Monthly Archives: September 2014

The scores are made up and the points don’t matter…

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Maybe the worst thing you can do in a room full of people who analyze and evaluate information for a living is walk in and show them a presentation while telling them that you don’t know how the data was processed to arrive at the stated conclusion you want them to believe. Most of us are already cynical from long years of having people try to convince us that “this time is different” or “shit doesn’t stink and I have a comprehensive study to prove it.” When you, the peddler of snake oil wrapped in a pretty PowerPoint covering, basically tell us that the scores are made up and the points don’t matter all you’ve really said is you’ve wasted an hour of our time. You see, that’s what happens when you pass along data that’s impossible to validate, from sources that are impossible to verify. Now that might not have been your intent, that was most assuredly the result.

In this line of work, credibility is pretty much the only coin of the realm. Once it’s lost, it almost never comes back without a massive effort and wasting even more time. It’s my estimate that avoiding that path from the outset is the better, more practical, course of action.

But what do I know? I’m just a guy sitting here with 105 minutes of his life gone today that he’s never going to get back.

Research…

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There’s always a fine line when a project starts between wanting to just do the work quietly and wanting to blog about every step along the way. In the interest of not giving away the store before it’s even written, I’ll try to keep my discussion points fairly general in terms of the next product in the jeffreytharp.com pipeline. Suffice to say it’s not going to be quite like any of my previous efforts.

I haven’t set down to a writing effort yet that didn’t start off with research… and that’s where the lion’s share of my self-imposed writing time is allocated at the moment. I’m doing my best to spend an hour a day sourcing background information in the hope that once I have a stack of notes, I’ll actually be ready to sit down and put words on the page.

What I supposed you need to know now is there is a fresh work in progress. What I hope you’re going to see at the end of this trail is a deeply personnel (and intensely sarcastic) look at my relationship with life, work, and social media. It may not be of interest to anyone. It may not sell a single copy. But from the preliminary research I’ve done so far, I’m wholly fascinated by the ground this effort will end up covering.

The inevitable leggy brunette…

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I think I know why Hemingway went to places like Havana and Key West to do his writing. I can put more words on the page sitting in a dive bar perched at the end of a ramshackle pier than I can most days sitting in the comfort of my own kitchen. Working at home offers the distraction of the familiar and the hundred other things that need to be done to keep the household running. The dive is full of any number of exotic distractions, but they’re different somehow – almost inspirational in a way that your tired old Mr. Coffee and the hum of the refrigerator will never be. There’s something about being away from the familiar that lets the ideas come more freely. Who knows, maybe there really is something to being outside your normal box.

Plus, if only in my own deluded fantasy, when the inevitable leggy brunette slides in next to you with her CrossFit body and a voice of a 1940s Hollywood starlet asking what you’re doing, you can tell her you’re writing a novel… or a novella in my case… but you’re going to want to say novel because no one really knows what a novella is. Besides, chicks dig writers. Quiet down. I already pointed out this is my own deluded fantasy and not the real world where people stare at you blankly when you tell them your grand aspirations as a writer. Sadly, neither the fantasy brunette nor the writing career is really the point.

The only reason I bring any of this up is I’ve spent the last six weeks writing from notes I put together while I was at the beach. That’s six weeks working from material I put together in my spare time over three days and nights. I’d hate to think what my daily word count could jump to if not saddled by such trivial matters as having bills to pay and a full time job. Reality is an often troublesome taskmaster.

Tonight, much to my chagrin, I realized my bag o’ ideas was empty and what I reached for as a substitute turned out to be something I wrote extensively about in 2011. In fact that old post was so close in phrasing at some points that it was genuinely creepy to look at them side by side, but written almost exactly three years apart. I’ve always said that I value consistency, but in this one small area, I worry it could be too much of a good thing.

Aside from being damned inconvenient, it also means from now on I’m apparently going to have to search my own website to make sure what I’m having is a legitimately new idea before spending any time rehashing a chestnut from the past. New ideas get harder and harder to come by when you’ve strewn opinion online for as many as five nights a week for almost eight years. I’ll either need to change up the routine, start seeing different parts of the world, and interacting with new people. Or I’ll just have to spend more time at the beach coming up with ideas. When I put it that way, there doesn’t really feel like a contest about which I should do… because changing up the routine, seeing different things, and meeting new people sounds just awful.

In triumph shall wave…

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20060809101028Today we celebrate the 200th anniversary of American victory at the Battle of Baltimore. At dawn on September 14th, 1814 a 30×42 foot flag was raised over the embattled Ft. McHenry. After 25 hours of bombardment by a numerically superior British force the American Army held it’s position, securing the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor and denying the British invaders a second major victory following their sack of Washington.

At seeing this massive flag flying over the fort’s battlements, a Maryland lawyer, Francis Scott Key, was so moved that he noted his thoughts in the form of a poem – Defence of Fort M’Henry – that would serve as the lyrical basis for America’s national anthem.

If the American Revolution gave birth to our republic, the War of 1812 – and the Battle of Baltimore – confirmed that the new nation would be preserved and not restored to the dominion of a far away monarch.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Paying cash. There’s a time and a place for cash. I carry it myself. However, the toll plaza at rush hour is neither the time nor the place. That’s the time and place where you should suck it up and order an E-ZPass so you can keep moving through the booth while the toll is automatically deducted from your account. I’m sure you have some very good reason like it being a privacy violation or you’re too lazy to use the internet, but no one has the time to wait around behind you while you try to scrape together $8 in loose change.

2. Strategy. Time was in this country when the chief executive said he had a strategy that meant he had a grand vision for the role the country should play in world affairs. Monroe, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan, and even Bush (43) were able to clearly articulate how they wanted to use American power. Apparently now the grand vision is to tiptoe around the hard issues, not try too hard, and for God’s sake avoid offending the international community in any way. It might be an approach, but it’s not what I’d call strategy.

3. Ray Rice and Mrs. Ray Rice. He’s a dirtbag and she’s dumb enough to not just stay with him, but publicly defend him too. News reported. Could we now please move on to paying attention to something that matters?

The last perfectly average day…

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September 11I don’t remember a damned thing about September 10, 2001. It must have been a perfectly average Monday. I was a second year teacher just trying to get through the week – or more likely trying to get through until Thursday and pint night at the Green Door.

America went to bed that night a nation more or less at peace with the world – victors of the Cold War and long past the 100 hour ground war in Iraq – we contented ourselves with international peacekeeping and the occasional cruise missile strike. We collectively went to sleep not knowing what would happen a few hours later. We went to sleep not knowing we were already at war and that the enemy wasn’t coming for us from across the ocean, it was already here living amongst us. For a few more hours, ignorance was bliss.

Not long after dawn, thirteen years ago tomorrow, the enemy came out of a vivid blue sky, targeting indiscriminately men and women and children and killing our kin and countrymen in their thousands.

I don’t remember anything about the 10th of September, but I remember almost everything about the day that came after it. If I let it the whole thing can spool through my memory like a newsreel. When I think about it now, especially today, the anniversary of the last day that was perfectly average, the sting and loss and anger all come back. It’s just like it happened yesterday.

That’s for the best. So many are bent on forgetting – on reinventing a past that never existed – that those of us who lived through it owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to never forget what we saw and what actually happened on those days in September. As for me, I’ll never forget. I’ll never forgive those who did it or those who supported them and who support them still. At every opportunity I’ll call for my country to be vigilant, to take the war to the enemy, and to beat back the gathering international darkness using every element of our national power.

We’ve all most likely seen the last of our perfectly average days. From here on out I’m afraid we’re destined to live in interesting times.

The most unsurprising post of the year…

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I like to pretend that when it comes to iPhone I wait and judge each device on its merits. If that were the case, I probably wouldn’t have owned every variant of the device except the ill-fated 5C. So here, a few hours after its formal unveiling I’ll go ahead and say for the record that I’ll be in the market for one of the variants of the iPhone 6 in the same way an addict is 140901_BIT_AppleLogoin the market for just one more hit. That is to say I’d be likely to lie, cheat, and steal to get my hands on it next week. I’m not playing coy with this one at all. It looks like a pretty damned significant upgrade over even my well-loved 5S… and because of that I’ll be awake at 3AM this coming Friday, clicking refresh furiously hoping to land a coveted place in the order queue before the servers supporting Apple and AT&T melt down and I get bumped into the “Delivers in 2-3 Weeks” category. Because clearly that is far too long to wait. Failing a successful early morning pre-order for delivery on the first day of availability, yes I’ll be one of “those people” in line in the wee small hours of the morning on the 19th. And yes, I’ve already asked for the day off to either take delivery from the comfort of my own home or to fight the masses at the local Apple Store. I know I’m a sick man.

With all that said – and with as much as I love me a new and better iPhone – the real star of this afternoon’s press event was the Apple Watch. Based purely on specs, it’s a remarkable little device… and marks the first time in my life I’ve ever considered paying $350 for a watch. Fortunately, the fine people in Cupertino are giving me a four month breather between the phone and the watch so I won’t have to raid ye olde retirement account just to keep my kit up to date.

It appears that rumors of Apple’s impending doom have been greatly exaggerated.

The paranoia of a idle mind…

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First the good news: The doc seems to think that with continued exercises and stretching, my shoulder should remain serviceable into the foreseeable future. Unless something changes, I’ve managed to escape the need for an MRI and potential surgery. It’s hard not to like that kind of report.

The next bit of his spiel was less ideal – apparently there were some “anomalous” results from my last round of blood work. The minute a sawbones breaks out the phrase “it’s probably nothing to be concerned about”, I start getting twitchy. Having blood drawn for a retest of the ol’ liver was not part of today’s original agenda… but given the last decade of being kept alive by chemistry, I don’t I shouldn’t be awfully surprised when it throws a few anomalies here and there.

While he was finalizing my chart for the day, the last thing he offered was to “throw in an HIV test” if I wanted one. Apparently that’s something they’re offering to everyone this month thanks to a new CDC recommendation. I’m assuming he didn’t offer based on my looking like an IV drug user or some kind of “deviated prevert.” Nonetheless, I figured while they have a needle stuck in my arm, why not offer up the second vial.

Up until now I’ve never so much as pondered the possibility of HIV. Let’s be honest here, I’m a middle age, overweight, wanna-be hermit who spends his free time reading, writing, and making sure the lawn is cut “just so.” I’m not sure how much sex the good doctor thinks I’m having, but apparently he thinks it’s a lot and that I’m probably doing it unprotected with complete strangers. I’m not sure if I should be proud or offended. At any rate, even though the results are a foregone conclusion, the damned test has been drifting around the back of my mind all day even though it would do as much good to sit here and worry about a satellite falling out of orbit and landing on me.

This is one of those times when living inside my head is an awfully troublesome place to be.

By George…

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From time to time I’m criticized for not posting enough pictures, stories, or thoughts about George, the Russian tortoise who’s been in residence here for almost two years now. Rest assured that George is alive and well. He’s living in a 100 gallon Rubbermaid tub in the living room, eating a eclectic mix of greens, and spending his days pushing things from one side of his tank to the other. He’s basically doing what a tortoise does. For the record, they’re not a pet I’d recommend for someone looking for an activity partner – unless your preferred activity is basking.

With fall and winter coming on (not that you’d know it from the temperature around here lately), the days for getting him outside to roam around the yard are coming to an end. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to building him a bigger indoor enclosure to replace the three giant blue containers sitting in the corner. I was looking at materials and what others had done online, but really struck on what looks like the future the last time I was wandering around Home Depot. I think the solution might just be the plastic pond liners people use to add water features to their back yards. It’s got high sides, lots of interior space, and should be easy enough to configure into multiple levels to give him room to maneuver. With a little work it also looks like it would be less obtrusive in the room than what I’m using now.

OK, so technically that’s more of an update on what George’s future home is probably going to look like, but hopefully it’s enough to earn some credit for discussing the least mentioned of my 4-legged kids.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Neighbors. Tuesday night, one of the strong storms passing through the area cleaved several large branches off a tree in the neighbor’s yard. Two of those large limbs landed squarely in my yard, so after work I got out the saw, cut them up and piled them neatly for burning once they’ve hand a few weeks to dry out. The third of the limbs to come down fell in the neighbor’s yard, but landed in such a way that it snapped one of my fence posts and buckled several rails. Two days later, I’m still looking at that downed limb lying across a crumpled fence from my kitchen window. The neighbors have been home. I’ve seen the kids playing in the yard and I’ve seen their vehicles come and go, but neither of them has broached the subject of the limb, or the fence. We’re now engaged in a great game of seeing how long it takes the neighbor takes to do some basic yard work and if they’ve got the personal integrity to at least offer to take care of the repairs. Given my observation over the last four years, I won’t be holding my breath waiting for either of those things to happen. If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d have addressed the issue already… and therein clearly lies the problem of holding others to the standards to which I hold myself.

2. Standing corrected. I hereby retract that mean things I said about my credit union yesterday. I discovered today that the fault was all mine for making a boneheaded mistake writing out the damned check. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.

3. Attempted guilting. Since the office is now officially down to four, there’s apparently going to be a self-appointed chief of attempting to make everyone feel guilty about taking time off, “because then everyone else is sooooooo busy.” Maybe if I were a better person, I would feel guilty. Then I remember that I didn’t create the staff shortage and that I’ve earned every hour of leave I’ve banked over the last eleven years, so I’m going to go ahead and schedule it when I need it rather than when it’s convenient for someone else. I’ve got problems enough of my own without giving in to attempted guilting. Nice try, though.