Well that was a nice rest. Spending a week in Paris does a lot for one’s sense of Americana; the lack of smoking, good coffee, and malaise. I really bit down hard on the euro lifestyle, as it’s taken me another three weeks to truly get my mind back in gear. Maybe when I go back next year (bet your ass) I won’t be so wide-eyed as to neglect my inner geek.
Thirty days without blogging has certainly given me ample time to find things to talk about. Here are just a couple that came out of catching up with my beloved Slate:
From last week’s Sinister and Rich: The Evidence that Lefties Earn More:
Learning and working in a world of machines designed for majority righties, lefties are at a disadvantage. Tools like the screwdriver work well for both. But others, like the scissors and the standard classroom writing desk and the electric food slicer and the band saw—not to mention writing from left to right, with all the smudges and blackened fingers that entails—are explicitly designed for righties. This ought to make lefties less productive. (Hence the basis for Ned Flanders’ Leftorium, the fictional store for left-handed people on The Simpsons.)
I don’t grant the premise that because scissors were designed to be used with the right hand it was harder for me to learn to cut construction paper, or that my handwriting took longer to develop because I smudged the ink. I smudged some of my writing early on, but you know what? I learned very quickly how I had angle the paper and my hand in order to avoid it. I wasn’t measuring myself against the other kids and thinking, “Why do they hold their pens differently than I do?” I was too busy learning how to hold the pen for fuck’s sake.
Also I don’t like the grammar in that Simpsons reference. Is it the store that’s fictional, thereby inferring that show may not be? And if you haven’t figured out that the Simpsons isn’t real, then using the awesome power of the Internet you should be able to deduce from one picture of those yellow-5 freaks that there isn’t a Leftorium.
And from this morning’s The CEO Real Estate Scame: The Newest Infuriating Perk for Corporate Executives:
Since the beginning of this summer, at least a half-dozen companies, including eBay and Nike, have disclosed in their routine Securities and Exchange Commission filings that they’re now protecting their executives from real estate market forces. The terms in the filings vary—”protection against loss”; “loss protection”; and “price protection”—but the meaning is the same: They are essentially guaranteeing that executives’ homes will sell for a good price. In other words, companies that depend on free markets are making sure their own executives are safeguarded from them.
Are we really foolish enough to argue logic in the face of human greed? I’d love to live in a world where we all understood that you don’t get your employer to pay for things that aren’t a legitimate cost of doing business, but at that point I might as well wait around for Elizabeth Shue to show up at my door with the keys to an LP640 between her teeth.
America’s corporate elite, for the most part, got to their towers of power (YEA!) by being greedy bloodsucking bastards. If they can figure out how to expense the sleep necessary to be concious in the office the following morning, then by fuck they’re going to do it.
