A deer, a deer, a Male deer.

OK, not “So”, but OK.

At some point today, my ex-boss (see entry about my review this year for a level set) comes by my desk. He says, “So, what you doing tonight round 5:00?”

I’m usually trying to figure out how to sneak off to the gym at that point. But, I say, “Ah, I dunno, why?”

He says, “Well a couple of us have been going the El Blazo after work, and that guy Scott who just went to work for you is there. Thought you might like to join.”

Now, I just sent Scott on a trip to Richardson Texas for a week. (It’s a dry county) I had been feeling guilty about making a good Orinda born guy, educated at UCLA hang in Richardson for a week. Think George Bush-Tom Delay heartland here. Beers not allowed, and if it was, it sure as Hell shouldn’t be taxed. After one week there, I think Scott wants adopt a gaggle homeless lesbians or open a coalition for dispossessed descendents of 49er’s. So, buying him a few beers seemed a good compromise.

Oh, the specifics of how much who drank, and what they did, are not important. What is, is, the deer.

A six-point buck.

The kind my Dad would like to assassinate on a regular basis each year. Someone had assassinated it, paid to have it mounted, and given it to the bar. There it was, staring at me as I was a drinking my beer. Not staring at me like most mounted deer. You know, straight on, symmetrical, with both eyes. No, this deer had a cocked head, slightly to the right, and it looked out the corner of its left eye, with a bit of smirk on its face. (Kind of a “What you doin look? Uh, I know what you are all about.” )

I didn’t like it.

Well, actually I did.

I mean, who the hell was that deer? Having been all assassinated, to look at me like that? Who was the taxidermist with the twisted sense of humor who created that creature? I pointed it out to others, including my ex-boss. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Having issues with Montana?” (My father that assassinates deer, antelope and elk, lives in Montana. My mother does too, but she doesn’t assassinate much.)
”No,” I said. “ I just wonder about it. “

“I think you have issues with Montana” he said, and went back to his glass of wine.

Now, I have issues with certain things. I discuss them in this blog on occasion. Sometimes they are with stuff that goes on in Montana. But that wasn’t the issue today. But I can tell you this. I liked that deer. I liked it so much, I’m going to have my Dad assassinate one just like it for me next season. Then I’m going to take some of my California rich guy money, and I’m going to pay a taxidermist to mount it with a one eyed twisted head look like the one in the bar. Then I’m going to hang it in one of my bathrooms so that is stares at people whilst they are going about their business. And while they are a sittin there a concentrating, that deer who will be looking at them with that “What you doin look on its face.” Then they’ll have trouble concentrating.

A few Iraqi Measurements

So,

I haven’t picked on the President about much lately.

But before I do, let’s talk about the concept of metrics. I get measured at work. For that matter, I measure things at work. Mostly I measure statistics on my projects to determine how well things are going. Now what I measure are straight forward things. I set a goal, like “I want to build a big software system by such and such a date, with a certain budget and with a quality standard of some kind. Most of my goals work out something like this. Build xxx project for less money than my peers could, without killing any of my subordinates, and within some timeline everyone won’t gripe about. I check the statistics as my project goes along. I stay within goals and I usually succeed. For this ability my company has seen fit to put me in the 98 percentile of income in the U.S.

George is in the 99 percentile of income in the U.S. He claimed today in a press conference that things were looking up in Iraq. He indicated Iraq had had elections and the new government was meeting. Things are looking up. Note his metric is not really something you can measure like: “Are you on budget, on schedule or what not?” I guess he’s on schedule. The new Iraqi government met today. But does that answer whether things are looking up?

Welp, truth is most things are up in Iraq. Here are few stats told in terms corporations use a lot. --Comparisons to say monthly or quarterly results from a year ago.


US Troop Casualties

Wounded in Iraq (But survived.)

Jan 2003 - 0
Jan 2004 - 187
Jan 2005 - 789

Wounded in Iraq (But didn’t survive.)

Jan 2003 - 0
Jan 2004 - 47
Jan 2005 - 107

** Note in Jan 2003 the Operations Iraqi Freedom had not begun so statistics on actual deaths/injuries
in Iraq operations were not gathered, and have been extrapolated.


Here are a few other statistics:

Amount of capital outlay on the part of the U.S. government for operations in IRAQ

Jan 2003 $83,000,000 (Monthly cost of enforcing no-fly zone)
Jan 2004 $7,080,000,000 (Monthly cost of occupation.)
Jan 2005 $9,333,333,000 (Monthly cost of holding elections.)


Then there is the whole issue of Iraqi dead.

Number of Iraqi’s being killed by Americans

Jan 2003 – 0
Jan 2004 – 690
Jan 2005 – 869

**It should be noted most Americans are killing Iraqi’s shooting at or caught between them and other
Iraqis shooting at Americans. For those caught in the middle I don’t think they care much who shot
then, the end result was the same. But for the purpose of metrics it can be made significant.

Then the really revealing statistics

Number of Iraqi’s being killed by member so Sadam Husein’s Regime

Jan 2003 – 22 (This included convicted criminals)
Jan 2004 – 634
Jan 2005 – 1948 (They weren’t elected but still seem to wield influence.)

I COULD GO ON. BUT YES GEORGE, BY MOST MEASURES, THINGS ARE UP IN IRAQ.

Yeah George, I’m picking on you.

The Wooptee Doo Toilet Seesaw

A lot of people ask why I have such a big house. It’s not a question I can answer quickly. It’s big by most standards. 19 rooms. Well, more depending on what you consider rooms. I won’t bore you with the details of the floor plan. Ok, I will, just a little.
The 19 rooms don’t count the two stairways, the downstairs hallway or for that matter the three distinct rooms in the basement. The house is 25 rooms if you look at it from a number of rooms to be restored and cleaned perspective. That is, indeed, how I look at it. I have to deal with them on a daily basis. This is why after 6 and half years, I still have seven rooms to restore. Of the 19 official functional living rooms four have toilets. I use to have a toilet in the basement, but I took it out and haven’t replaced it. I will someday. But still, in the meantime, this house is built for scalability. Increase the total number of occupants and they can pretty much not notice each other. The bathrooms are all separately plumbed and have their own hot water heaters. When guests come, we can all shower and shit at once and not inconvenience anyone. Pretty cool, huh? That’s right; there are no bathroom lines at party’s women. The house is built for volume but organized for individual efficiency. Occupants can see each other going about their business but never really have to share a toilet seat or even a common wall if they don’t want too.

Course most of the time I live in the house by myself. This leads me to the peculiar behavior of rotating bathrooms over the week. I need to feel like I’m utilizing all the space and I don’t want the toilets to feel neglected.

Now where I work at is pretty much the opposite. The building houses 8000 workers and we are in large open atrium office levels which stretch for about a quarter of a mile. There are four wings, four stories high. It’s vast, and built for efficiency. --Building efficiency, not worker efficiency. I can spend ten minutes walking between meetings and it takes fifteen minutes to get from where I park my car to where I park my ass. (We call this a productive workspace.) So while we the workers at my company, formerly called yaba daba du, formerly du –yabba and soon to be daba again (I had to change the names to comply with a recent company memon on mentioning the company in blogs) are wasting so much time traveling back and fourth between places to essentially park our ass , we tend to have a lot of lines, choke points and bump into each other in odd ways. One of the odd efficiency meeting items: the toilets. All the toilets in the building are wall mounted. Men’s and Women’s bathrooms share a common wall between the toilets. I suppose this was done for plumbing efficiency. It lowered costs and solved dealing with running plumbing lines through steel beams or something. But it has an added bonus. Parking your ass and taking a poop at work can be like a roller coaster ride. The toilets on opposite sides of the wall share the same mounting bracket. You can be sitting there concentrating away, hoping you don’t stink the place up too much and --whooptee doo. You are on a toilet seesaw. Someone sits down and you get a little lift in life. Usually just a subtle little rise under your legs to let you know you have member or the opposite sex in close proximity sharing a bodily function. It’s not a full rise, but you notice it.

Now the thing is, after a few years of experiencing this, you start to wonder about the Wooptee Doos. You can’t help notice that they come in various levels of intensity.
--Something like the Richter scale. Sometimes it’s just a gentle bump in the groin area. Other times, someone gets off the other toilet, and you feel a moment of weightlessness as you enter into free fall. To put the Wooptee Doo Richter Scale in perspective, I weigh 270 pounds. So, when I get a big lift or a big fall, I have to wonder what was on the other side balancing me. Our company has a lot of pretty large women roaming the building. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Not that I think making fun of fat is a good idea. I weigh 270, after all. (Note: I also have 20 inch biceps and bench 210 lbs 120 times a workout just for the heck of it) But even a well worked out woman can’t weigh 270 and not be a behemoth. And if they can sit down on the toilet and fling me up into the air on the other side, well, they lost sense of reality somewhere. --Cause, they weigh a lot more than me. So when women walk by me he the halls and sit in meetings, I start to wonder, where on the Wooptee Doo scale they stand. I especially wonder that if they are really big and tend to not pay attention to me when I’m asking questions or giving direction. (I’m a director after all, I give direction.)

Guess who tends to spend the least time paying attention to what I say? You guessed it, the women on the high end of the Wooptee Doo scale. Not that I’m saying that means anything really important. It’s just a biased non-scientific observation of a guy who has dealing with a couple of women who have been taking a little multi-million dollar project I’ve been directing for the last year for a roller coaster ride. A big whooptee doo. We are now four hundred percent over budget and fifty percent behind schedule. When I ask questions or make suggestions on how we might trim the fat and get the project on balance, I am quite impolitely and publicly eviscerated. You’d think I’d suggested something radical like, “On balance, raw vegetables and fresh fruit was healthier to eat than Hagen Daas.”

I bring all this up, because I’m sure that if either one of these women were to sit down on the opposite end of the toilet seesaw from me. I would be sent sailing. But they have overlooked one minor issue, sitting there on the other side of the wall, in what they think is their own little toilet. (Nibbling potato chips and declaring themselves queen.) The person on the other side of the seesaw has more muscle. On Monday, it’s them, that will be sailing, and they won’t be thinking it’s a wooptee doo.



Special Note:

The author of this piece does not in any way want to imply lack of cooperation and focus are traits restricted only women on the high end of the Wooptee Doo scale. However, given certain sexual barriers in America, the physical limits of the work toilet seesaw lab, the relative difference in the number of times a woman has to sit down in a bathroom to that of a man and therefore the limits to subsequent possible observations of male members of society on the high end of the Wooptee Doo scale, the author will have to draw a hasty generalization that: members of either sex on the high end of the Wooptie Doo scale tend to be unfocussed and uncooperative. But this conclusion is based on conjecture and extrapolation and not empirical data points gathered for this article on women with high wooptee doo coefficients. Therefore the reliability of the women wooptee doo conclusion is less suspect that the male wooptee doo conjectures. But in either case we are just talking about a bunch of fat asses.

The skinny on the unknown/known people in our life.

I was working out at the gym the other day watching Philosophy Guy run on the treadmill as I did ab crunches. Philosophy Guy is a twenty something blond Berkeley student, 5’10”, 165, in good shape with medium long hair pulled back to a short ponytail. He also has a kind of a scraggily beard you see on a lot of vegans. You know they kind who use bio-diesel in their bus as they travel to Grateful Dead revivals? Though, Philosophy Guy bathes more than bio-diesel vegans. We meet every Saturday. I lift weights. He runs on the treadmill and then does a lot of dips. I gave him the name “Philosophy Guy” because the first time I noticed him he was standing beside a thin twenty something female student. They were carrying on a conversation about Philosophy near an abdominal machine I use between lift sets. The discussion lasted the entire one and a half hours of my work out. The next week, I noticed him on the treadmill. I thought, “Hey there that philosophy vegan looking guy.” But I didn’t really know if he was a vegan, and he didn’t smell like one, so I just call him Philosophy Guy. (I didn’t name the girl, I never saw her again. Though I think Philosophy Guy would like to see her.)

Now Philosophy Guy is not anybody important in my life. Hell, I don’t even have the slightest idea of what his name is. But I see a lot of him, so I need to organize him in my brain, and I gave him a name: “Philosophy Guy.” I haven’t even heard him talk since the day he tried to pick up on the unnamed girl. But I think about him as he is running. Mainly because I’m jealous of what good shape he’s in. Though I don’t want his beard or hair, I kind of wish I had a twenty something body, and could run again. But that’s not the point of this blog entry.

You see, Philosophy Guy is only one of a large myriad of people I have names for. All of these people have one thing in common. I see them on a regular basis around town, and I don’t have the slightest idea who they are. At the same time, they haven’t got the slightest idea who I am. I’ll give you some examples:

Clothes Change Guy:

A twenty something, maybe late teens, African American guy who I also see each Saturday at the gym. Reason for his name: he does one set of lifts then circuit wanders the entire gym floor singing to himself. For each different exercise he does he adds or subtracts a layer of clothing. Depending on what he’s doing he may have his hoodie on, or a tank top, or a t-shirt on top of the tank top. We won’t get into the sweat pants etc. What clothes he’s not using for that set he keeps in a pile by the wall. I probably should call him “Fashion Guy.”

Al Qaida Woman:

A rather short fat red hair with white streaks woman who drags a roller suitcase behind her at work each day. About a year ago, if you a regular reader of this blog I had a rather large entry about her. She blocked my entrance to work one day and demanded to see my badge. Despite me showing her the badge and showing it worked on the automatic door entrance, she refused to let me pass. We had a minor altercation which she turned me in for 8 months later. I didn’t know her name then, and I was asked not to contact her in the future. So I gave her the name Al Qaida Woman. I also keep about three hundred feet away from her at all times, cause I’m sure she’ll blow up at me if I get within two hundred feet.

Now there are tons of others:

Green Mohawk Guy, Bearded Lesbian Biker, One Heavy Lift of Everything Guy, Obnoxious Gym Guy (He runs around the locker room in San Ramon, naked and talks to everyone about sports, his vacations, etc, while we all just try and change and not dwell on the fact our penis’s our hanging out.) and Duck Guy (He always has OSU shirts on).

We all know these type of people, we all see them everyday, but we haven’t got the slightest idea who they are or what they are about in another context. So we give them a name and we probably create a story about them. Well, I do. I need a story to go with a name. As my friend Ian is apt to say, “What is the skinny” when he meets someone new. That’s what I need, the skinny or brief blurb on people. If I’ve never really met them, I make it up, like I have here. For the most part, our invented story is probably better than real life. I know it works that way when people do it for me.

As I have mentioned before my friend Mike and I are apt to frequent the local lesbian bar in our neighborhood on Wednesday night and talk to the straight bartender about politics. Now we do this quite innocently, and as time has progressed a skinny has developed on me. The local skinny: I’m bi-sexual married guy. As the story goes, I’m married to a 53 year old African American woman and we go into the bar to pick up women and sometimes men for three ways. --Ah if the skinny was really only the skinny.