The above set me to what probably sounded like a horrible crying/coughing fit but was actually out-of-control laughter, thigh-slapping, &c., much like my recent discovery of Dogs in Elk and I Has a Sweet Potato.
Hat tip for Austenbook: Shari. Thank you, Shari!
…or maybe the zeroth. :)
My boss added a 5th law of PMing today:
5. If you think you just received everything you need to move forward, chances are good you’re wrong.
A moment ago, I was sitting, carefully removing pumpkin puree from my hand blender with a finger, and wondering how many other people like (plain) pumpkin enough to eat puree off an implement. This is fairly flavorful pumpkin — I’ve definitely had pumpkin that’s bland enough I wouldn’t eat it plain — but I suspect the desire to eat any kind of pumpkin plain is not that great in most people. Add sugar and spice and all that’s nice and it’s a different story, of course.
In other news, I’m getting comment-spammed so badly that I basically can’t take the time to find any new “good” commenters out of the mess. So if you’ve left a comment recently and not seen it show up, sorry, it went in the dustbin along with the hundreds of spam comments. Mail me if you need to get approved.
I wrote this as a little light work joke, but it’s funny in part because these situations do tend to keep cropping up…
The Laws of Project Management
1. There is no spec.
1a. If there is a spec, it will change as soon as you start work.
2. There are never as many resources as the project requires.
3. Things are very urgent when people tell you what the due date is, but not when you need something from them in order to meet it.
4. Whatever it is, they needed it yesterday.
According to Michael Pollan, rocket is also the “proper American name” for arugula:
It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”)
Arugula is the Italian name for it, so I’m not exactly sure what people have against it. Zucchini and broccoli (hardly pretentious vegetables) also have Italian names. Lots of American favorite foods are Italian in origin — pizza and pasta, anyone? Well, unlike zucchini and broccoli (and pizza and pasta), it is often expensive, and since it is expensive and sounds foreign, its existence must clearly be at the insistence of liberal yuppiehood. (It probably helps that Italian is now also associated with Starbucks and other gourmet coffee brands, as I presume it wasn’t when zucchini, broccoli, pizza, and pasta became part of American culture.)
Dan commented on the LJ feed of my blog on the same thing Pollan is talking about:
You know how arugula is the new metonymy for all things liberal yuppie? I doubt that’d be the case if we called it “rocket”.
My response was:
Maybe I’ll start calling it rocket. (But then I think people will mocket (ha) by calling it ‘roquette’.)
As it turns out, it actually is called roquette too.
I enjoyed the article a lot — I love the thought that some of the White House’s South Lawn could be turned into a Victory Garden of sorts. I don’t agree with everything that Pollan suggests, but it’s a great batch of ideas to assess. And it has this amusing tie-in to my last entry. Win!
I’m sort of reluctant to post this lest they track me down, but apparently I’m not only a lost alumna of the AYSP (Albuquerque Youth Symphony Program), but a lost alumna on the internet!
Please, don’t turn me in! I’d like to stay missing. I get enough monetary requests from old institutions as it is.
New favorite word: argh-inspiring.
And the blog it’s noted in (Wordlustitude), is also my new favorite blog.
Courtesy of the wonderful Sars.
I can’t resist:
Now consider again Skinner’s sentence:
Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale.
This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of situations in which justice has little to do with a disobedient whale. Equivalently, there are no situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale, in which justice doesn’t have little to do with a disobedient whale.
Earlier today I read one of the weekly emails from my VP and found myself thinking, there are some things that really don’t make a lot of sense without context and sound very strange and funny when presented alone. And I think justice not having anything to do with a disobedient whale is definitely one of them.
While re-reading The Right Attitude to Rain, I came across several quotations I thought about memorializing in my Facebook profile, including this one:
How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number. And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort.
This is so emblematic of what I love about Alexander McCall Smith. He’s full of these funny little observations that are expressed in the compact, deadpan way that British people have of saying things. Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort. It’s lovely.
In the end I decided that pickled onions were probably enough Alexander McCall Smith for one Facebook profile, but I did want to add a lovely little poem about Scotland that’s quoted closely following the above gem. When I searched for the poem, though, one of the results that came up was from an SNP (Scottish National Party) news release, about SNP MSPs wearing the white rose of Scotland to the opening of Parliament. I was concerned that maybe the poem has nationalist associations that I wasn’t aware of, but I couldn’t find anything else that suggested that it’s more than a longstanding image association made famous by nationalist poet.
To make sure I was spelling the poet’s (pen) name correctly, I looked him up in Wikipedia, and found this gem:
He was instrumental in creating a truly Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he was a communist. Unusually for a communist, he was a committed Scottish nationalist.
The parallel there sent me into gales of laughter, closely followed by coughing. There can’t have been that many Scottish communists, anyhow, I would think.
I also found this bit amusing:
MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia amongst his hobbies in his Who’s Who entry.
Not that Anglophobia is funny, per se, but having Anglophobia as a hobby in your Who’s Who entry strikes me as strangely hilarious.
For what it’s worth, I’m neither a Scottish nationalist nor an Anglophobe, but I do think it’s a beautiful little verse, expressive of the love I feel for Scotland.
The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet — and breaks the heart.
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