Author Archives: Jon Lowder

These Ain’t Your Mama’s Halloween Costumes

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Kidpimp
We went over to the Figs’ house (lifelong friends) last night for Halloween.  The ladies took the kids around the neighborhood to beg for candy while the men stayed behind and watched sports between doorbell rings. After one visit Mr. Fig commented that it didn’t seem quite right to have a boy in an Austin Powers costume. Yeah baby!  I’d have to agree.  Over on his blog Ed Cone wonders how someone can dress their "cherub-cheeked blond boy" as "a cane-wielding floppy-hatted green-velour-clad" pimp.  Ed asks, "What does it say about attitudes toward race and sex for this
cherub-cheeked blond boy to be thusly dressed, beyond the fact that I
am getting old?"

Personally I think we’re lucky that no one thought to dress up the blond boy’s sister as a street walker or Austin Powers’ brother as Fat Bastard.  We may be getting old, but I don’t care if it’s 1947, 1977, 2007 or 2037, dressing a kid up as a swingin’ 60’s era Rumpelstiltskin, a pimp or a ‘ho just ain’t right.  Think maybe this is a little over reaction to a rogue parent with questionable taste dressing up her kid as Shaft’s arch-enemy?  Think again, because you can order your little Johnny his very own pimp outfit in a variety of designs right here among other places. 

Okay, I admit it, I am getting old.  But come on, pimps?  What’s next, meth-head masks?

links for 2007-10-31

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Ultimate Nightmare

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I came across a blog called Acid Test (found via Blog on the Run) that posted what is supposedly an excerpt from a Peace Corps training manual.  It details how to respond to being attacked by an anaconda.  To wit:

“Related to the boa constrictor, the anaconda is the largest snake
species in the world. It grows to thirty-five feet in length and weighs
300 to 400 pounds.

  • 1. If you are attacked by an anaconda, do not run. The snake is faster than you are.
  • 2. Lie flat on the ground. Put your arms tight against your sides, your legs tight against one another.
  • 3. Tuck your chin in.
  • 4. The snake will begin to nudge and climb over your body.
  • 5. Do not panic.
  • 6. After the snake has examined you, it will begin to swallow you
    from the feet end – always from the feet end. Permit the snake to
    swallow your feet and ankles. Do not panic!
  • 7. The snake will now begin to suck your legs into its body. You must lie perfectly still. This will take a long time.
  • 8. When the snake has reached your knees slowly and with as little
    movement as possible, reach down, take your knife and very gently slide
    it into the side of the snake’s mouth between the edge of its mouth and
    your leg, then suddenly rip upwards, severing the snake’s head.
  • 9. Be sure you have your knife.
  • 10. Be sure your knife is sharp.”

Have fun sleeping tonight.

links for 2007-10-30

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Hey Daddy!

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So on Saturday I land in Charlotte after a 9 1/2 hour flight from Germany.  I clear customs without a hitch, get my checked luggage and before I know it I’m in my car heading north on I-77 to Statesville to meet my family at a hot air balloon festival.  I’m low on gas so I stop to tank up and as I stand next to my car I hear a man say "Hey Daddy!" and I look around to find a guy in his 50’s and obviously down on his luck approaching me.  In one hand he has a plastic grocery back full of something and in the other he has what looks like a laptop case.

"Hey daddy", he says again and follows with, "you about a 40?"

"Huh?", I reply.

"You got about a 40 inch waist?", he asks.

"Uh, yeah I guess about that", I say more than a little warily.

"I got some boxers that’d look real nice on you and I give ’em to you cheap", he says.  I notice that he’s missing a front tooth but his other teeth look really healthy and white.  It looks like he brushes pretty regularly which is a change from most of the people who have tried to hustle me in the past.

"Uh, no thanks I have plenty of boxers," I tell him.

"They’re real cheap man, just $3," he says.

"No really I don’t need ’em," I insist.

"Okay, I’ll throw in a watch and it will still only be $3."

"No thanks," I say, a little annoyance creeping into my voice.  I’m tired and I just want to go see my family and I don’t feel like messing with this guy.  Forget that he’s probably having the kind of day that makes a 9 1/2 hour flight seem like nothing.  Hell, they fed me twice on the plane and this guy may not have had a square meal all day.  That’s not on my mind though because I’m tired and I’m only thinking about seeing Celeste and the kids.

"No offense man, I’m just trying to hustle for some money, okay Daddy?"

"No problem, I’m just not interested."

"Okay daddy," he says and then moves to the next pump where another car has just pulled in. 

"Hey daddy, what you got about a 50 inch waist?  I got some boxers that’d look real good on you and they’re only $3."

After I got back on 77 I thought about two things; I should have slipped the guy a couple of bucks and I should have told him that it’s not an effective sales technique to remind middle-aged guys how fat they’ve gotten.  I feel bad that I didn’t do either.

Offshore Outsourcing Hits the Winston-Salem Journal

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The Winston-Salem Journal reported that customer service calls for its circulation department will be outsourced to a company based in the Phillipines.  More interesting to me was a comment that the managing editor Ken Otterbourg left on his blog in response to another comment left by a reader on a post that had nothing to do with the outsourcing story (his post was about photography on the Blue Ridge Parkway):

Reader’s comment: I love great photographs.  Hopefully you guys won’t be outsourcing your photography to Manila any time soon.

Capitalism is alive and well in W-S (and the non-US areas we send our jobs to.)

Ken’s comment: Thanks for the comments. I’m not going to minimize the import or
symbolism of the movement of our customer-support operations. But I do
think that it speaks well of our newspaper that we reported this. For
job cuts at this level, many publications would not report them. We
thought it was important to do so, from a credibility standpoint and
also from a fairness standpoint, because we’ve reported extensively on
IT and back-office operations in this area moving offshore.

I think Ken makes a good point, and I’m glad to see that the Journal is engaging in a little transparency.  I do ask though that they order the company not to use fake American names for its representatives. Nothing more annoying than talking to another "Jack" who’s real name is Arjun or a "Mary" who’s real name is "Ashakiran".

This story reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to look into.  Does anyone have access to the total number of NC jobs lost to overseas companies in the last 10-20 years?  If so, how about a yearly breakdown and a breakdown by industry?  I’m thinking I can get it off the state’s website somewhere but if someone already has it I’d love to see it without duplicating the work.

Hands Off Boys, er, Happy Birthday Erin

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One of the reasons I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to make this trip to Germany is that today is my daughter Erin’s birthday. I’ve never missed one of the kids’ birthdays and I hope I never have to do it again. Ironically the more birthdays we celebrate with the kids the more I treasure each one, because when I think about it we’ll have three more with Erin’s older brother Michael and four more with Erin before they go off to college and then it’s highly likely we’ll miss lots of their birthdays after that.  Ah well, gotta put food on the table and all that.I’m also feeling particularly nostalgic because the past year has seen Erin truly blossom.  She’s truly becoming a young lady, a fact that was hammered home when she tried on the dress she’s going to be wearing in her aunt’s wedding. Let’s just say I’m going to be fighting off some drunken louts in a few weeks and I won’t be taking prisoners.  The girl’s gonna drop some jaws and if any of them drop the wrong way Daddy’s gonna have to do some peacekeeping.

PhotoOf course I’m like every other Dad out there, wanting my little girl to stay just that.  Unfortunately time and biology have conspired against my wishes and she just keeps getting more lady like and less girlish.  At the risk of repeating myself from last year’s birthday post, I have to say again that she’s eventually going to be some lucky guy’s boyfriend, fiance and wife. But be warned fellas, you better be prepared to impress because you’ll have to be better than any man I’ve ever met to take my girl away from her mother and me.
PhotoFor now we’re going to hold on to Erin as tight as we can and enjoy the soccer games and practices, the family dinners and the silly stories.  We’ll treasure her laugh, watch with wonder as she continues to thrive in school and let her bedazzle us with her smile.  In short we’ll enjoy every moment we can with our young lady because they are becoming too few.

Happy birthday sweetheart.  See you in a couple of days.Photo

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links for 2007-10-22

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German TV

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So I woke up last night at 2 a.m. Frankfurt time, and that was after sleeping five hours.  Unfortunately I knew right away that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon so I decided to call home and then do some reading.  After the call and an hour or two of reading I clicked on the TV and started surfing through the 40 or so channels of TV that the hotel carries.  In the process I discovered some interesting things:

  1. Girls doing things to girls, if you get my drift, is a staple of German late night television.  At first I thought this was an interesting departure from the infomercials that are a staple of late night TV in the states, but then I realized that they were all hawking SMS p-rn services and s-x lines.  As I surfed the channels I counted at least five that ran these things, which means that over 10% of the stations had them.

    I’m still trying to figure out what kind of guy would get worked up with some supposed woman sending him messages like "U R so hot U R mkg me…" Of course the wireless services here are so far ahead of ours in the US that it would be a good bet that they deliver high quality video to pervs’ phones and they’re just using "SMS" in the same way that some people call all sodas "Coke".  Either way, you don’t see the "commercials" or the wireless p-rn back in the states. 

  2. They carry Al Jazeera and I have to tell you that if it wasn’t for the little symbol in the corner I would have thought it was another version of CNN, except with real reporters.  All the reporters I saw were British and considering that they were running opposite Wolf Blitzer they came off looking like geniuses.  Only when you get a chance to watch BBC, Sky TV and, yes, Al Jazeera do you begin to appreciate what unmitigated crap we have for national TV news programming in the states.  I think what I like best about the non-US networks is that they don’t all assume that the average viewer is ADHD and on his sixth cup of coffee in the last hour.  Stories have depth, some running several minutes, and the reporters and commentators address the audience with a calm and reserve that we haven’t seen on US television in at least 20 years.  What’s interesting to me is that Sky and Fox are both owned by Rupert Murdoch, but Sky makes Fox look like a production of some local high school’s Young Republicans group. Shows you what he thinks of we Amerikaners.  Not that Sky comes across as particularly great, but in comparison to our junk it seems almost NPR-worthy.  FYI, one of the most viewed videos on Sky’s site is the manager at the KFC in Statesville NC (about 1/2 hour from my house) fighting off a shotgun-toting robber.  It really is a small world.
  3. EuroSport is the anti-ESPN.  Nary a studio full of retired players or coaches as panelists to be found and lets just say that the sports they carry are hard to come by on the west side of the Atlantic.  In the course of browsing I saw sumo wrestling, snooker and team handball.  The last is a hybrid of soccer and basketball that I’d love to give a try, but I doubt I’ll ever get the chance.  Note to ESPN execs: can you please dial back the BS and start just giving us the sports?  You’re beginning to remind me of MTV (what happened to the music?) and not in a good way.
  4. It’s a trip seeing movies with German voice-overs, especially the male voices.  The Germans all sound much more "manly" than the original actors, especially guys like Steven Seagall. 

Hopefully that will be the extent of my German television reviews since I’d like to get at least a little sleep over the next few days.