Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Revolutions

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I quit smoking for my birthday in 1976.

I have mentioned since that that used up all my willpower. I don’t smoke. I still like the smell of a good cigar but I still didn’t smoke today.

I figure I have aimed my stock of willpower at not smoking which doesn’t leave much to avoid lusting after a new Android tablet or a different boat.

Researcher Roy F. Baumeister sort of agrees in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Like a muscle, willpower is fatigued or broken down completely by overuse.

We’re not talking about the Australian racer who drives for Team Penske in the IndyCar Series. Willpower is usually thought to mean self discipline, self-control, or the ability to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

Like keep a New Year’s resolution.

I “came of [management] age” in the 70s and 80s when the B-schools thought employees were valuable and Theory Y was king. I still believe in Management By Objectives, a program I first implemented at Harris.

MBO relies on participative goal setting in which employees decide on what business goals they can attain and the tasks they will undertake to fulfill them. The part I like best is that we measure the actual results against the standards we set at the beginning of the period so we all — managers and managees alike — always know exactly how we are doing.

The reason managers like MBO is that the employees think they have power because they are setting their own goals and are more committed to the company (and more likely to outproduce the company expectations) as a result.

The only real downside to MBO is that it is still a top-down process.

On the other hand, it doesn’t rely solely on willpower. Properly done, every goal has both an external deadline and a manager or coach or peer to make sure we do it. It’s a pretty good process to force yourself to do something you really really really didn’t want to do.

When I led a parent group at our local middle and high school, we started a goal setting club. The kids created their own goals, set milestones, and chose someone to monitor their results. We had a reward at the end. The kids did very well.

Back to Dr. Baumeister’s weight room. He has shown that we can build “new” willpower in much the same way we build muscles in the gym: practice and reps, practice and reps. And by eating properly. Our brains need fuel to make decisions, store and retrieve memories, and pass standardized tests. Dr. Baumeister found that willpower requires glucose too so we can be strengthen our willpower simply by working out and adding to the brain’s fuel stores.

Building working muscle means working with moderate weights but doing it over and over and over again.

Want to keep your New Year’s resolutions?

Take Dr. Baumeister’s advice and use what we’ve learned in MBO. Just like the 7th and 8th graders:

  • Create a goal you can reach. It is darned near impossible to lose 50 pounds but it is reasonable to lose a pound a week.
  • Set checkpoints to make sure you’re on track. That’s no different than going to the gym every day.
  • Choose someone to monitor your results. There is nothing like peer pressure to make sure you haven’t snuck out to the barn for a smoke — I told everyone I knew I was quitting and they watched me like hungry mosquitoes.
  • Build your willpower and resolutions just one or two goals at a time. You can work your biceps today and your glutes tomorrow.

Revolutionary, that is.

Pundit Speak

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May you live in interesting times.

Never a curse for an editorial writer but nobody wants to read polemics today. Not even me.

I tried to get some personal interest going about the kerfuffle over the new Muppet movie. Yawn. Rufus chewed on the rugs about the increasing threshold for itemized medical expense deductions. Ho hum. Election news. Who cares?

2011 was an interesting year in Puffin Land.

The birth of my unexpected first great-granddaughter and my friend Bob’s expected second grandson added joy but we also experienced the death of Anne’s most-favorite cousin and Nancy’s father.

Bob beat back lymphoma.

Anne now has a removable cast.

I got back to North Puffin in January, just in time to shovel us out of a record snow year. We should get an average of 67.4 inches of snow each winter which means October through April or so. We about doubled that and most of it waited for me to get there. Great, white gobs of greasy, grimy, icicles, and me without a spoon — I did all the plowing with the bucket loader because my snowblower was buried behind the construction materiel in the barn.

The record snows led to record melts and record high water in Vermont’s lakes and rivers which led to record flood claims. Then Irene rampaged through the state and did it again. North Puffin was exceptionally lucky. The house is more than 20 feet above the new Lake Champlain flood stage so we merely lived on an island until the early flood waters receded. And the hurricane which devastated southern Vermont just watered our apple tree.

Anne and I did a bunch of telephone diagnosis on the pellet stove when she was next to the stove and I was next to the beach. The stove was recalcitrant in January and rebellious in November. There’s good news. The early estrangement turned out to be a cleaning issue and the Fall failure a broken brain. We were able to get the stove running both times, all thanks to the phone and pictures-by-email.

Technology helped Bob and me when I had to pack up his tons of gear down here and drive it home for him. That was my first use of Skype which meant he could see what I was describing and we got all the astronomy parts in the right boxes.

Anne and I will definitely use Skype the next time she has to disassemble the pellet stove.

Broke: I made the boat payments for our body shop when the Honda collapsed right in front of a very patient cop. Got to do it a second time when a steel pipe (the kind that supports a parking meter) jumped in front of the Camaro. Then Anne had the apple tree trip her and break her leg and we started making payments on the orthopod’s boat.

He has a bigger boat than the body shop guy.

A commercial client told me they “weren’t inclined to pay [our] bill” this fall. I’ve run both a small business and an arts council for more than 20 years and I’ve met plenty of slow payers — and some actual deadbeats — but I’ve not heard that one before. Looks like I’ll find out how collections work.

I suspect bill collectors have a bigger boat than I do, too.

My back porch project moved along nicely but slowly. I closed in the north wing and did most of the finish work. It looks good and breaks the worst of the winter winds coming off the lake.

An interesting year.

I had my toes in the ocean and my ass in the sand yesterday. It was a very quiet Christmas. The beach was overcast but the water was quite nice. A girl named Nola skipped through the waves and was part of about four generations there. A 2-1/2 year old, a young couple, their parents, and the parents’ parents.

Life goes on.

18 Mile Boondoggle

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Two people were airlifted to hospital last week after a police chase ended in a crash and gunfire that closed the one and only road into (and out of) the Florida Keys for nearly a day.

ABC News PhotoOur section of U.S. Route 1 — the Florida Keys Overseas Highway — opened in 1938. The 18-mile long easternmost segment of the two-lane road that connects Key West at mile marker 0 to the United States has been the site of uncounted (by me) head-on crashes and a worrisome bottleneck for hurricane evacuation planners. When traffic flowed, it was an All-American Road in the National Scenic Byways program. When traffic stalled, the entire island chain would shut down.

Construction on the Florida Department of Transportation 18-Mile Stretch project began January 3, 2005, right at the height of tourist season.

The FLDOT has converted the Overseas Highway from an open two-lane road to a divided two-lane road with a concrete barrier separating northbound and southbound traffic. They replaced the Jewfish Creek drawbridge with a 65-foot-high fixed-span and added an elevated causeway over Lake Surprise. It also includes a new C-111 bridge, two new smaller bridges, an emergency evacuation shoulder along the northbound lane, new turn lanes, and a repaved and re-striped road surface everywhere else. A fence on both sides of the roadway now prevents wildlife getting off the road when they wind up in front of you.

Under ConstructionThe project took six years and cost $330 million and is said to have come in “on time and under budget.”

18 miles. $330 million. Why not? It’s only a skoch over $18 million/mile. $289.35/inch. Heck, my beach is worth more than that!

And a beautiful road it is with its tropical green barrier and smooth, comfortable, wide lane each way.

Back to the chase. And the shoot-out. And the road closure. The DEA, ATF, ICE, FDLE, 17 other alphabet agencies, plus Homeland Security and Miami-Dade police had run a drug sting on a criminal gang they knew pretty well; the sting did not go quite as smoothly as they hoped. The suspects took off in an SUV. Officers gave chase. Cops pursued the vehicle southwest through Miami-Dade County into Homestead, and on down the 18-Mile Stretch.

Note to the bad guys: when the cops are chasing you, driving to an island with only one road in and out is a really really bad idea.

The chase ended when the driver of the SUV lost control and the truck flipped.

Accidents that close our road are common. One person died in an afternoon crash on the Long Key Bridge on December 12. U.S. 1 was closed for a couple of hours. The highway was completely blocked.

Same bridge. May 19. Traffic stalled after two vehicles collided head-on on the bridge. That one included a vehicle fire and significant injuries; at least one person was airlifted to Miami. The road was closed for only an hour or so that time.

Florida DOT made a boondoggle of the 5-year, $330-million redesign of the 18-Mile Stretch. Accidents there CLOSE THE ENTIRE ROAD.

What on this green earth do they think a fender bender will do to a hurricane evacuation, especially since they installed the concrete choke point down the centerline?

Fly United

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I drove all the way down here to the land of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Key Deer.

I wanted to fly.

1,780 road miles it is from North Puffin to South. 2,000 or more frequent flier miles.

I wanted to fly.

I hate to fly.

Cicero taught us “A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble.”

FELLOW TRAVELERS
55-year-old Olga Bezmelnitsyna and 41-year-old Sergei Gorlov (called “a middle-aged couple” in the report) were fined £500 for outraging public decency after a series of incidents on a 12-hour flight from Brazil to London. The cabin crew received complaints from passengers about the pair and found Bezmelnitsyna face down in her companion’s lap. Despite being warned she was caught later in the flight with her hand on his groin with his trousers unzipped. I guess she wasn’t done.

Jeezum, all they needed was a blanket.

And a 44-year old man and his 39-year-old female partner (also called “a middle-aged couple” on the radio) were arrested upon landing in north Queensland. The Jetstar cabin crew said they found the pair together in the plane’s toilet and that the man “became abusive to staff after they were discovered.” I guess he wasn’t finished, either. He was charged with disorderly conduct on an aircraft but his partner was merely fined.

This is all because airlines stopped giving out blankets.

The news was all atwitter about the Alec Baldwin/American Airlines kerfuffle last week. No other sex to report, I guess.

No, I made that up, mostly because he tweeted about it after the fact.

PETTY BUREAUCRATS
“I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog,” Cicero wrote.

The AA fiasco began with a celebrity using a mobile device to play Words With Friends. He was on an airplane. I presume the Friends were not. The cabin doors closed, and the passengers were asked to turn off all electronic devices. Mr. Baldwin refused. He acted the ass. I understand that.

One passenger told the reporter that the other passengers were all Tweeting about Mr. Baldwin’s ejection for … Tweeting. “The flight attendants didn’t threaten to eject the rest of them.” he said.

Ah hah! Bureaucrats in the skies!

TSA
Lenore Zimmerman, an 84-, 85-, or 95-year-old woman on her way to Fort Lauderdale, said she was strip searched in New York after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner because she worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her pants and other clothes. She missed her flight and had to take one 2-1/2 hours later, she said.

TSA said in a statement that no strip search was conducted. “While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case.”

I think they found her diaper.

Somebody is lying. I suspect TSA.

And a second granny — 88-year old Ruth Sherman — says she was strip-searched at JFK. She said screeners at JetBlue took her to a private area to check the bulge caused by her colostomy bag. Linda Kallish, in her 60s, also came forward with a nearly identical story.

TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein would not provide the agency’s definition of a strip search. “It depends,” she said.

People who believe the TSA have baptized themselves in the Kool-Aid™. We’re willing to let some stranger stop and search us under the presumption of guilt simply because we travel. They “randomly” select us — or they sort of search all of us — on the off chance they might catch a bad guy.

That’s why we call it “fishing” instead of “catching.”

Back in the old days, I flew to South Puffin on a one-way ticket. I had my pony tail, computer bag, and I checked my “brown cardboard suitcase” (a heavy IBM server shipping box that carried everything I needed down here including a full size cooler). The bureaucrats “randomly” selected that box and me for added scrutiny.

That was the right thing to do.

When they spent their time on the grannies, they missed the wife beater, the smuggler, the embezzler, and father stabber. Father rapers. Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me. And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me.1

“Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.” wrote Dr. Jim Boren.

Actually, I rather like to fly. I just hate to fly with the people who grease the wheels. And Mr. Baldwin.

Sex, Sex, and More Sex

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Twenty-nine percent of ordinary Americans have had sex on a first date, and about as many have had an “unexpected sexual encounter with someone new.” Among people who are married or living in a committed relationship (or formerly married), sixteen percent have cheated on their partner (nearly twice as many men as women) — while more, thirty percent, have fantasized about it.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an affair.

Ordinary Americans are pikers.

Voice of America reports that “When U.S. businessman Herman Cain suspended his campaign [Saturday] for the Republican presidential nomination following allegations of sexual harassment and a lengthy extramarital affair, he joined a long list of U.S. presidents and presidential contenders whose personal lives have attracted scrutiny.”

The long list is pretty much all of them.

Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gary Hart, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there are the Mark Sanfords, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Eliot Spitzers, Anthony Weiners. Apparently about 97.7 percent of American presidents and 110 percent of American presidential candidates.

What did we expect? From the Victorians through Viet Nam, public morality did inhibit any open acknowledgment of sexuality but things have (sort of) changed. Most American homes today probably have copies of Playboy and Fanny Hill and the Joy of Sex but the owners still keep them out of sight. On the other hand, a couple generations of soap operas have been hotbeds of in-your-face adultery. They reflected American life or at least American political life.

Now we tell ourselves stories — stories about how prim we are and how licentious our neighbors are — and those stories hurt us.

Countries with an ultraconservative attitude towards sex and sex education like the U.S. have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.

I have some simple advice for these people in public life:


Grow a pair!
You guys (and I mean all of you political philanderers from any affiliation) think you’re winning the dicksizing contest.

You ain’t.

You’d like We the People to believe you are King of the Bedroom or at least the oval rug but you can’t even stand up for your bigger self when your littler self gets caught standing up.

Here’s the answer. When the admittedly brain dead reporter asks, “Did you really have sex with three women, and a goat?” tell the truth.

“Yep. What’s it to you?”

About the only follow up to that is, “Was it good for the goat?”

Actually, a decent reporter should ask the spouse to comment. It would be a good teaching moment for relationship building. Maybe for polyamory. Or at least for truth in advertising.