Stray Hawkeye

In the course of the last two days we’ve had someone with Pink Eye come in to work, and someone else with Strep Throat come in to work.  Both of them knew it, knew they were contagious, and came in anyway.  It took repeated pleas/orders from the Strep Throat one’s boss to get her to go home, and she still stuck around for a good hour before leaving.  Pink Eye has come in to work every day, and has not gone home at all.

Now mind you, our company gives everyone a laptop as their computer so you can work from home, or from other cities (it’s consulting), so it’s not like working from home means you’re burning you PTO / vacation hours.  You’re just working and don’t have to commute or dress up.  And yet people still keep coming into our cube farm when they’re knowingly contagious and almost refuse to leave.  Something is seriously wrong with attitudes towards work around here.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to stop by the day care and find some toddlers to sneeze on me.

I made the usual rounds of the art fairs this weekend, and they’re just like I remembered.  Uptown’s expensive, crowded, and pretty.  Powderhorn is cool, laid-back, local, and affordable.  Loring Park is generally in between and where I ended up buying something.  Specifically a print of Broken Wing by Timothy Kobs.  I’m not usually one for fairy themed art, but I love the color and the mix of really pretty and really sad in it.  Just such a cool contrast and the little touch of red/orange on the wing really sets it off.  Also, talked briefly with artist and a woman with him at the booth, really nice people.

Other favorite art fair moment for the year.  While I was taking the art hop bus between Uptown and Powderhorn, there was a husband and wife with several small kids next to me.  From the bits of conversation I overheard, they were pretty obviously from the suburbs and not very familiar with the area.  As the bus turned right off of Lake onto Lyndale, the wife looked at the window and, with a chuckle, said, “The Smitten Kitten!  What a great name for a store!”   I’m pretty sure she was unaware of their line of business (NSFW), and given the age of the children she had with her, I refrained from informing her.

There is a tree in Athens, GA that owns itself.  And all the land within 8 feet of it’s base.  The article is rather interesting just for the oddness of it all.  Especially in light of the general strictness of most property laws and claims.  One of my favorite pieces of interplay between official law and law as people actually deal with it:

Athens-Clarke County confirms that the tree is in the right-of-way and is thus “accepted for care” by municipal authorities; according to city-county officials, local government and the owners of the adjacent property jointly serve as “stewards” for the care of the tree, while Athens’ Junior Ladies’ Garden Club serves as its “primary advocate.” Regarding Jackson’s deed, one writer noted at the turn of the last century, “However defective this title may be in law, the public recognized it.” In that spirit, it is the stated position of the Athens-Clarke County unified government that the tree, in spite of the law, does indeed own itself.

My question then, is what the tree does for a living to pay the property taxes on itself?

The title is ill-fitting to my sentiment, but I still like the content of this XKCD.

A while back I was talking to a guy who lives on a fairly remote farm, and who has been working for a long time to get as far off the grid as he can.  I only talked to him briefly (a friend of a friend whom I’d just met) and he was a really interesting and really nice guy.

He has a horse drawn buggy that he takes when he goes into town when it’s nice (still has a car), has ducks and chickens, and has been working on restoring some old farm equipment that’s powered by draft horses.

While we were on his farm, he mentioned a book about how farm work was done before gas engines (which in his opinion also reflected how it would be done after we run out of gas), which we could read if we were interested in the topic.  (All discussions of energy density, labor time, specialization, and efficiency aside for the moment.)

I only kind of remembered the name of the book, but I looked it up on Amazon and was able to find it.  However, I think they could have given a bit more though to the layout of the cover:

I wouldn’t believe it was a real book either if I hadn’t seen it at his place.  You can pick it up on Amazon here.

So after an incredibly dull and unrewarding day at work today, I was walking from the office to the bus downtown tonight.  I see two people coming running around the corner on the cross street at the end of the block I’m on.  One runs across the street, the other down the block towards me.  The cross street they came from is a pretty main bus route, so it makes sense for someone to be running for a bus along that street, but the street I’m on has almost no buses, and even if it did, the person running towards me wouldn’t have been able to see one to run towards it.

It strikes me as odd that two people would both round that corner, running hard, at almost the same moment, but go different directions, and at least one of them not running for a bus.  What makes people in the city run (who in what are quite obviously not running clothes) other than running for a bus?  Well, being chased is about it.   This whole thought process takes about 2 seconds.  Sure enough, a cop and a gentleman (whom I can only assume is a witness/victim) come running around the corner after them, and follow the one on my side of the street.   The cop and the gentleman are both running, but the person running towards me (I can see now it’s a woman, maybe mid to late 20′s) looks a little faster than them from my roughly one second of observing their relative paces and evaluating overall pace differentials and agility.

So then it occurs to me.

I have a chance to legally open field tackle someone on the street, and as an added bonus, they know a cop is almost there anyway so I can be reasonably confident I won’t get stabbed or shot-  I get to be a good Samaritan / Spider-Man preventing the Uncle Ben’s death, and tackle someone in the process.  This is already the high point of my day.  Awesome.

For a moment I envision a full speed BCS Championship Game style juke move followed by a leaping swinging high arm tackle / clothesline.  I drop into the standard linebacker pose – a slight squat, shoulders squared, arms out to about a 45 degree angle, eyes on target.  While I’m wearing business casual and a messenger bag.  It occurs to me I watch too much football.

If you don’t know me and I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere, it would probably be helpful to mention at this point that I’m male, about 6’3″ and 225lbs, and reasonably athletic.  Not something I think of daily, but apparently me in a football stance with an obvious intent to tackle you is rather intimidating.  It also doesn’t occur to me daily how much bigger I am than most people so it’s a brief second before I realize what an uneven match up this is.

The girl keeps running and attempts to knock into me and get past.  However, given the size differential, it’s a pretty feeble attempt.  Plus, she doesn’t really try to go around me, but more through.  She runs basically straight in to me, and more or less bounces straight back off.  I guess she thought I was going to leap out of the way at the last second or something.  She tries again, this time trying to go slightly around me.  I wrap one arm around her shoulders, which is more than enough to stop her.  At this point it seems to dawn on her how much bigger I am than her as well, and that she’s not getting past.  I unwrap my arm and just stand in front of her.  She berates me briefly and the cop and the gentleman finally catch up.  They are that much slower.  At this point it was flagrantly obvious the cop would not have caught up with the lady on his own.  She ran into me twice, and told me off, in the amount of distance she got on them in one block.

The cop hands a pair of handcuffs to the gentleman and tells him to arrest the woman.  It occurs to me that he probably saw whatever it was illegal that they did, and therefore can/should make a citizen’s arrest.  As a side note, if an officer isn’t present for a crime, technically, they shouldn’t arrest the person if it’s a minor offense, and will often ask the main witnesses to make a citizen’s arrest, which the witness can do because they witnessed the crime.  (I actually read this article on citizen’s arrests in Minnesota a couple weeks ago, which fit nicely with this evening’s events.)

The cop then set off at a light jog (perhaps a run for him) after the other runner, who had (criminals are dumb) upon splitting up with the woman, chosen to run down the other side of the same street, going the same direction, towards a traffic cop in an intersection.  I’m not sure if the cop caught up with the guy, or if the traffic cop got involved.  The gentleman was a similar build to me, and seemed to have this whole arresting thing well under control, so I shrugged my shoulders and kept walking to my bus.   This all took perhaps 10 or 15 seconds.

I mention this not to brag or anything, but for the following reasons:

• It’s really random and kind of entertaining.
• It’s not often that being a fairly big guy or being in reasonably good shape comes in handy in civil society outside of helping people move, so it’s kind of nice when it does.
• The cop made absolutely, positively no show of appreciation for the help in stopping someone who was apparently worth chasing and arresting, and who would have obviously gotten away otherwise.  No “thanks”, not even a half second of eye contact and a slight head nod.  He acted exactly as if the girl had run into a light pole and couldn’t figure out how to get around it.  I suppose from a legal stand point, the tackling of strangers on the street when you didn’t even witness the crime isn’t something they probably want to encourage, and he was a bit distracted with the other runner, but it still struck me as odd that at no point did he in any way even acknowledge my presence.
• In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to tackle someone running from the cops on the street (and you know you have, or that well choreographed fight scene you come up with while waiting in line at the post office where everyone in line who has a package actually has a weapon in it and is well trained in martial arts), even if a bit anti-climactic due to the size differential, yes, it is really fun/exciting.

So, then when I got off the bus tonight after this (again, I mention not to brag, but for the coincidence and how much things go in streaks), I walked about a half block and there was a truck trying to get out of a parking spot on the side of the street, and was really, really stuck on some ice, and spinning their tires trying to get it out.  So, laughing a bit, I went over and help push them out.  (A guy who I had just passed walking went past this, saw that I went to help, then stopped and came back to help too.)   After a couple of good shoves, the truck got some traction and pulled out.   In shear contrast to the cop and the amount of effort / personal risk expended in both situations, the girl driving the truck turned around at the next intersection so she could come back and thank us both enthusiastically, and looked absolutely ecstatic that someone, in fact two someones, stopped to help.

I must look helpful lately.  From Friday night to Monday evening, the following total strangers have asked me for help/directions:

• A rather wealthy looking woman asked me for direction while I was out for a run.  She was in a mustang and pulled over and stopped in the middle of the road to ask me.
• A lady on the bus asked me for directions to the convention center, for a homeless convention.  No idea how that works
• Another girl on the bus asked me how to get somewhere.
• An extremely inebriated girl stumbling in front of our building asked me to call a cab for her.  That one was rather unpleasant.
• A guy asked me for directions to Hooters and the Target Center, and if I knew of any other “good” restaurants around here.  Because apparently Hooters is a good restaurant.
• A guy with two thick gauge lip rings, and a thick gauge nose ring (like a bull), plus a couple of tattoos on his face asked me for directions.  He was the nicest and most cordial of all of them.

In addition:

• A fellow Iowa fan struck up a moderately long conversation with me on the street while waiting for a stoplight to change.
• A security guard struck up a conversation with me, also for quite a while.  He’s also from Iowa originally.  Waterloo originally.  He moved up here about… well, I could go on.

And all of this in just a little over one weekend.  It’s not like I stand around outside trolling for people to be a Boy Scout to.  I basically go to and from work, and go running about every other day.  I didn’t even really go out at all this weekend.  It just struck me as odd that this many random strangers would ask me for directions in such a short period of time.

Overheard a project manager saying- “Our application is like the economy, like the Dow, it goes up and it goes down, but mostly it goes down.”

One coworker to another while trying to decide where to go for lunch- “Show your heart who’s boss, get a burger.”

On a girl’s bag was a comic showing a boy saying “I’m a lover, not a figher”, and a girl next to him wearing boxing gloves saying, “Good, then this should be easy.”

An odd bit of Zen, or something, on life goals- changing, degrading, growing, evolving, I’m not sure.

At a fairly large meeting last week at work, we had a speaker come in who is sort of a higher up in the overall chain of command.  Our company has an extremely large, confusing, fussy chain of command with a lot of “strategy groups” and such along the way, so I’m not sure exactly where this guy falls, except that he’s high enough to be considered worth flying in from the coast to be a guest speaker, but low enough he would come to a relatively small meeting(150 people in a company of 150,000), stay for the whole thing, and not be a keynote speaker.

That’s a bit irrelevant to the story, but it sets the stage.  He was part of a panel discussion.  To introduce themselves, each speaker had a single PowerPoint slide (which from the divergent styles, fonts, layouts, and approaches to content, it was apparent they each prepared their own).

His slide had all of this in bullet point form, but I think it’s worth recounting how he narrated it as well, as closely paraphrased as I can remember.

He was born on an Army base and described himself as an Army brat.  It was always his dream to fly fighter jets, specifically F-16′s.  He went on about this for a bit.  However, when he was ready to enter the Air Force Academy, his vision was not up to their standards (you can’t fly fighter jets in the Air Force if you wear glasses).  So, he decided that he would be a military officer.  I forget the exact name of the school, but there is apparently a hugely prestigious Air Force school that one goes to be become a really important Air Force guy.  Like, you have to interview with a US Senator and a few other equally impressive people just to apply to get in.  This application is a very long process.

(This part is a little fuzzy, it was late in the meeting, so I was fading in and out.)

During the application process, he met a girl, and applied to a regular college.  By time his application to the military school came back (he was accepted), he decided to stick with the girl (maybe wife by this point), and the college he was going to (a place you’ve probably heard of, but not Ivy League or anything).

There may have been a bullet point about children and joining our company here, but if there was it was rather quickly and generically covered.

His next big accomplishment on the list, and he was quite excited about this, was that he build a deck on his house.  They live on a golf course, and he spent the last year or so designing and building a deck for the back of his house, facing the golf course.

Now, he didn’t actually build it, like cutting the boards and hammering the nails (“But it looked fun!”).  He hired contractors who did the work, but he was very proud and still referred to it as himself building a deck, and was adamant that a very detailed sketch of it the deck in the lower corner of his slide was in fact his “back of a napkin” design for it, drawn in perspective, with measurements.

In fact, of the pictures on his slide, telling us who he was, two of the pictures were of the deck, one was of a jet, and I think the other was a generic family type picture.

It just struck me as odd how he went from wanting to fly fighter jets, to being on a panel discussion introducing his life by focusing on the deck he spent the last summer not actually building.

I suppose this happens to all of us to some degree.  We all wanted to be an astronaut/cowboy/princess/president/fire fighter when we were little.  Or, in my case, paleontologists (I was an odd kid).  Yet very few of us will end up being the first Space Presidential-Princess of all the Fire Fighting Cowboys.

It just struck me as odd for someone to present this shift is such a straightforward, yet, I’m guessing entirely unintended, manner.

So today I was having a Caribou Iced Coffee that I got at a race.  Basically it’s coffee, which is cold, and comes in an aluminum can.  I was curious what was in it, so I read the list of ingredients:

Coffee, reduced fat milk, sugar, sodium bicarbonate, natural flavors, carrageenan

Those all sounded pretty familiar, except carrageenan.  I was curious what it was, and even more so, how to pronounce it.  It strikes me a fun sounding word, though I’m still not sure if I’ve got it right.  That’s one of the major downsides of the internet- you can read about something all you like and become an expert on it, but as soon as you go to talk about it, you’ll sound like an idiot for saying it wrong.  Either way, it’s kind of fun to try to say. Carrageenan.

So anyway, I looked up what it is on Wikipedia.  Apparently, it’s an extract from a type of red seaweed that grows off of the coast of Ireland.  Aside from iced coffee, it’s also used in processed meat, fire fighting foam, shampoo, and shoe polish.  Oh yeah, and it might also be useful as a sexual lubricant and microbicide.

Amazing the things you can learn reading an ingredient list while highly caffeinated.

What will they do with red Irish seaweed next?