My little elph digital camera has some serious red eye problems.

posted by paula 1:05 PM

So what I have we been up to all week? Here’s a small synopsis, sans annoying commercial breaks:

Monday -- Monday was sulking night. The neighbors came down to 'console' me after I received my rejection letter in the mail. All right, so I wasn’t that broken up about it, but no one likes rejections, even if they come in the form of a candy gram. I’m a little disappointed that such a small organization that had very few interviews in the last round couldn’t get up the guts to call me and tell me I didn’t get the job, even after speaking with them multiple times on the phone and going through two interviews. Like someone said: “It’s like my old college boyfriend breaking up with me over the phone because walking to the next dorm was too far.”

Tuesday – Twins playoff night. Thanks to our friends, we got two tickets to the game at the dome. Sadly enough, the Twins haven’t won since.

Friday – Friday night was an impromptu ‘Twin Margarita night’ at the Friday household. Eight of us got together to watch the Twins v. Angels game and have some drinks. Some chips, salsa, one and half bottles of tequila and one Twins loss later, all our worries were out for the weekend, giving us a rain check for Monday. Unfortunately, what remains is some rather unflattering images of an intoxicated Erik and Greg. Which gives us the opportunity to introduce our new/old friend Greg, who has just moved to the area after working oh-so-closely with Mr. Greenspan in D.C. If you’d like someone to thank for lowering the interest rates these days, thank Greg (He’s in the yellow shirt. Quite fond of Friday, no less.)

In addition, I'm also trying to organize a small trip to a Chippendales show for the ladies. Nothing like a little harmless, gratuitous, partial-nudity to start the season off right. Details are still up in the air, but if you'd like to join us please email me.

posted by paula 10:12 AM

And again. Weird news from Florida.

posted by paula 7:53 AM

What????


You've got to be kidding me.
Richard Conniff has written a book stating that America's rich behave like our fellow primates. My issues with the book are that it's written on the following assumptions:

1. All successful CEOs are alpha-type men. Where does that leave women? This assumption evokes images of Oprah dancing around a boardroom somewhere, yelling and screaming, beating her chest like an ape.
2. 'Rich' is an absolute and not a sliding scale. That is, being having a net worth of say, $1.5 million is not rich, but $2 million is.
3. ‘Rich’ is also not defined. There are certainly different types, both in how you are ‘rich’ and how you ‘got rich.’ Net worth vs. cash flow. Did you inherit your money? Come into a large sum from a settlement or earn it in your career? Obviously, behaviors differ between each party.
4. Because we somehow physically evolved from primates our social behaviors must be derived from their species as well.
5. So this guy spends decades studying primates in the middle of the rainforest and because of a few similarities he’s noticed he’s suddenly and expert on human behavior?

Lastly, Conniff assumes that these people are inherently bad by nature – that CEOs and Presidents and Veeps are all deceptive individuals by painting pictures of wanting to be considered with the rest of the crowd. What he misses is this: society as a whole perpetuates these standards for our corporate elite and even admires them. No matter how much we pretend to despise the leaders of WorldCom, Enron and the like, in actuality, we’re the ones who reward this sort of behavior that Conniff sites as atrocious. We work for their companies. We support their efforts. We pay them large salaries because we want leaders who know what’s going on and have the aggression necessary to take us to the next level. If it wasn’t such a highly held position, society would naturally regulate itself and make the CEO an equivalent of a mailroom employee in the corporate hierarchy.
Being successful is still an admirable goal and an object of envy by many. We’ve built a society that admires aggression in the business world and rewards it with money and power. So if anyone’s to blame, it’s not the CEO. Society is a more likely culprit than that.

posted by paula 11:08 AM

Poor Martha. Of course, I mean that as much as Martha was naive to the actual consequences of her actions when she committed her illegal trades. Despite the fact that I don't support her actions, I'm sticking with her though-- jail time or not. To me, Martha's the epitome of what little girls should be taught about feminism: the only woman who didn't have to become a man to be a feminist and made her fortune off of proper doily placement and flower arrangements. But that's another story for another day.
I was at the post office the other day, returning a package to Martha when the clerk commented on her current legal troubles. I reminded him politely that it was pretty easy for us to judge, since we're not faced with temptation of knowing that we're about to lose scads of money and could avoid impending disaster if we commit one small, illegal act. He replied with "Yeah, but when these people get so insanely rich, they tend to lose it. All I know is if I had that much money to throw around, I wouldn't have done it." And therein lies the irony. You see, to me, the fact that Martha's actually investing implies that she doesn't throw her money around and that she's actually quite sensible about where it goes. The actual act of investing seems to imply that someone's planning for a future and if that's not the case, at the very least it implies that they're slightly more right-minded than those who are spending their millions on a slew of new Ferraris in coordinating colors.
There's no doubt what Martha did was wrong -- either in the case that she built a trust with a slimy stock broker who helped her seal the deal and then eventually betrayed that trust to save his own self, or the fact that she knew what was going down. I think the temptation to avoid disaster was just a little too much.
Look at it this way: If she does go to prison, at least her legacy won't end. She'll be able to teach the other inmates how to make fragrant lemon sugar or embroider day lilies into those otherwise drab pillowcases.

posted by paula 6:22 PM