Seemed like the right thing to do ...

Since really bad executive talent has been a topic somewhat on my mind,
and on the minds of others, too, I imagine, I thought I'd dredge up this
little item from what was probably the late nineties.

---

RECURSES, REVILED AGAIN

Ann Arbor: There is some danger, meta-software cosmologists warn, that the universal all may be entering an unstable phase and beginning to exhibit some of the symptoms commonly seen in overloaded or poorly-thought-out computer systems. For example, recursion, the mathematical and programming term for the process of functions calling themselves, seems to be rearing its head in areas of daily life that are not specifically software-related.

For example, the White House is calling, apparently without more than the usual lingual length in cheek, for an independent prosecutor to investigate the behavior of the independent prosecutor who's investigating them. You could argue (and you probably will) that this is not a recursive call but just an example of instantiation, where the constructor, independent_prosecutor (target, agenda), is being called to create another instance of the independent_prosecutor object. However, I could argue (and I think I will, right now, in fact) that the situation is less clear-cut than that, since the instantiating object (the White House) is only enabled to issue the call after a triggering action by an existing instance of the class being instantiated, namely the issuance of a ludicrous_gaffe message. Metaphysically, then, we could see Kenneth Starr as having called himself by providing another object with the enabling condition it requires to sic Janet Reno on his mangy ass.

Now, the definition of "recursion" offered by the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (http://wfn-shop.Princeton.EDU/foldoc/) includes the following important note:

"If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on its arguments to check for a "base case" - a condition under which it can return a value without calling itself."

In other words, the implementer of a recursive function has the responsibility to provide a guard or short stop, preventing runaway processing. However, since the independent_prosecutor object was almost certainly (oh, ok, certainly) not designed using sound computational principles or in an ISO 9001-certified environment, the probability of there being no such guard in place approaches (oh, ok, is) 1. So, from this, we can postulate the frightening vision of 100% of the intelligent life in the universe being named independent prosecutors within a period of time that can be (but hasn't been) easily calculated. At the first point at which an object attempts to execute an independent_prosecutor constructor and receives a NULL return, indicating that no more sentient beings are available to fill the office, there had damn well better be somebody checking the return values, or the universe will seg fault.

--

Meanwhile, in yet another example of recursive corporate behavior, Reuters reports that Al Dunlop, the so-called "chainsaw" of corporate downsizing, has himself been downsized by his latest victim -- that is, employer -- Sunbeam Corporation. It is not the case, yet, that Sunbeam had to bring in a downsizing expert in order to rid itself of an incompetent, inefficient executive workforce, but that situation is certainly not impossible to imagine (at least, not for me, it isn't, but then I enjoy imagining things like that). Since companies bring in Huns like Dunlop to improve short-term performance, and since these people carry a substantial price tag themselves, it's only a short step toward hiring another CEO whose specialty is cutting out the cutters- out (since after you improve earnings per share in year 1 by reducing labor, closing plants, and generally gutting a corporation, there isn't much left to cut in year 2 -- except the high priced axemen and axewomen left over from the previous year.)

Fortunately, this form of recursion does have its own, fundamental guard in that the corporation in question represents the scope of the operations. When the last employee (presumably the last CEO hired) lays himself off, the last pointer is freed, and the system executes a graceful shutdown.

--

The Wood-Charles News Service and Computer Science Rant has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern, now pioneering the hospitality industry's first recursive last call. "Oh, call yourself," suggested a member of wait staff.

Trip to Toronto

Spent a long weekend in the land of the equivalent dollars. Lots of fun, good food, like that. Hitchhikers were a bit persistent, though.

Avocado Salad's Influence on Rock n' Roll

Clearing out noise from the back of my head:

I take them avocados off the shelf
I dice and mash 'em up by myself.
Add some lemon and I serve it cold.
I like that old time guacamole. Bob Segar

Everybody in the whole cell block
Got salmonella from the jailhouse guac. Elvis

You can spill guac in America... Night Ranger

She's another guacamole widow,
Living in this town.
Another guacamole widow
Since they gunned him down. Wishbone Ash

By the way, your Editor would like to point out that we do, in fact, know that it's not really pronounced "gwak-a-mohl," but rather "gwak-a-mol-ay." However, that latter doesn't really sound anything like rock-n-roll. We'd have had to rhyme up things with, oh, I don't know, the word "holy" in 'em. Or "rolly-polly." Or at a stretch, "E. coli." So be glad - you could have gotten "Guacamole Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our lunch, ..."

Not the polar bears!

It's one thing to endanger a bunch of socialist animals like coral, or nasty, poisonous reptiles, or anything else that, say, Steve Irwin would have been into, but for God's sake, the polar bears?!?! Come on, can't we tax somebody into saving the polar bears? Dick Cheney, maybe, or Lou Dobbs? It's gotta be somebody's fault.

A good week ...

... for those unclear on the concept.

First, our beloved Ann Arbor News ran a piece on a family who try to buy American as much as possible. Not a problem, philosophically, right up to the point where Mrs. needed a new "mixer." They went to local stores, and looked for products that said "Made in America" on the box. Then they went home and bought one, for cheap, on eBay. Let's protect American jobs. Idiots.

Next, in reference to her mother who was killed by a neighbor's pack of American Bulldogs, a woman said, "It's ok for God to take her. But for God to take her like this is unacceptable."

So there's now some kind of standard for acts of God? And God stepped over the line on this one? Are you planning on suing God, Madame, or just talking trash about him on the talk show circuit? As far as I could tell from the newspaper coverage (admittedly it was the Detroit Free Press), everyone except the victim seemed to be an Idiot.

As an aside, I was reading the bulldog story, aloud with annotation, to Linda this morning in the cafe', down at Kerrytown, and the young woman sitting next to us got up and left. She'd been reading "Jewels of (something) from the Gospel of Matthew."

Oh, Jeez, not poetry again

A Used Textbook
2007 09

Thirty years ago
My mother recommended to me
An old anthology
Of poetry: A.J.M. Smith's
Seven Centuries of Verse.

Being poor, I bought a used copy,
And it was full
Of the worst struggling notes
In someone's hand
Trying to understand
Yeats and Hopkins
On a public school education.

"Poet is split into two
This separates him from animal part"
Whatever this meant
To some poor sod
Copying down blindly the phrase
Of a bored TA in Humanities
Nothing does it impart
Of the first two lines
Of Sailing to Byzantium.

And apparently
There was nothing to be said
(no notes appear)
Of Byzantium's first two lines
That end, "The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed."

Big 9?

By the way, in case any of you missed it, the University of Michigan Wolverines lost their opener to fabled football powerhouse, Appalachian State University. The Mountaineers left the field singing their fight song, "An Appalachian State of Mind," specially written for them by alumnus, Billy-Bob Joel.

Some folks like to get away
Take a holiday from civilization
Hop a flight to Boone
Or to Bumpus Mills, TN
But I'm taking an old pickup truck
With six coonhounds in behind ...
I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

I've seen all the movie stars
In their fancy cars and their limousines
(well, not actually, 'cause they seldom come down here)
But I can imagine what they look like,
'cause I watch "American Idol,"
In an Appalachian state of mind

It was so easy living day by day
Out of touch with the rhythm and blues
No reason to change that, far as I can see
The Slippery Rock Times, The Dirt Farmer's Journal

It comes down to reality (or not)
And it's fine with me 'cause I've let it slide
Don't care if it's Front Royal or Chattanooga
Long as there's a Walmart to plug inta
I've left them all behind
I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

I'm just taking my old pickup truck up I-95
With a case of PBR in behind
'Cause I'm in an Appalachian state of mind

Meanwhile, the Michigan State University Spartans beat the Kyrgyzstan National Agrikultural Kollege Komrades 174 to 3, ushering in the era of MSU's new head coach, ex-President Jimmy Carter ... oh, hell, I give up. College football is so crushingly boring, not even a vastly embarassing loss to a school with an even funnier name than Slippery Rock or Shippensberg can help me spice it up.

An end-of-summer medley

Because nothing much new or interesting has happened the last week or so (except every Republican in sight resigning from something or other -- Gonzales and Craig are actually resigning and, even more importantly, Sen John Warner of VA announced that he wouldn't run again in 2008. Now if only that Hoonyack from Kentucky who sullies my surname would hang up his squirrel gun ...), here's a contextless melange' of stuff from the old WCA archives. I thought it was funny, back then, and I still sort of think so now.

---

From 2000:
Ann Arbor: Recently, WCA Facilities staff purchased two new smoke detectors for HQ. Like the lazy, featherbedding weasels I am -- that is, they are, they failed to install them, and the two units were left sitting on a credenza in the executive dining room. Last night, one of the executive staff, namely a large black cat, jumped up on the credenza and sat down on the detectors, one of which promptly went off. After I picked myself up off the floor, laughing, the question I had was: what did it detect?

---

From 2000:
OH, WHAT AN HONOR!

Ann Arbor: There's this person, Judy Rose, who writes about Detroit-area real estate in the Free Press (not unlike being the quality of life Editor at a concentration camp). Her column in a recent paper was headed, "St. Clair Shores looks like the next Royal Oak." And as if that wasn't enough, the lead points out that, in past years, Berkley and Ferndale have also been the next Royal Oaks.

Ok, I see how the game is played. Pick a depressing near-in suburb with one or two early buildings left in what can be described only geographically as a downtown. Pick another one nearby, where someone has recently opened -- say -- a new restaurant, and write 250 words on "X is the new Y." Ok, I predict that in the next 10 years, Inkster will be the new Taylor. How's that? Or Wyandotte is well on its way to becoming the next Ecorse? Warren the next Sterling Heights? Gore the next Clinton?

Folks, these are not cities we're talking about. They're either small towns that were swamped, devastated, and destroyed wholesale by urban sprawl, or they're development-driven accretions of the fifties, refugee camps for white folks fleeing the big bad city. And Ms. Rose, it takes more than (and I quote from your encomium to St. Clair Shores), "... brick pavers, trees, flowers, a park with a pond and bridge, and a trolley to transport visitors from one Nautical Mile site to another" to make them anything but a hellish endorsement of rigid urban planning policies.

Meanwhile and much more existentially, Ann Arbor is all set to be the next Ann Arbor.

---

From 1999:

WHAT?!?
Ann Arbor: By now, your WCA Food Editorial staff have heard pretty much everything out of new, ill-trained, and/or just plain young wait personnel. Our long time favorite was the response from an employee of a now-defunct Ann Arbor brunch venue, when our son asked if he could have hard boiled eggs: "We just don't have the facilities for that." However, two new instances have just recently come to hand, and we thought we'd share them with you.

First, from a waitress at that new place out in Saline, Mac's Acadian: she brought a bottle of wine, uncorked it with at least a reasonable degree of ability, poured it around, and then asked, "Now, should I let it breathe, or should I put the top back on?"

And not a week later, 1500 miles away, a young man in a Santa Fe restaurant took our order, noted our wine request, and was turning around when Linda said, "... and we'd all like water, too, please."

"Oh," he said, "Um, Ok. The water will be a few minutes. We're out."

A whole new product opportunity!

The following story illusetrates a fantastic opportunity to take
products somehow related to a disgraced celebrity (in this case
Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons pond scum who plead guilty this
week to various charges related to running a dog fighting enterprize)
and disdain-ize(tm) them by having dogs chew on 'em.

Now between the various dogs residing with us and our near acquaintances,
I figure we can achieve a throughput of 10 to 15 thousand chewed sports cards
a day, especially if we "sweeten" the deal a bit with beef broth
and other chew-performance-enhancing substances. (Even allowing
for the occasional completely-eaten object d'art.)

Then, when we're really up and running, we approach the owner of a
local wash-your-dog shoppe about turning the dog-o-mat into a chewed sports collectibles venue. Imagine: Babe Ruth signed baseballs with ferret bites! Dale Earnhardt NASCAR keychains with St. Bernard slobber! Videos of David Beckham being chased around a soccer pitch by pit bulls! It'll be huge, man!

And don't even get me started about the potential of other
once-precious artifacts with their value enhanced by disrespectful
animal behavior -- reliquaries with paw prints, full size replicas
of Michelangelo's David with a pomeranian gnawing on its ankle,
prints of the Mona Lisa with dog hair on her gown ... the sky's the
limit!

And you cat owners -- no need to be left out!
Let's get the business plan lagged down and get this off the
launch pad! I haven't been so excited since the Y-prize (a million
dollars to the builders of the first rocket to crash on Cleveland.)

Vocabulary Tests

Some mornings are better than others; mornings when I get up and immediately take a Vicodin are not necessarily the best. Viz, our coffee technology consists of old Chemex drip pots and a Capresso grinder. The Capresso features a clear plastic lid on the bin where the unground beans go. Making a morning's worth of coffee involves grinding twice, once for caffienated and once for decaf. (Can you see this coming, yet?) On more than one occasion, I've removed the grinder lid, poured in one kind of coffee, replaced the lid, ground the coffee, dumped the results into a chemex, come back to the grinder, measured out the next set of beans, and dumped them ... onto the nice, clear lid, which I've forgotten is still in place. Beans here, beans there, beans all over the place. And it makes such a great noise as it's happening, too. Definitely exercises my vocabulary.

And then there was last week, when I dropped 4 or 5 of Coney Dog's allergy pills on the floor (yes, the dog's on meds, too). I can't quite bend down that far -- my knee complains -- so I thought, ok, I'll go get one of those nice upholstered cylinders we bought (Ottomans or Ottomen or whatever the plural is), sit on it, and that'll get me down far enough to rescue the doggie benadryl. That worked, but then in getting up, I shifted my weight slightly and the damn thing collapsed, dumping me on the floor, again causing me to resort to my great facility in the language of abuse and complaint.

These are the things that Doctors and physical therapists should know about -- they're the great motivators, the events that make you want to get better fast, throw away those crutches, and have fewer reasons to take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.