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April 24, 2006
Sunburn
Writing from Washington DC this morning. Spent the weekend at Miami beach and am currently on day 3 of the sunburn. It’s much better than the evening of day 1, when the nausea and chills set in, or day 2, when it was painful to stand up. Apparently you can’t just watch your own skin for signs of color and then put on sunscreen and apparently, your skin does not “save up” anti burning time. Anyway, I put sunscreen on my face, neck and arms before heading out to Key Biscayne and then forgot all about it until that evening when the nausea and disorientation set in. Now I have a little bit of color on my face and arms and the rest of me looks like a stoplight so I have some evidence that sunscreen actually works.
Posted by jb at 09:21 AM | Comments (1)
April 16, 2006
Friday and Saturday
Passover at the Green's house. 11 people. We sat down at 9:45 pm and finished at 1:30 in the morning. The Seder started slow and then we all raced to the finish.
Drove over the Lara’s house the next day- a small blue bungalow in Brentwood. I brought two plants, a grape vine and some other trellis-oriented plant as a housewarming gift. Steven- her husband- and I moved a trunk into the basement and worked at pulling some blue vinyl siding off of the porch eaves. I still need to call Lara’s brother Neil.
Wrote the first two paragraphs at the Freer Gallery of Asian art, sitting on the walkway that surrounds a small boxwood garden in the middle. I meant to drive out to Woodley park, relax at a café, and have some coffee but I decided to keep going by train down to the Smithsonian stop where I could take a gander at the Chinese landscape paintings I’d studied in college. The main landscape exhibit was shut for repairs but I decided to stroll around and see whether they’d kept any of the landscapes by Ni Tsan on the walls.
Ni Tsan’s paintings are unusual because they maintain broad swathes of blank canvas. The ink forms trail off into this space, occasionally forming a transparent bridge in the middle of the canvas that joins forms at the top and bottom. It makes me think of the last note in a recital or of a thought that slowly trails away.
Rachel called as I was leaving the art gallery. Went over to her house and planted some azaleas and spring onions in some raised beds that she was working on. Afterwards, Nathan, Rachel and I went over to a block of warehouses on 4th and Morse in NE where we ate Korean food at a bodega wishboned between the Haw San (sp) import export warehouse and four other warehouses. The food was really cheap and the proprietor sat and talked to us while we ate.
One item in re eating at small shops in industrial warehouse clusters. There are forklifts everywhere.
Sat around on the front porch with Dave last night. Dave hand cut some hickory and used to cook a big steak on the portico outside his kitchen.
Happy Easter to the upstairs housemates. Good luck to T Montgomery during her trip to Calif.
Posted by jb at 08:19 AM | Comments (4)
April 13, 2006
Arlington
At a Marriot Courtyard in Arlington this morning. I arrived after driving up from Norfolk, VA yesterday. I may be traveling to Florida in a few days but this isn’t certain.
Went running in Norfolk, along the side of a side road and under two bridges, one near a warehouse where some kids were working on their lowriders.
Walked around DC last night, from GWU to the monument to Dupont circle/ Conn Ave where I had dinner at Kramerbooks before walking back. Tons of people on the sidewalk. The outdoor tables were packed ith diners at 10:30 which is something more common in Europe and less common in Boston.
Called everyone I knew last night. Walking and talking. Tried to get to people who knew people who knew friends of mine who had phones but no apparent phone numbers then voicemail in order to tell them that I was planning to be around Saturday morning.
Now Passover tonight at Dave’s house. Really Dave’s parent’s house. Everyone will be there. Remind me to get a bottle of wine.
Posted by jb at 08:38 AM | Comments (3)
April 09, 2006
Mistakes Were Made
"Good afternoon America. Good afternoon shareholders. Mark Platner here. We will be reviewing our quarterly results shortly but I wanted to first take a minute and speak frankly on some of the difficulties that have confronted us and about some of the changes we will be making in order to better serve our community, our nation, and those who have chosen to stand by us throughout the last three quarters
First, I’d like to say that this transition period has not been easy for any of us. We’ve all spent long nights on this end, reviewing past decisions, trying to determine where things went wrong. Several of us left the company. One committed Seppuku. The cleaning staff in our Clearwater, FL office is still in therapy. We are paying for the therapy, by the way. We may be in tough financial times but we still care about our employees.
Today we are focused on disclosure. We are glad to get things out in the open and see this as the first part in our own ten-step plan toward corporate accountability. With that in mind, I’ll walk through some of the problems that we have faced and provide some insight to changes in our approach
The biggest and most obvious stumbling block hit us early when we merged Corporate Office Rentals and a new Theme Parks division we’d acquired from a Disney Affiliate. In retrospect, we should have installed our more traditional managers in the Theme Parks division rather than thinking ‘out of the box’ by replacing the Rental Management team with a set of Rodeo Clowns. In retrospect, we were deceived by their inspirational speeches. We are happy to announce, however, that we have settled out of court to control our losses stemming from the early decision to combine coffee stations and mechanical bulls as a “wake up and get going” tool.
Unfortunately, we did not learn the larger lesson here, and followed with other unfortunate staffing changes. An example: while we continue to believe in the enormous potential held by all individuals, we now admit that our decision to hire state-certified sociopaths to staff our “Bright and Perky” line of family restaurants was short-sighted. Many of these restaurants, by the way, are still standing and most of our waitstaff no longer require clozapine to function.
We can also state that our decision to replace a third of our workforce with Roomba’s was unfortunate. While we firmly believe that robots are the way of the future, we feel that these robots may not be Roombas with built in calculators. As part of our ongoing settlement process, we would also like to extend a formal apology to the many patients who visited our regional hospitals during this Roombas phase and in particular, the one hundred and sixty eight patients who ended up getting a less than gentle vacuum massage rather than undergoing standard, accepted open heart surgery procedures.
As you know, our difficulties extended beyond staffing decisions. For those of you wondering about the oversized Monopoly cards sent out in the place of the last quarterly shareholders report, I ask for your patience. You may have gotten our letter on the subject. We now have standard reports prepared for everyone except shareholders with more than two hotels on Ventnor Avenue. We have also removed the slot machine graphic from our homepage share price display. On that note, you may be pleased to know that we remain listed in the NYSE despite the regrettable but well publicized incident with the giraffe.
That said, we are making efforts to improve the situation and communicate these improvements to the outside world. You may recognize, for example, changes in our advertising style. Many viewers were offended by our last ad campaign. They did not, for example, find the commercial where the plane filled with kittens blows up near an orphanage “funny” or “cute” in the way that we’d intended. We regret this. From now on we will use only mimes. Maybe an orphanage full. Just a joke there.
Thanks for listening to my introduction. We will start the formal review now. We suspect that you will find more reassuring information within the body of this report. Pay particular attention to our management analysis. We’ve spent some time trying to clarify parts. You’ll find some liner notes to the interpretive dance sequence under your seats."
Posted by jb at 07:54 AM | Comments (1)