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Strongbad!
Ah, politics!

 
Ahhh, here's another rant on the One Minute Moron

If Blogger erases this one (tried to write this three weeks ago), I'm gonna go on a rampage...

Anyway, new rant, pending publishing at Amazon on The One Minute Manager Balances Work and Life:

The One Minute Moron Does Fitness

I'm absolutely stunned that something this completely lame would get published. Included, for the oh-so-busy, and oh-so-idiotic manager who is addicted to stupid parables as the ultimate source of advice on everything in life, is a very simple and very basic exercise program couched in a totally ridiculous story about our One Minute Moron.

See, the One Minute Moron was so effective that he was promoted within his company, and now had to do a lot of travelling, spend lots of hours at work, etc. After "eating his way across the country," he'd put on 50 lbs and had a heart-attack scare.

So, instead of starting to pick up, say, a copy of Men's Health, or some other publication, and learning how to work out and eat healthfully on his own, he heads to a motivational seminar, since he doesn't have the intellectual wattage to figure it out on his own.

He's given a list of four things he needs to have a healthy and "balanced" life, but three of them are totally ignored in favor of a really lame, really basic beginner fitness program that his doctor could have designed for him, had the Moron the intelligence to ask!

The rest of the book is spent dispensing such basic advice as: don't eat cheeseburgers every day for lunch, cut back on sweets, go for a walk three times a week and then up the workout as that's no longer hard for you, start lifting weights, and maybe join an aerobics or yoga class. I'm sorry, but if you don't know this basic stuff, you probably can't breathe on your own!

Just to totally slam this point home, there are the characteristic phrases in large type on alternate pages, and stupid cartoons showing a fat, balding guy running down the street sweating.

For the basic information found in this little piece of fluff, my suggestion is: just ask your doctor. You'll save the cover price, and won't have your intelligence insulted in the process. But if you're as parable-addicted as the One Minute Moron, maybe you do need this book.

One extra star for correct beginner fitness advice.

 
Condition Orange-- oh no!

Drop everything and run for the hills!

I've been swimming in DeNile about the stupid friggin' terrorism alerts ever since 9/11, and the war on Afghanistan... This administration nauseates me more than I care to a) admit and b) face.

Anyway, I smell a rat.

Think about it: massive troop movements to the Gulf. Mobilization...

So now the alert is on Orange, and there has been a very vague warning about "soft targets" in danger in the US and abroad that Americans are staying at. No reason. No specifics. No nada. But the alert is raised. Ohkay.

So, beware, Americans! You're in danger, but no one's told you from what... And the reason why is due to increased troops in the Gulf. And there's no concrete target. And Dumbya and co. are pushing more and more and more for war.

Do you feel your hysteria rise not knowing where the target would be or who would be threatening these diffuse targets? Think that might be the goal? Get the American public afraid enough that it would support an unpopular war....?

Hmmm... I smell a rat. A more specific and more genuine threat would lower the hysteria instead of increasing it nationwide. One lady on Oprah today (ah the glories of TV as you're pedalling on the elliptical) claimed she was horribly worried about Saddam's weapons. Considering he has no way to deliver them, it's a touch irrational. If you're irrational enough to be afraid of a petty tinhorn dictator in a small country halfway around the world, what would a raised terrorism alert level do to you?

Oy vey. War's coming, and there's no way around it... Damnation!

 
Since the coding was all fuxored

Here's the operating system I am:

 
Gotta love it!

Or you're toast! Heh, been musing about ye olde work situation which makes ZEEEERO sense to me. In fact, it makes zeeeero "logical sense" which is my boss' way of saying, "Makes sense..."

I've been wondering what the point of the expression "making logical sense" is. I mean, there's making sense, and there's nonsense. That's it! What else is there in this wide universe? Redundancy drives me insane. And what could possibly be more redundant than making "logical sense." Either you make sense or you don't, and there's nothing else! Which is why I gather the expression, "logical sense," really is nonsense. Surprise, surprise. I'm not even going to associate this bit of silliness with a book I'm reading about the "logic of chaos." Godz above!

But, anyway, I digress. I had a Scott Adams moment at work yesterday during this little "testing get-together" meeting yesterday. We were supposed to find out about this one test, and take care of a few "housekeeping" items. Ohkay, whatever. Things were sort of blah, people asking some questions. All of a sudden, the boss erupts in this rantish thing. Basically, someone had reported to her from this mini-meeting we'd had the day before that someone had complained about contacting the districts via telephone. "I don't want anyone EVER saying they don't want to talk to their districts. You have an opportunity that I envy-- the chance to build relationships and really care about these people. You cannot say in the call center that you don't want to talk to anyone! I can't stand to hear that kind of talk or hear about that kind of talk!" Uh what? So much for the First Amendment.

'Course her interpretation was dead wrong about what had actually happened. Two of us were concerned about efficiency, and a more rational way of handling getting this one project taken care of than calling every single district, when it might not be rationally necessary. In fact, in some cases, it was totally unnecessary. And in some cases the project could get finished much more quickly using such modern conveniences --oooh ahhh--- as e-mail. Whatever.

This is the same person who asserted to everyone that all of us work in a "fun, team atmosphere." Everyone sort of looked skeptical, since we all know the truth...

**sigh**

 
I usually hate the Enneagram...

It's almost always been inaccurate, but I love this little graphic-- it's so me:


free enneagram test

 
Women are like waves

Um yeah... One of my little chuckles whenever I head over to Paul's is to read a page here or there out of his copy of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. I'm staggered by just how wrong most of the advice is in that book, especially when it comes to to women who fall under a "T" orientation on the Myers-Briggs profiling. Hell, I read that and find myself identifying with the men who go in their "caves" and not the flaky women who cry and moan and wait for reassurance. I like to "retreat" when I'm feeling pissy or tired or depressed, and work through the problems on my own. So, does this mean I'm a Martian? Nope! Instead, as a woman, I am like a "wave." I ride the crest and then fall deep into the bottom of my well, where I need to be "supported" by talking about all my feelings. Uh yeah.

It's nice to know you have the support if you need it, but I usually don't. Maybe I'm just weird. Or maybe John Gray is full of shit. I know I'm weird, but I also know that you can't make a huge book of generalizations about what "all women" or "all men" need. I know a lot of men who are "Venutian" and a lot of women who are "Martian." Hell, the breakdown of T versus F temperments are pretty much 65/35, which means that a pretty large minority of either sex ends up with the characteristics that Gray assigns to the other sex. I'm a T, and I will always be a T. You can claim I'm an F all you want, but I'll never be one of the basket-cases that Gray talks about.

So what's stranger, me, a woman, identifying with the male perspective in Gray's book, or Gray's assertion that I fit into a generic "woman" mold that he conjures up in his own F-based head? If I didn't know any better, I'd say that he was a misplaced "Venutian" himself. But then again, who knows?

Logic would dictate that there needs to be more than just one single model of male/female interaction, since there are billions of different men and women, and thousands (or maybe hundreds of thousands) of different cultures with different constructs of male/female relations. Maybe it's this generic categorization that gets me more than anything else. With all of the different models out there, how can anyone assert that there is one single "right" way for men and women to interact, and to advise an entire sex on how to behave in regard to the other one?

John Gray is full of shit.