Mr T’s rants and ravings

I saw this post on the Delta Airlines blog and it brought back memories. Back in the early days of flying (I may have taken my first flight in the late 1950’s) boys were given pilot wings and girls were given stewardess wings. Of course today we call stewardesses flight attendants and there are a lot more male ones then their used to me.

It’s more than a PC name change though. There was a connotation about stewardesses back then. They were mostly young and frequently good looking. And they were taking care of a heavily male clientele. And if they were not explicitly valued for their sex appeal there was always a hint of that. Southwest went so far as to dress their stewardesses in hot pants. OK maybe that was fairly explicit. But the fact was that there was something of an idea that women on airplanes were servants. Pilots on the other hand were important – they ran things. Also that being a pilot was a man’s job.

Today it’s different. I have flown a number of commercial flights with women pilots and co-pilots. Most flights have at least one male flight attendant. And in general I think that flight attendants are taken more seriously. And well they should be. I think that on most flights the flight attendants are a lot more important to the comfort and experience of the trip than the pilots. And having to deal with all sorts of people on  a crowded airplane is often quite a chore.

We don’t think about “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” so much any more. It’s not gone away – just try and be an elementary school teacher and a man some time. But I think we are making progress.

Oh and if you think that all flight attendants are middle aged women – not that there is anything wrong with that as some of them look pretty good too – fly IcelandAir sometime. From what I read Singapore Airlines works hard to have attractive flight attendants. But honestly I have no complaints and cute young flight attendants are not what I look for. I have been well taken care of on Delta for years and years. They are and have long been my airline of choice. I’ll take the experience and quality of their flight attendants any day.

One of the things my Dad reminds me on a regular basis is that one should not think so much about how much they are paying in taxes but how much they have left after taxes. Related to that he reminds me that the affairs of government (not a reference to Bill and Monica :-)) have to be paid for some how.

This morning I found this post in the right wing Granite Grok blog. It shows what percentage of the total Federal tax bill is paid by various levels of income earners. The top 10% of income earners (about $109k/year) pay over 70% of the income tax revenue. The top 1% pay almost 40% all by themselves. Is that fair? Honestly, maybe it is. Especially if you think about what people have left after paying their taxes.

The thing that struck me the most is how low the levels are for the top 5, 10, and 25%. Most teachers, who I tend to think of as underpaid, are at least in the top half with a few making the top 25% in some parts of the country. At the top end, Phillips Andover thinks of families making as much as $300,000 as middle class and offers some financial aid for them. I don’t think of people making $100,000 to $150,000 as rich. Well off, sure, but still middle class. And yet those people are in the top 5-10% of income earners? I didn’t expect that.

But it makes me wonder, how are the people in the bottom half making it?

So I have learned a few things about women over the years. One of them is about “would you like to …” You see women will ask a man “would you like to” and follow it with something no man in history has ever wanted to do of his own free will. Now when a man asks “would you like to” he is asking if doing the said thing will make the person more happy than not doing it. For example “would you like some food?” Or perhaps “would you like to go to the baseball game.” If one answers “no” that is fine. It was a real question.

A woman uses that sort of question the way a man asks “would you please do me a favor and …” In other words the ask is for something the askee wants the asker to do that they may or may not want to do.

I learned rather quickly that when a woman asks a question like this she really expects a “yes” answer regardless of the request. At first I thought that meant they wanted a man to lie. In other words, the wanted the man to say “yes I would like to do that” no matter how distasteful the task was. Well I was half right.

They do want the man to say “yes” but they don’t want it to be a lie. They want to man to actually want to do the thing. Really! Now that can be hard for a guy to understand. We don’t really want to lie but we do get asked to do things we really would rather not do. So to learn to live with myself I decided that a woman was really asking a different question. “Would you like to change the litter box?” translates to “Do you love me enough to change the litter box?” Now that question I can honestly answer (to my wife anyway) “Why yes I do!”

That way I don’t have to lie and my wife is happy because I change the litter box. It’s the difference between a literal question and an idiomatic interpretation. I pass this bit of wisdom off to you guys who are not yet married or who are recently married.

So I have to finish writing up my business commitments for the new year. The first draft is due today. Yes I am taking a break. I’ve been working on it most of the day so far. After the last several very rainy days I felt like I needed some fresh air and some sun. So I moved out to my back yard. I am under a sort of awning I guess you could call it and sitting on a hammock. Occasionally I lay down but I’m pretty much working on the laptop except when I am going through printouts (I still need paper some times). It’s a relaxing environment.
There is a rill with babbling water running through it about 40 yards behind me. I hear birds singing and there is a squarel eating some food I left out for him about 30 yards away. He just chased a chipmonk away. Occasionally of course a car goes by and that is less calming but since the road is freshly paved it is not so jarring as it was.
Technology makes this possible of course. The wi-fi reaches hear easily. I have both my cell phone and a portable landline for my business number sitting on a chair beside me. I can easily send things to the printer inside as it is on the network. I have all the benefits of an office but a whole lot more. It would be very hard to have to work in a regular office on a regular basis again. I could do it if the job was right but honestly there would have to be more than just money involved.
Is this the way of the future? A year ago I would have said yes but the price of gas may change things. Oh sure one saves money going to work but if it become to expensive to live outside of cities because any other travel is too expensive people may not be in such a hurry to adopt the idea that they can live and work anywhere. City life causes its own troubles though. Without good mass transit travel in the city is no fun at all.
Well for the time being I can afford to live where I do. And I can work from anywhere. So life, for now, is good.

Monday is St Hans Night in Norway. It celebrates the longest night of the year. That’s not the longest night of the year anymore but that is because of calendar drift. Long story - go to Wikepedia if you want it. In Norway there will be bonfires on the hills and beaches and there will be late night parties. I was there, in Oslo actually, for that night in 2000. There was quite a public party down near the harbor that night. It never really got dark either.

In the US we pretty much ignore the day. Oh we talk about the first day of summer (today was the first full day) and they may even say that it is the longest day of the year. But really for the most part it passes without notice. I tend to notice though. I like sun light and as the days get longer from the winter solstice I notice. And I notice as they get shorter. Sometimes I think I want to move south where the variences is less. But I do like the long summer days so maybe I want to be south for the winter - more for the sun than the warm really.

Any way, I think we ignore the long and the short days for the most part because we have more artifical light. Who cares how bright or dark it is outside when when have light when ever we want indoors? But I think we miss something when we miss the natural light and dark. Regardless I think I will try to pay special attention to the sunset on Monday. Longest day of the year or not.

I’ve gotten a little frustrated lately with some things I would like to blog about but can’t. It’s not that anyone is telling me not to but rather I know it would not go well for me. There are some things that is just not helpful to talk about in public. By that I mean there is no foreseeable gain in doing so. In fact the only possible outcome of any note is that people who are important to me will get upset. Well not all the people who might get upset are important to me directly but they are important to people who I do care about.

Nothing illegal of course. Blowing something illegal out into the open would be a good thing. So mostly I am talking about things that are just embarrassing to people or perhaps more truth then some people can handle. What is the point of getting people upset if there is no potential upside?

I’m not talking about work either. Well not completely. See part of the problem is that when you work for a company anything you blog (or even say) is likely to be taken as official company statements. Especially by lawyers and by idiots. (Did I just repeat myself?) So for example there is no way I want to comment on any matters that involve the company and legal actions. Not even if I agree completely with the company.

And there are lots of cases where I don’t really want to talk about friends but sort of I do. Again things are open to misinterpretation and there is risk in being too open. Some things really just don’t belong blasted all over the Internet but not being able to tell anyone is frustrating at time.

I’ve just seen too many cases of casual remarks and personal opinion twisted in ways they are not intended. Some day when I am retired I might blog about some of this stuff but when I think about it maybe not even then. After all I want people to be able to trust that I can in fact keep things private. This being a grown up stuff spoils a lot of fun.

I think I am a defective OCD person. That is to say that I am somewhat obsessive in that I really like things neat, organized, clean and very “ship shape.” But unfortunately I’m not compulsive about getting things that way. So if the mess gets too big it bothers me a lot but I’m not motivated to clean it up. Rather I am motivated to leave it behind.

Take my office for example. When I get in the midst of a lot of travel the office quickly becomes a mess. Now you are wondering if I am away so much how could it become a mess? Well the way it works is that when I come back from a trip I empty out all the things I picked up so that I have a clean backpack for the next  trip. But I don’t really have time to organize it well. I think “I’ll get to it later” but of course I don’t. The next time it is even harder to organize and I don’t have time to fix things so it gets worse. Until finally I take my laptop and I work in the dinning room or the family room or some other place.

This cannot last though. In fact soon it will be over because Mrs. T will be on summer break. It is much to distracting to try to work outside of my office when she is in the house. We’ll not go into the details but it is enough to say that soon I will clean out my office – it will likely take about two days – so that I can work comfortably there again. That has been the pattern for the last four or five years now. Some how I really need to find an easy way to keep the office neat and tidy.

I figured it out for clothing. About two years ago I “outsourced” cleaning of my shirts and dress pants. Rather than trying to wash them with everything else and iron them myself (or try to talk Mrs. T into doing the ironing) I started taking them to the dry cleaners. They come back clean and very pressed. I ask for starch so they really feel neat and clean all day long. It’s a reasonable trade for my money. The office is not so easy though. Sigh. Maybe I need a fully functional OCD office mate.

Like a lot of people I am a touch typist. OK not a great one and I have trouble with special characters but still I get  but most of the time. This means a couple of things. One is that I can take notes while watching the people or person who is talking. That seems more polite than looking at the keyboard. And it means that I can type in the dark when I can’t see the keyboard if I want to. (Which I am doing now BTW)  It’s a pretty useful skill to have. And of course it means that I type faster (though not real fast) then I would if I had to look for the keys all the time.

I went to secretarial school to learn to type when I was in middle school. Yes a special school for mostly women to learn office skills that was mostly typing and shorthand. I never learned the shorthand but the typing I learned and that has served me well for years and years. It was weird being a middle school boy in a place like that. I pretty muck just worked because I was not about to talk to all those older women some of whom much have been at least 20!

Now a days people learn to text by touch. That’s just not going to happen for me and I don’t think anyone teachers that. People just learn it. I’m not sure how many people who IM can touch type though. I tend to think that some of the reason for text and IM shorthand is that people just don’t type fast enough. I know that a lot of the conversations I have are with people who use code and still do not type as much real information as I do. That can cause misunderstandings at time.

Does anyone know if middle schools teach typing these days? Or younger? High schools seem to pretty much have dropped it. Somewhere along the line I think that typing should be something people learn though. Maybe not to me a super fast touch typist but at least good enough to write a good essay and keep up with a text based conversation. What do you think?

I believe that everything has a story. Some stories are trivial and some are not. I suspect that one can’t tell if the story is big or small by the item though. Money is an example.

Yesterday I found a five dollar bill on the ground. It was wet and dirty but there is no way of telling how long it has been on the ground or how it got there. It may be that someone lost it and never knew it was missing. Perhaps they had plenty of money and losing was lost in the noise as it were. But on the other hand perhaps to the person who lost it losing it mattered a good deal. Could it have meant the difference between a good meal and no meal at all? Could it have meant that they ran out of gas on the way home? There are all sorts of ways where losing $5 could be a big deal to someone.

I also found a dime yesterday. Now a dime is a whole lot less valuable than a five spot so it probably didn’t change anyone’s life. But I’ll bet if one really thought about it one could make up a good story about it.

So I found $5.10 yesterday. The dime is going into my change fund but I’m not sure about the five. Spend it - on something fun or on regular expenses? Or put save it for something? Tough questions. What do you do with found money?

So this is a risky post. I’m going to talk about naked people. Sort of. The big news today was that Lindsay Lohan has taken part in a photo shoot to re-create the last photo shoot that Marilyn Monroe did. The pictures are in New York magazine. Apparently the pictures are so popular that the magazine’s web site crashed. The Today show showed some of the pictures with a big read "ribbon" in strategic places.

This brings up item number one. Apparently you can show as much of a woman’s breasts as you want as long as the nipples don’t show. This is an advance from the past. The old "I Dream of Jeanie" show was not allowed to show belly buttons. The original Star Trek was not only not allowed to show nipples but could not show the underside of a breast. I had no idea the underside was so much more titillating than the top side. Sigh.

Recently I watched a few minutes of a show on Discovery Channel or Travel Channel (I wasn’t paying much attention) that was chronicling life in an African village. The women wore nothing but jewelry above the waist. The nipples were magically airbrushed into invisibility. I guess if you can’t see them they aren’t there. And if they aren’t there no one will get all excited. I mean really, do they think no one knows what they look like?

Coming back to Ms. Lohan’s photo shoot. I’ve seen some of the images from Marilyn Monroe’s shoot. They have been on display in an fancy art gallery near where my father lives. They’ve been put on display in the windows with no Today style red ribbon. Apparently no one complains. Now I think the images are more artsy than erotic though I’m not sure I’d be comfortable having them on display in my house. They are not quite our style. I suspect that Ms. Lohan’s images are the same. But somehow I doubt that the people whose traffic crashed the web site were looking for art.

Outside the US attitudes about showing the human body are different. Bare breasts, and other body parts, are more common and people tend not to get all worked up about it. I was on a beach, quite unexpectedly I assure you, where a number of young women were topless. Honestly you can get used to it pretty quickly and it need not get one all hot and bothered. I asked a BG student once about a visit a group of them made to a nude beach oversees on a field trip and his comment was that "not everyone looks good naked." No kidding!

But of course in the US we make such a big thing of it that when people do see it they get all bothered because, in part I think, they think they are supposed to. Is this helpful? I’m not so sure it is.

Now I am not advocating a sudden and dramatic change nor am I suggesting that we need more nudity in the world. It just seems that f the way we treat the nude form contributes to the objectification of women. We let or perhaps encourage people to look everywhere but at the face. It becomes all about how a woman looks and not who she is. I think I need do little more than suggest one watch a minute or two of "Deal or No Deal." Does anyone really believe that show would be as popular without "hot women" in short dresses with lots of cleavage holding the suitcases? I don’t think so. Could you recognize any of them by their faces? Somehow I doubt it.

The photographer who took these pictures is an artist to be sure. But it seems like everyone else involved from Ms. Lohan to the magazine are just using her body to make money. And that seems to me a shame.