Current Events

I wrote a post about the good stuff that happened in 2006. Everytime I sat down to write about the bad and the ugly of last year, I'd become paralyized by the massive amounts of badness and uglyness that permeated the year.

There was the triumvirate of firecrotch (Lindsay Lohan), skanky chocha (Paris Hilton), and white trash poontang (Britney Spears).

Ugh Britney.

Anorexia became the new black with Nicole Ritchie it's standard bearer. Yeah sure, anorectics have been banned from catwalks across the globe what with four dead models sacrificied to the disease but when we still have a coked-out yet incredibly rich Kate Moss prancing around ... well ... no wonder it's still considered hot in Hollywood.

There was also the crazy whacked out Tom Cruise with his scientology slave Katie Holmes and their tethan child. And Star Jones. And Donald Trump. And Kid Rock and Pam Anderson.

But those are just the entertainment.

What about Darfur?
Do you remember the devastation of Lebanon?
Then there's the never ending carnage in Iraq.
And the immigration raids.

Do you know where habeas corpus went?

How about Mark Foley?
Ted Haggard?
Samuel Alito?

The thing is ... all of this is too abstract, too far away when compared to the death of my niece Lydia.

I really liked this one folks.

If you want to keep up with what the pragmatic, structured, organized, thoughtful people who design build and maintain the behind the scenes critical infrastructure that you, me and all of us count on for EVERY FACET of our daily lives, I highly suggest you add Control Global to your "favorites" list.

A few favorite quotes from the article as a tease to encourage you to read the whole thing :

Engineering solves problems. Innovation creates problems. Most innovation comes from people outside the domain of expertise. Innovators can be anybody.

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We think that this is the innovation age. Not so. We forget fish hooks, fire and the wheel. Twice as many patents were issued in the early 1900s as today. Distance, time and familiarity diminish importance.
My dad would talk to some of my visiting young MBAs. They would complain about the D.C. politics, the latest recession and tax laws. After they left, Dad would say, “Don’t they know this has happened five times before?”

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What does this mean to the working process engineer? We should not dwell on the latest standards and play in our sandbox. Putting change into a process because we want to try out the latest computer is not progress. We, as well as our management, should think about what we do and why we are doing it. Innovation is not just components, systems and toys. Innovation also is a part of how we think.

I had been planning to blog on the subject of “Juxtaposition” for months – and after searching for many months and months (more than 2) for Scully’s line to Mulder to that effect, I have struck out. As full season DVD sets are pushing $100, I’m just going to have to wait. Unless of course the left over FEMA Patio Relief fund for California gets reallocated for cranial wandering projects – that is.

From my feeble memory, Scully said to Mulder, “the weaving together of seemingly unrelated pieces of information to form a rational conclusion to explain the unexplainable of which was lost by any normal means of analysis”.

I stretched it a bit I think – but it’s pretty close - such is poetic license when doing quasi creative writing. As soon as someone or I can dig up the dialogue I will correct the aforementioned linguistics. I am to the point where certain lines from certain shows hold a reverence for me as though lyrics from our favorite songs. This quote from Ms. Scully is one of them – for the not so faint of heart there are others – but I will save those for another day. The point is Scully knew, perhaps like no other, the gift of tenacity Mulder had for his quest. The unrelenting search for the truth to his questions.

The truth is out there.

If I want to be aware of the extra-toed frogs (and extra legged) from the Savanna River Weapons complex (did I mention the deformed turtles and snakes that wander off the reservation and breed with the straights?) or the Dioxin discharges of the Tittabawassee River and subsequent effects to the habitat of the river basin, not to mention the Saginaw Bay (did I mention this is just upstream from the inlet to the municipal water supply of the entire Detroit Metropolitan Area?) 0r that nearly every resident in the State of Michigan has PCB residue in their bodies from the sealant sprayed on the feed silos that made it’s way into the dairy feed and subsequently the milk and subsequently we Michigan residents. If I want to drink my Espresso and dance on the keyboard and try and make sense of it all – and share it with you – this is my dance.