Excerpt from a Mid-Year Performance Review and Evaluation of Cindy S.
In general, Cindy produces high quality work and has an attention to detail. However, Cindy regularly demonstrates a lack of urgency saying things like, “it’ll get done or it won’t get done,” and she doesn’t seem to connect her actions with their results. Also, Cindy can pushback when given a simple request, to create a graph, for example, and, while she get’s the work done, she often uses language that is inappropriate for the workplace to describe her displeasure with the task at hand (I also suspect that the graph itself contained some hidden message).
Dolly Parton – Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?
Stick around to the last few seconds.
From Rick Neece’s iPad
Why do all y’all always post the good stuff while I am away?
The feud boiled over when Frank Frazetta Jr. used a backhoe to try to break into the artist’s museum in the Pocono Mountains
A 1971 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta has sold for $1.5 million, two months after the Pennsylvania artist’s death.
“If you find that your opossum gets restless during this procedure, give it a grape.”
Public Law Library Again
Caller: “Which crimes will the judge use to decide whether or not I can get a name change?”
Librarian: “Huh?”
Caller: “I was convicted of thieft, egg assault, drug possession, and conceal-weapon. They found thangs on me, but it was not mine! So which crimes will the judge use to decide whether or not I can get a name change?”
Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
This from a New York times Writers on Writing item by Elmore Leonard, cadged from an LA Times Jacket Copy piece: Janet Fitch’s 10 rules for writers.
dear clusterflock
Let’s say you’ve come into an unexpected inheritance. It totals about $4,000. What should I do with it? Spend part of it being responsible, part irresponsible?
Excerpt from a Mid-Year Performance Review and Evaluation of Terry Gross
When Terry is in the office she delivers high quality work and tends to pique my curiosity in subjects I would not normally have an interest in. However, I am disappointed in the number of times Terry simply turns in work from a previous project or assignment in order to ensure she can take a day off without having to complete additional work before her departure. For example, Terry recently submitted work that had been completed in 2004 and simply recorded a new introduction that said the guest had recently released a new album or died. While the new introduction did make the interview somewhat relevant, most people do not get paid to submit work they completed and were paid for six years ago. In the future I would expect Terry to plan ahead and record something new or find someone to cover for her before going out on a scheduled vacation.
“Being a big guy certainly has its advantages”
headline of the day
Giant sinkhole swallows Escalade in Wisconsin
A different approach to security at Camden Yards
A kid runs onto the field at Camden Yards and they definitely don’t tase him, bro.
from the moderated comment spam
Eloisa Curlis:
Wow, It reminds me a joke i’ve heard yesterday. As the moral is closely the same! =) A guy in his forties purchased a brand-new Bmw and had been out on the interstate just for a wonderful evening ride. The top was initially down, a breeze was blowing through what was left of his wild hair and he decided to open her up. Since the hook hopped up to ninety mph, he suddenly saw blinking red and blue lights behind him. “There is no way they can catch this car!,” he thought to himself and opened her up even more. A hook come to ninety, hundred…. Next the reality of the problem strike him. “What the heck am I doing?” he thought and pulled over. The cop arrived up to him, took his licence without having any phrase and examined it as well as the car. “It’s happen to be a long evening, this is the end of my shift and it is Friday the 13th. I don’t feel like far more paperwork, thus if you’ll be able to provide me an reason for your driving a car that I haven’t heard before, you can go.” The guy thinks for a second and says, “Last week my spouse went off with a cop. I was worried you were trying to give her back.” “Have a great weekend,” says the policeman.
from the comments
If a child asks — “Mama, why did you give me the last of the food and take none for yourself?” and the mother says “Because I love you” — that is a better answer at that moment than one that would have described genetically reinforced mechanisms aimed at species survival. Yet, if the child asks many questions about her world, and each time the answer is — “Because God made it that way” — a lack of satisfaction is going to appear and a strong desire to see what is hidden will begin. Because we want to know, we like to believe that a complete knowing may be reached: the physical perspective sees the path as one of incremental tearing down and rebuilding and adding to; the spiritual sees it as already present but dimly perceived — each person a hole cut in dark fabric with the starfield flickering behind it. In each of these perspectives problems arise (and will always arise) when the authority of a Complete Knowledge is drawn upon before it is possessed or can be compellingly demonstrated. But I wonder — what would we be when there was nothing left to learn? Here I come down on the side of Wallace Stevens, in “Sunday Morning”:
VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receeding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Bought Silence, Bought Speech
LONDON (AFP) – The head of the American Association of Professors accused BP Friday of trying to buy the silence of scientists and academics to protect itself after the Gulf oil spill, in a BBC interview.
“This is really one huge corporation trying to buy faculty silence in a comprehensive way,” said Cary Nelson.
Puppet factories: depending upon respect for argumentation while undermining its better uses. What methods are best for confronting the results of such efforts, when charges of hypocricy and bias are immediately knocked down by the rushing flood of tendentious speech?
Big Mexican Women Help Afghans Go AWOL From Texas Air Force Base
The Afghan deserters refer to the women as “BMWs” — Big Mexican Women — and they often are the first step in the Afghans’ journey from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to Canada, a diplomatic official told FoxNews.com. He requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly during an ongoing investigation by U.S. and international authorities into who helped the Afghans leave the Defense Language Institute’s English Language Center at Lackland.
Fox News = Grain of Salt.
China has an oil spill of its own
Update: Another gallery.
“The law is clear, you are what you are born as,” Ellis said.
The family of a southeast Texas firefighter killed in a July 4 blaze has sued to void his marriage to his transgender widow and prevent her from getting his death benefits because she was born a man and Texas doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages.
A bacterium is actually producing the chemical that smells so good
Searching for the smell of dirt, I found:
Why does my boyfriend love to watch me smell my dirty knickers?
(Category: Women’s Health)
from the spam
This extreme dieting is loss of excess body fat for human body has nutritional requirements, all people get older.
The End of History Ale
BrewDog, a brewery in the UK that specializes in high-volume ales, claims they’ve created the world’s strongest beer. As if this wasn’t enough of a feat, the $750-a-bottle brew is literally packaged in dead animals:
Twelve bottles of The End Of History ale have been made and placed inside seven dead stoats, four squirrels and one hare.
[...]
The firm’s co-founder James Watt said: ”In true BrewDog fashion, we’ve torn up convention, blurred distinctions and pushed brewing and beer packaging to its absolute limits.
”This is the beer to end all beers. It’s an audacious blend of eccentricity, artistry and rebellion; changing the general perception of beer, one stuffed animal at a time.
Life in a Day
Via Google.
Internet dating, 5
38-year-old male located forty miles outside a metropolitan area contacts 26-year-old female within city limits:
I don’t know how our two lives would fit together, but, I think that we are looking for the same thing; expressing and experiencing love in a happy and fulfilling relationship. I’m looking to grow a quality long-term relationship to celebrate life; I am open to the possibility that could be with you — unless you would rather miss out and live your life without a man’s energy.
bullshitartistrendering
My favorite tag at Wired Science.
Pasadena Museum of California Art’s Design Biennial
From a Brooke Hodge post at The New York Times Style Magazine:
In the past two years, most news out of California has been dire, from the state’s tanking economy to rising unemployment and drastic cuts to education. The Golden State has long been recognized as a locus of creativity and innovation and, as the Pasadena Museum of California Art’s Design Biennial shows, it takes more than a little recession to dampen designers’ spirits. In fact, innovation and experimentation often thrive in hard times.
