Ever wanted to force-feed somebody a big dose of worming medicine?

 ---Disclosure: Some details have been fuzzified to protect the guilty--- 

Have you ever listened to somebody for ten minutes and thought, "If this guy was my dog, I would give him a whacking-big dose of worming medicine"?

There I was....

There I was in a phone call with the "On-boarding Specialist" for a multi-level marketing organization.  I had emailed him and waited two days with no acknowledgement or response from him. I emailed his boss suggesting that he share his expectations regarding getting back to underlings and I got a text from the on-boarding specialist three minutes later. "Is it OK if I call you tomorrow?"

I emailed him a list of issues I wanted covered in the phone call. Examples:

• What is the suggested attire?
• What are the key competitive points between what I am selling and the major competitors?

Pretty basic information, I thought. 

He started right off rambling. He acknowledge that he had received and reviewed my list of questions but didn't start answering them in the first five minutes of the conversation so I started asking him directly.

"What is the suggested attire?" I asked.

His response, "Well, we just want you to seem like the neighbor-next-door so you can wear whatever you want".

"What are the key competitive advantages that I should be hammering?" I asked.

His response, "It is my opinion that canned responses don't work and you should just wing-it".

In the nine-minutes and nineteen seconds I was on the phone with him (gotta love smartphones) the only thing he offered to do for me was to email a link to a "killer app" and he told me that I was expected to attend sales "pep-rallies" on Saturdays where "inspirational speakers" would energize us.

Every issue I raised where a proper response required that he actually DO SOMETHING/ANYTHING was met with the equivalent of an old, tired, worm-riddled Basset Hound mournfully lifting its eyes (but not its head) and huffing out a sigh. Does anybody want to guess the age of the OBS?

After cutting the phone-call short (hey, I was going to the beach and he had spent more than nine minutes saying nothing useful), I sent a quick email to the On-boarding Specialist's boss informing him that I didn't think I was a good fit with his organization's culture. That was the politest way I could think of to inform him that I have no intention wasting my time.

The day ERJ went to a swinger's bar...

Mrs ERJ and I were invited by Southern Belle and Belladonna, our two daughters, to join them for a fun day at the beach.

We went to our usual spot, Duck Lake State Park which is just south of Whitehall, Michigan. It is a family-oriented spot and not a "meat market" like some of the other beaches. Mrs ERJ likes it because there is no phone reception (other than 911). If you get a signal it is likely to be from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and your phone will change time-zones. One great thing about Milwaukee, though, is that it is always beer-thirty.

After the fun in the sun and surf, the kids wanted to go to a restaurant they had visited before. I only heard dribs-and-drabs of conversation as I was stowing cargo but I thought I heard that this restaurant was popular with "swingers". You can imagine my consternation when Mrs ERJ seemed very excited about visiting this restaurant.

 

The restaurant's name is "The Deck" and it is in Muskegon, Michigan. Entrees are in the $15-to-$25 range. Food arrived five minutes after ordering. The band was decent.

Work-tickets

We have been getting some spin-off from the storms raging through Northern Indiana for the last half-week. Random sprinkles, mist and fog. It makes cutting grass tedious because I have to stop frequently and clear the deck from wet clippings.

I went for a run this morning. It had been on yesterday's work-ticket but didn't happen. I chugged along for an entire mile at the blistering pace of 13:52. I had not run in over a year. I had no expectations. I hoped to be able to run more than a half-mile and I managed a mile. I was pretty sure that I would not be able to crack 12-minute-miles. 13:52 is a start.

Tomorrow is a lifting day. We are expecting rain the day after tomorrow, so I need to prioritize my outside tasks. Some weeding, which almost always gets pushed to a back-burner, needs to get done. Pushing a lawnmower is on the list. Picking up a half-yard of fill sand to level out a depression and to get water to flow away from the house is another "must".

The four Khaki Campbell ducks I purchased in May are starting to show secondary sexual characteristics. I am pretty certain that one of them is a girl and another is a boy. The other two seem to change characteristics based on the angle of the light. The one senior duck that I thought was a Khaki Campbell is probably a Khaki Campbell x Peking duck. It has many white feathers compared to the KC I purchased in May.

Bonus video

The creator of this video argues that modern chickens had most of their "survival instincts" (street-smarts) bred out of them. They are docile, slow and much too trusting and don't fare well in free-range programs when there is high predator pressure.

He contends that there are some "less improved", borderline feral, heritage breeds that still retain the street-smarts of the chickens that survived thousands of years of rough-and-tumble, laissez faire care. He specifically mentions Icelandic land-race, American Game and Old English Game.

In climates that are warmer than his, you can probably add Egyptian Fayoumi, Sumatra, various "fighting" breeds and other "flighty", small-bodied chickens. You might get 100 eggs a year out of each hens. They are likely to go broody and hatch out chicks in the oddest places. They also tend to be very protective mothers.
 

Presented without comment

 

Sisyphus, Prometheus, Snowden and others

There is a class of hero who defies convention and goes off-script. He operates outside of sanctioned channels and defies the power-brokers. If you comb through history you will see this character, an uncomfortable combination of Jung's Hero and Rebel archtypes, popping up at random intervals.

Adam defied God and ate from the tree of knowledge, bringing death and pain into the world. He suffered the pain of having one of his sons murdered by another one of his sons. 

Prometheus stole fire from Apollo and gave it to humans. He was chained to boulders on top of a mountain and his liver was pecked at by vultures only to have it grow back over-night. In ancient Greece, qualities like bravery and fortitude were believed to reside in the liver, much like way we say "have heart".

Sisyphus bartered with the gods for a spring that never ran dry for Corinth. He was sentenced to roll a boulder up a steep mountain only to have it slip from his grasp mere feet from the top and roll all the way back to the bottom.

Jesus defied the scribes and pharisees and the powers appointed by Rome. He promised mankind eternal life, something that was reserved for gods. He was crucified.

Galileo observed the wobbles of objects in the sky and deduced that the earth is not the center of the universe. He shared that conclusion and he was condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".  

Snowden revealed that nothing is private on the internet. Big-Brother trawls all traffic. Snowden fled to Moscow, Russia.

Batman?  

There are others. Some would include various politicians who defied the puppet-masters who were pulling strings in smoke-filled, back rooms. They campaigned and won in spite of the puppet-masters' dictates. You know who ISN'T one of these archtypes? Bernie Sanders. He rolled over even though he was set to trounce Hillary Clinton for the Democratic POTUS nomination in 2016.

These heroes (or antiheroes, depending on your perspective) are sprinkled through history and the stories about them shape how we perceive and process events. They created the mental structures we use to bring order to our lives.

Have you been to the beach lately?

 A palate cleanser 

If you are like me, the first two things you noticed are the complete lack of visible tattoos and her very practical fingernails.

It is very nice to see a picture of a woman who hasn't turned her skin into a comic-strip or her hands into horror-movie props.

I am sure that she has a very pleasant personality. 

Advanced Directives

Mrs ERJ and I are thrashing through our "Advanced Directives". I will be Mrs ERJ's decision-maker and she will be mine. We have a second person, an alternate, lined up in case the primary is not available. That can happen, for instance, if we were both in the same auto accident.

One of the difficulties is providing the alternate with some simple, clear-cut questions to ask the surgeon or attending doctor and communicate what the GO-NOGO criteria will be.

So, the picture in my head is that if I can sit in a wheelchair and hold a fishing rod or a shotgun 60 days after the surgery or intervention then I want the intervention. If there is a 50% chance that I will have that level of capability, I want the intervention. If there is a 25% chance that I will be able to reach that capability in 60 days, I want the intervention. If there is only a 20% chance that I will reach that level of capability in 60 days...I think I don't want the intervention.

Critical to this process is that the medical caregiver who is providing the information not be aware of what the cut-off values are. 

I need to have some tasks on "the other side" that give me a feeling of being productive, whether it be catching bullheads, carp or bluegills, or whether it be slaying bunnies, woodchucks and red squirrels intent on ravaging the garden and orchards.

Studies on how the human brain calibrations for various probabilities are pretty consistent. Most people are fairly well calibrated for 50:50 probabilities. The calibration gets shaky at 25:75 events and goes totally into the weeds at 20% probability.

 

May 31, 2022. Mrs ERJ was out-of-town and the tomato plants weren't going to plant themselves. That is precisely 31 days after I got whacked as I was crossing a street by a Malibu going 35 mph.

I got a big assist from Belladonna. She moved the trays of pepper plants to the garden for me. And she didn't rat-me-out to Mrs ERJ.

A physically-fit person in a wheel chair can probably run a zero-turn mower if there are not too many obstacles. If he is sufficiently motivated, he can probably do some straw-bale gardening and grow tomato seedlings, brew small batches of beer and, with a little bit of help, run a still. He might even be able to do a little bit of blogging on the side.

He can shake a bucket with corn in the bottom of it but he cannot chase cows and probably cannot close the gate. 

Any thoughts? 

University of Michigan goes all "Alice in Wonderland"

Alice: If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? 

For a very brief period, sanity prevailed in the education industry. The leading thinkers claimed that test-scores were much better at measuring the teachers' performance than a measure of an individual student's ability.

The logic was that a single test score was a snap-shot of a single student at an instant of time. Did he need to visit the restroom (anxiety)? Was there a big fight with his dad the night before. Did the girl he was interested in disrespect him just before the test? Maybe he had been up all night writing plug-ins for Call-of-Duty or software that compressed video in real-time. A single test score is a single number with very little context.

However, if a teacher is teaching three sections of freshman algebra, then there are seventy-five data points. It becomes crystal clear if a teacher skipped over some material that the students were responsible for because nearly all of the students will bomb the questions that measure that skill. If the scores of the classes are segregated with the earliest (in the day) class scoring poorly and the latest class scoring best, it indicates that the teacher failed to prepare for the class the night before and was "winging it". Or, if all of the students struggled with story-problems, it indicates that the teacher needs to do more story-problems on the chalk-board in front of the class, even if she absolutely hates story problems.

As you can imagine, this insight was extremely unpopular with teachers and they quickly buried it.

Which brings us to the University of Michigan 

University of Michigan will not issue grades to some freshmen students.

This is an admission of stunning failures of multiple systems within the education industry.

It is a failure of the admissions process. If the students are not ready to start their freshmen year at U-of-M, then why were they admitted? They can enroll at a community college, beef up their skills and then transfer to U-of-M.

It is a failure of the high schools feeding U-of-M. They were giving inflated grades to students who then hit-the-wall when presented with college-level work. There are multiple examples of valedictorians with +4.0 GPAs requiring remedial math classes as freshmen.

It is a failure of the high school academic advisors who "encourage" students with puffery rather than calibrating their expectations with reality.

It is a failure of a higher education system that prints reams of 4-year diplomas with zero market value, thereby requiring students to seek Master's degrees. In turn, the need to get into a Master's program puts pressure on students to generate high GPAs during their worthless 4-year program.

It is a failure of the U-of-M College of Education which has an enrollment of over 50,000 students. They are churning out teachers and administrators who cannot produce a "product" that is acceptable to the down-line customer, be it industry or higher education. Universities are trapped in the jaws of conflicting interest. They require better incoming students even as they churn out teachers who cannot teach and administrators who cannot "improve" the inadequacies of those teachers or discipline the students with criminal behaviors.

Consequently, they must dilute the value of their primary product, diplomas. Like Rome adding lead to their silver coins, it is a one-way street.  Home schooling is looking better by the day to the normal people.

The only question is whether the education industry dies a slow, tortuous death by starvation or whether they are catastrophically defeated like the Spanish Armada which sailed top-heavy ships into the storm. 

 P.S. Parents and grandparents, self-esteem should be EARNED. Proper self-esteem is based on reality and is an unshakable foundation. It is a source of confidence and is the basis for a robust outlook on life. The false-esteem shilled by the education industry is a fragile, over-inflated balloon and grossly INCREASES the student's fragility.

Don't be scared off if you kid calls you "a dream killer". Better they should grapple with reality while they can make adjustments then to get trapped by debt for a worthless degree that they cannot repay. 

Doublemint girls

Yesterday was a lifting day. I didn't hit my usual time-slot and got to the gym at about 2:15 PM.

One of the people at the desk noticed my hospital socks and very gently and very professionally informed me that they were not allowed. He also added that he understood why I want to wear them. He also explained that they get a lot of high school kids who want to work-out in shower-slide. Shower slides have unstable soles and no side-stability; they are accidents waiting to happen when lifting. Ergo, only lace-up athletic shoes are allowed in the weight-room.

I think he was surprised when I didn't give him any push-back. "I used to be a supervisor. I understand that you represent the organization and that you have to enforce rules. Thank-you for telling me."

I went back to the locker room and put on my regular socks and my street shoes (which are athletic shoes) and went back and started lifting.

As I was recovering between my second-to-last set and my last-set, two young women started using the hamstring machine behind the dead-lift platform. That is where they lay on a table on their belly and hook a padded bar with their heels and lift it by flexing their knees.

I could go into great deal describing them physically, but it is enough to call them "The Doublemint Twins". You will get the picture.

I finished my five minute recovery and got on the dead-lift platform and squatted/bend down to grip the bar...and I felt their eyes on me. A quick glance around confirmed that the eyes of the girl on the machine had her eyes locked on me.

Six repetitions takes me sixty seconds. That feeling never departed.

It was a what-the-hell minute. Are they checking out my gluteus maximus? I wear baggy clothing when lifting but the fabric gets stretched tight down there when lifting. 

The feeling was so novel and disquieting that I completed the last three reps with my eyes closed. It is entirely possible that I lost count of the number of reps and done more than six.

I immediately started breaking down the set-up after the last rep, pulling off the plates and she maintained her intense stare the entire time.

When I left the platform to get the sanitary wipe to wipe-down the bar, I noticed that the girl on the hamstring machine kept her eyes locked on where I had been....which was between her and the mirror on the wall.

Mystery solved.

Frankly, I am very relieved. I am wearing enough hats already and don't have time to do all of them well. I don't need to add teen "heart-throb" to the list. 

Today's work-tickets

Pick up the yard.

Mow the grass.

Go for a run. 

Weed in the garden for an hour. 

Stretch target: clean out the bed of the truck