Not green

I once mentioned that as far as I could tell, red is the only color that doesn't have a pastel partner.  One hears people talk about "pale blue" or "soft yellow" or such, but I've never heard anyone talk about "pastel red" because "pastel red" has it's own identity:  pink.

Sure, in some ways that's more a quirk of language, rather than spectrum, but I dunno.  When you make red darker it looks blacker.  When you make pink look darker, it looks ... bluer.

I was, of course, mocked for this and generally kept down by The Man.  And as I'm neither a lighting designer nor a painter,* I don't have the background to make a better argument, so I let it drop.

But ...

But ...

Thanks to Alice, Facebook, and NPR, this little tidbit has fallen into my lap.

I'm probably still wrong, but somehow I feel --- less wrong.

There is no blue food.  There is no pink light.

*Because colors in light and colors in pigment are two separate things.  The former is additive color and the later is subtractive color.**


**A fact I'll be able to retain until just after I post this, of course.

Leta's Rule of Purses

"If one's purse is capable of carrying the weight of a small child, one will."

Time for something smaller.

Don't Throw the Past Away

I have an audition for another Irish play, Brian Friel's* Dancing at Lughnasa.  If I am cast, I will need an Irish accent for the weeks of rehearsals as well as the weekends of performance.  The chances of it not leaking into my every day conversation I leave as an exercise for the reader.


*If I say I have an audition for an Irish play, one can assume that I mean one by Brian Friel.  I am one of the few theater geeks I know who finds Martin McDonagh hard to take.  I'd much rather watch the crew do the clean up and reset all the blood squibs than actually watch The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

Quoted

New Hampshire Public Radio covered NPR listeners response to their 9/11 coverage.

Now I'm wondering if I should write and tell them that when I hear "you'll reap the rewards" in their fundraising ad, my brain automatically fills in "of your pluck, my boy, in the Bailey and Middlesex sessions."

I can't take it anymore

Sometimes public radio does what I call over covering a story and rather than just bitch to David about it, I wrote to the Ombudsman* and outlined my concerns.  I didn't use any of the bad words that I've been using to the radio recently, so I consider that a win.  (If this siphons off some of my annoyance and David doesn't have to listen to me be irritated, he may consider it a win as well.)


I suspect that this will accomplish nothing but I feel better for having written it.  During the last president election caller after caller to the Diane Rehm show begged the panel on the Friday News Round Up to scale back the discussion of the "horse race"**.  The panelists, every time, said that they had to talk it to death because that's what people are interested in.


The New York Times ran a piece back in 2007 that neat sums up my dismay with horse race coverage:  "The campaign coverage has been sharply at odds with what the public says it wants, the study found, with voters eager to know more about the candidates’ positions on issues and their personal backgrounds, more about lesser-known candidates and more about the debates. 


But the media is even more obsessed this time around with questions of tactics and strategy, despite what the study described as a “generational struggle” in both parties. Horse-race stories accounted for 63 percent of the stories this year compared with what the study said was about 55 percent in 2000 and 2004."


If you are the sort of malcontent that I am  -- or if you are dismayed that there is not enough coverage of 9/11 this week or won't be enough of election -- the Ombudsman (see job description, below) can be reached via the Contact Us button on NPR.org.

Dear Ombudsman,
An effective way to make me no longer care about a subject - or to get angry every time it's raised - is for public radio to over cover it.  When public radio becomes One Thing Considered -- as it has with the 9/11 anniversary --and has story after story on the subject, each one with a more tenuous connection, it just burns out any ability to hear any more about it.

The events of 9/11 were a defining tragedy for this generation and it makes me truly sad that I can't listen to Morning Edition or ATC right now without thinking "Oh good grief, another one?"  and changing the station.  I won't be listening to public radio this weekend because I can't stand to have truly important things turned into noise.

I understand that anniversaries make a convenient hook for stories that might otherwise lack one.  But the hook is overfull.

The same thing will happen during over coverage of the 2012 election.  By the time the 2008 election was over I believe that public radio had spoken to every person living in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.  I grew to hate all of them, let alone the people running for office who I had grown to detest long before through overexposure.  I remember at one point thinking "Another election story?  Another?  Is nothing happening anywhere else in the world?  Sweden maybe?"

Please consider scaling back.  I would appreciate it and I don't think I'm the only one.

*Ombudsman is a Latin term that means "the person corporate has assigned to actually have to listen to the random whining and complaining of the malcontents."  What a great job to have ...


** The horse race is political handicapping and on the FNRU it's usually about the fundraising.

Another reason I like my job

I am in charge in planning the annual meeting of our managers and Board of Directors, a very fine group of people with whom I greatly enjoy spending time.*

Today I sent out the e-mail confirming the date and location of the meeting, to wit:

As mentioned previously, the managers meeting will be held [date]. We had originally hoped to have the meetings here in the DC area but a city-wide meeting** is taking place that week, so we will meet at the [location]. [Further details, blah, blah, blah]

Within a few minutes I got a reply from one of our Operations Managers: Wow – a city wide meeting. Do all residents have to attend? That must be one heck of a gathering!

And I answered back: Yes! That’s exactly it. Plays hell with restaurant reservations with 600,000 all trying to get a table.

This is why when people ask me what I do I say that I work with smart people who can take a joke.


* I would probably enjoy it more if my brain weren't running a constant hum through my head of "What have I forgotten to do?  What have I done wrong?"


** A city-wide meeting has lots of stuff going on in the Washington Convention Center and fills every hotel.

I like to look

Tess Vigeland* hosts my favorite radio show about personal finance** and over the past couple of years if there is one thing that she has said more than once it's that during volatile times like these we should just throw the investment statements in a drawer, unopened.  "Don't look!"

(Hmmm.  Maybe there should be more exclamation marks in that because Tess always sounds very emphatic when giving this particular piece of advice.)

I respect Tess immensely and enjoy her reporting but I have to say:  I like to look.

In fact, I look every week.  On Monday morning, as a matter of fact.  I've kept a series of Excel spreadsheets (one per year) for the past ten years.  The data?  The balance of my 401(k).  The purpose?  I do better with feedback.  When watching my weight, I get on the scale.  When I was digging my way out of debt, I paid lots of attention to my bank balance and those debts with my lists and graphs and calculations***.  If I could figure out how to as quickly and easily quantify how many lines of dialogue I know versus how many I need to know, I'd do that, too.  And probably learn the darn lines faster.****

I know that sometimes the news will be good and sometimes it will be ... less good ... but locking in losses when the numbers are down remains a poor idea.  So I look.  And I chart.  And I leave my 401(k) alone.  Every few years I rebalance but not during a volatile period.  And I look.  And I chart. And I make jokes about which brand of cat food Pekoe and I will be sharing during my golden years.

Oddly enough, I started doing this charting three months before 9/11 so if you look to the left you can see the  10 percent drop in my balance after that awful day.  It was a scary drop at the time but the balance recovered in a few weeks and compared to 2008 it can't even be seen.  From May of '08 to March of '09 I lost 40 percent of the then current balance.  Right now I'm down 8 percent from just before the whole Debt Deal mess.  But the numbers on the right are still higher than the numbers on the left. Up and down, up and down, but generally up.  Looking has taught me to take the long view.  I'm saving for the future, not for this morning's balance.

As I like to say, if I look out of the window during the winter and see that it is snowing, I don't throw away my summer clothes.  So I look.  And I graph.

I like to look.


*It's pronounced Vigg-land even though it looks like Vie-gland.  Sort of like it's pronounced Lee-tah even though it looks like Lett-uh.  Those who can pronounce us can't spell us and vice versa ...


** Okay, there's not a large sample, I realize.  Not the point. The show is awesome, as is Tess.


*** And lines and circles and a few paragraphs on the back.  


**** When a friend was in labor and said that she wanted to go to the midwife's office to find out how dilated she was because she "needed to know the numbers" it made perfect sense to me.  Of course, if it hadn't made perfect sense to us, then her husband, mother, and I might have recognized this for the class transition phase thinking it actually was.  S'okay.  We got to the hospital with several minutes to spare. What?