Life with Lloyd

When I came in to work this morning, my admin person pointed out to me that we seem to have a new pet. Evidently she spent 20 minutes this morning talking to a new friend who, judging from the pile of paper shreds and peanuts sheds found there, lives behind one of my bookshelves. For no apparent reason, we've taken to calling him(her?it?) Lloyd.
When word got out to the rest of my office (All women, in case you wondered.) they immediately started calling for blood. Luckily, I was able to find a site that sells live-traps for mice. Dot's already ordered 2 of them, and she's started putting pieces of oatmeal cookie back by his nest, which he seems to be eating very quickly, so he's ready to hop into the trap when it gets here.
Now we're discussing whether we should get an office pet. I'm voting for a rat.
This may be the most encouraging sign about my workplace I've had in a very long time.

Instructions

SA and I cleaned out and organized our filing cabinet yesterday. She has to help me with this stuff because, given my druthers, I keep EVERYTHING. Among all the flotsam and jetsam, we found a number of product manuals, just in case you can't remember how to use something you've owned for 5 years. Being as I was kind of looking over her shoulder, I had a difficult time figuring out what some of the manuals were actually for, and why I had kept them. Chief among those questions was, apparently, an instruction manual for a can-opener.

Though it turned out that I had misread the cover, all I could think was, "Good grief. Even I must think I'm an idiot."

Oh! My Bleeding Heart...

Well. It's Office Christmas Party Season. Well, maybe it WAS Christmas Party Season. I know we're done with ours, thank God...

SA's party was last weekend. She works for a non-profit, so their Christmas party consists of a potluck supper at one of the employees houses. She gets a small gift/bonus every year - a gift certificate to use at any of a few local shops.

Saturday was my Christmas Party. I work for a decent-sized, very much for-profit business with a number of different small companies in 3 different town making up the whole that is our corporation. Our Christmas Party was Black-Tie-Optional. (Talk about misnomers... It's optional as long as you don't mind looking like a degenerate who has no idea of how to dress in polite company. My wife might disagree with me, but I counted three guys who weren't in at least a jacket and tie.) Anyway, as you'd guess, it was held at a major local country club and featured 3 different dinner selections, party favors that cost more than SA's bonus for each attendee, an open bar (Again, thank God.), a live band, and a concert from a local choral group. To top it off, we all received our Christmas bonuses. I receive a moderately small bonus, because I haven't' been with the company for very long. I found out that some administrators get many times what I got. My bonus was still TEN TIMES what SA got.

And amid all this ridiculously overblown merriment, complete with a multitude of melodramatic speeches about corporate synergy and how we are all one big family, all I could think was, How many poor f-ing families could we have subsidized Christmas for if we'd opted to have a f-ing pot luck????

Sometimes I HATE corporate America.

The reason I won't be reading ANYTHING by MIchael Chrichton anymore...

Hey Gang. Sorry it's been so long. I've been, well.... I dunno. I've been busy, but not really any more so than normal. I guess I'm just a generally shitty blogger. I'll try to do better.

Anyway, I've got my undies in a bunch this morning, so I figured it was probably time to vent.

I love to read. As a general rule, I'll read just about anything, but my favorite genres tend to be fantasy/science fiction and suspense. Therefore, I've read just about everything that Michael Chrichton has written. Yes, I realize it's just pulp and that he's not a great writer, but his plot-lines are generally interesting and that pretty much all I ask.

No more.

It turns out that he's a right-wing wack-job. This, in itself, is not reason enough for me to stop reading his books. I have, after all, been to MANY Ted Nugent concerts. (I still have nightmares about cardboard cutouts of Janet Reno...) However, it also turns out that Chrichton's a totally socially-maladjusted, vindictive asshole. (Thank You to Think Progress for tipping me off to this.)

Chrichton is a vocal critic of Global Warming. (Maybe that's a bad way to phrase that. I mean, anybody with half a clue is a critic of Global warming. What? We should support it? What i mean to say is that Chrichton is the kind of scientific oblivious moron who doesn't think it exists. I say this as I look out my window on December 15th at green grass in Northern Michigan. ) In 2004, he release the novel State of Fear, wherein he depicts global warming as a a hoax concocted by environmentalists to raise money. He has since met with our Moron-In-Chief to discuss this and the two of them are in near-total agreement.

As a response to Chrichton's public stance on this subject, last March, New Republic senior editor Michael Crowley wrote a cover story called “Jurassic President: Michael Crichton’s Scariest Creation.” It talked about how dangerous this stance was, especially when it's held by the f-ing President.

From Think Progress-


Crichton’s response was to smear Crowley in his latest novel, Next, by writing in a character named “Mick Crowley” who rapes a two-year-old boy. The following is a graphic excerpt from Crichton’s novel (reader beware):

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. …

It turned out Crowley’s taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child’s mother as “fantasizing feminist fundamentalists” who had made up the whole thing from “their sick, twisted imaginations.” This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley’s penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler’s rectum.)

The real-life Michael Crowley is also a Washington journalist and also graduated from Yale.

Well, that's it for me. I absolutely HATE IT when people can't come up with a reasonable argument so they resort to name calling. And truly, I can't honestly think of anything worse to call someone than "child-rapist".

Even for all you right-wingers out there, (And again, what are you doing reading MY blog?) I can't imagine being willing to support anyone who behaves that way, regardless of his political views.

Good grief...