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| Boo attacks my phone |
I really do. Having to post pictures from my iPhone just doesn’t feel right. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day across most of Georgia tomorrow, so maybe I’ll take a few hours and go find something interesting to look at. Or maybe not. Who can say?
I worked from home today, spending most of my time taking some mandatory training and getting it out of the way for the next 6 months. We’re required to take some of the most moronic courses ever thought up. It’s not that their concepts are stupid – business ethics, sexual harassment, etc – but it’s ridiculous that people still have to sit through “training” about it, complete with tests at the end that are made up of incredibly obvious questions. I’ll admit that, most of the time, I just skip to the test right off the bat and don’t bother with the material. It’s sort of pointless to spend an hour watching poorly-acted and patently unbelievable video when you can just answer some questions which will typically be phrased something like this:
One of Skip’s employees, Mandy, tells him that another employee, Steven, regularly steals money from petty cash. What should Skip do?
- Alert human resources.
- Tell Mandy that she shouldn’t squeal on other employees.
- Confront Steven and blackmail him.
- Do nothing. Everybody steals from petty cash.
Today, however, I sat through most of the videos – basically because I don’t like starting new projects on Fridays, and I finished my old ones yesterday.
Had some shepherds pie for lunch and dinner, and spent the last couple of hours watching Ghosts of Mississippi, which is a movie about the retrial of the guy who murdered Medgar Evers in the 1960s. This is about the third time in the last year that I’ve stumbled across something dealing with Medgar Evers. Each time, I’ve been somewhat appalled at the bigotry of the middle of the last century. I understand that prejudice is a fact of life and that everybody’s got some and that, particularly in the south, racism still exists in many ways today; but the over-the-top nature of it during the 1960s just blows me away. How can/could anybody actually think like that?
I had a brief email conversation with my father about just this subject sometime in the last year, trying to find out how he felt about issues of race when he was in his 20s and 30s, and how his views have changed, if at all. He told me that New England was pretty isolated from the whole problem. I can accept that.
Politically, it just makes me more liberal. Over generations, societal change is effected best by government intervention. The government made forced integration. At the time, it caused riots. Today, nobody thinks anything about it (except very stupid people who tend to be over 50). Government sued the tobacco industry, shouted about the evils of smoking, and made it illegal for anyone under 17 to buy cigarettes. When I was in high school, smoking was no big deal. Most of the kids I know today think it’s disgusting. In the 50s and 60s, drunk driving was a comical offense (think Otis on the Andy Griffith Show). After MADD got government involved, it became a crime nearly worthy of the death penalty.
There are plenty of other examples that I can’t think of right now, but my point is still this: if you want big-time changes, you need big-time regulation. It’s not something that parents pass down to kids.
I also practiced the tuba for about 45 minutes today. I think it’s the first time in about a week that I’ve played it. Started out pretty rough, but smoothed out after I warmed up. Didn’t take the alto horn out of the case. I’ll blow on it this weekend, probably.
Got a slight case of indigestion this evening and really wanted a glass of milk, but let it go. No Dairy January is almost over.
TWD