leaving…”
Bro, are you sure you want to be talking shit about Boeing? Cuz, you know…
It’s always better to be lucky than to be good. Seriously. It’s better yet to be both.
The comment thing has turned into a bit of an administrative nightmare for me, I am often going through several hundred pending comments every day, mostly for online pharmacies and a bunch in Russian that I have no clue what they are saying. Some actual comments end up there so I can’t just dump them in one batch. It isn’t that time consuming really but dang it sure seems like it when I log in and have 200 pending comments, 99% bogus.
I don’t even see those. Even my spam is mainly from actual people. Verrrry sensitive.
Totally OT, but perhaps you have a moment or two to clarify something which has bothered me for years.
Once you, a blog host, have published your entry, are you typically able to edit it later on if you wish to? I notice that you, JW, have gone back and edited your posts when called out for something in the comments. But so very many other blog hosts leave typos and grammatical mistakes in their entries, indefinitely. Is this because on their individual platforms, they are unable to make corrections after posting? I am one of those awful grammar nazi types whose eye is drawn irresistibly to the trivial mistakes in a piece of writing, so I am very curious about this. Does the Zman, for just one example, simply not bother to go back and correct a typo, or is he unable to?
I was disappointed when your chosen platform removed that precious brief window after posting during which a commenter could edit his entry. I am a habitual proofreader, but I make mistakes like everyone else. I miss the ability to quickly find and correct my own goofs.
If I know about it, I’ll edit it (that week). A formatting change goofed up a few randomly a few years ago, and they’re still that way. I even keep the memes up for two days so I can fix those if someone finds an error.
Yup, it deleted that. I’ll see if they have a new version.
Apologies if this reprints John; for some reason Word Press sites seem to have eaten my comments yesterday in more than one place.
I actually really enjoy hearing how authors come about their blogs. Writing is a very personal business for me; it is interesting to see how others post on a very regular basis and the process for how they write.
I try not to write too much about that, because I’m fundamentally a boring person.
My email is in the about section.