Today I'm forty-five years old. It's not a date I care to fuss about - the
attention makes me aware of time's passage and I feel myself aging. Famous people
born this day include Virginia Woolf, Robert Burns
and Antonio Carlos Jobim. I had lunch at the Sushi House, part of a place
called "Town & Country Village" which was awash with the youth from Palo
Alto High, just across the street. On my way out I gave a tangerine to a
lost soul standing with his hand-written sign at the exit, and he blessed
me in the name of his deity. Bonus: I got to goof off most of the day
since our system was down at work.
I've been playing around with this - it's the walk/don't walk traffic light
of the Eastern Zone, and now I know its name: "Ampelmännchen". Was of a
sudden intrigued when I saw it on a business card at "Words"; but I've got a snapshot here of one I took
on the streets of Leipzig in 1994, and I remember being
amused by their designs when I first saw them in East Berlin in 1978. The odd
texture is the surface of the lens visible beneath the stencil.
I snagged the imagery here; further research has so far produced a bunch
of German text, but no images of the more common Western versions for comparison.
Apparently they're replacing the old Eastern hardware and there's some outcry.
Finding this page too challenging for my
own limited capabilities I ran it through the Babbelfish
translator and put the bewildering result here.
What do you make of it? "Something's happening here; what it
is ain't exactly clear."
Eaters and Shitters
Somewhere recently I read somebody griping about people who
come in to work and head to the rest room first thing to take
a dump. He thought that was personal business which should be
dealt with before coming into the office. I myself find the
reverse annoying - the employee who arrives with breakfast
in a bag and proceeds to fill at least the day's first
half-hour with desk-eating. All the usual irritants - the
smell of something tasty (or alternatively, something with
a vile stench which lingers), the disgusting sounds of someone
eating (when I'm not), and the noisy conclusion: the rustle and
waste of the packaging being wadded up and discarded - it's
a major distraction. <1>
On the contrary, the Theory X in me has no
problem with an employee grunting away in the rest
room - the ideal company would provide courtesy
copies of today's newspaper in there, rather than leaving
that duty to the more generous workers. In fact I recall
conversations with previous co-workers - I remember
finding common ground with one who, like me, tried to
keep his bowel movements scheduled regular, so they
occurred on company time; and the tale of another (F) who
was chastised by the well-conditioned old women in her
office (at corporate headquarters) because she was
taking too much time in the ladies' room.
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This paragraph has now come full circle.