Brown Motion

 Desperate times desperate measures. Creating news out of nothing. Major media conglomerates are all guilty of this and the stupid audiences lap it up. Brady may be retiring.  Or maybe not.   Stocks are going to be up or down. Crypto is a craze or not. Ukraine is in trouble perhaps. Biden added more pets on the taxpayer's dime. Maybe you will tune in or not!

 It is fitting to close out this name calling by discussing a person's last name. Specifically my newly found source of inspiration - the NFL.  Readership may have noticed that I have started to randomly watch NFL games on TV.  Channel clicking has only got me so far.  I binged and I streamed and then gave up. America's pastime - only next to shopping and eating. Football.  An oblate spheroid made of cowskin being run and thrown by 20 large guys in helmets.  Millions of dollars worth of pastime this. But the idea to write about last name stemmed from my observation of the players' jerseys. You see the last name of the player is plastered on the backs along with a player number. And I must say 95% of the last names were new to me.  Never ever heard before. Not to mention hard to pronounce. Wanogho Marpeet (it means bashing in Indian lingo) Suh Singletary Butkus (no really?) Gronkowski Kittle (not the candy) you get the idea.. 

 For an Indian ex-pat like me wandering in America, the notion of a 'first name' was a cultural adjustment.  Where I come from I simply had a name.  In India some rather formal types might even have asked for my good name.  But that is all I knew about a name.  My own that was given to me by my parents at birth. Of course there was the matter of what came after it. Well as the English left they left us with their formatting.  Hence a surname.  Not to be confused with 'Suriname', a country and former Dutch colony on the north edge of South America. Origin of the word surname is Latin as in 'sur' which means 'from above' and 'nom' or name.  As in the family or tribe identifier that you carry to indicate your own heredity. Hence a name and surname. Now in America it was not so.  There was the concept of a first name. It to me implied the dude or gal I meet had more than one name. To follow the first? And how many exactly?  Vexing. I had hea...

 Everywhere I turn these days for product or service I am dreading the type of response I might get.  This dread is not hard to explain.  I am sure the readership has encountered this too. A subpar service or product experience from airlines to hotels to food distribution or purveyors including grocers and QSRs to banks and phone companies and the like. Using Covid as a crutch there seems to be a new easy out for anything that does not meet the contractual or implied guidance on what a customer should be getting for parting with their time and cash. Sorry it is due to covid.  Even getting on work related zoom calls and dreading the rabid dog barking uncontrollably in some schmo's background like some sort of new age music is crazy. From a recent experience where we had a scheduled Rapid Test for this dreaded virus that got canceled an hour before the test itself - sorry due to covid we are in a shortage of the tests.  Really?  And you with your millions of ...

 Americans love pets.  Four legged creatures of various kinds are the norm.  Non profits galore urging everyday citizens to adopt them as a pandemic took hold. Your benevolence and altruism was being tickled.  Find this creature a home. Et al. Another way to look at it - House arrest for an organism that would rather live in the great outdoors. And do what the species was naturally designed to.  Run amuck and hunt for their food. Modern civilization turned that story to suit their greed.  Companionship when the human version ditched older folks of the same species. A four legged toy to get through boredom and so on. Feeding and captivating the clueless creature of limited intelligence into submission to jump and prance when the owner chose to.  Children abusing it by riding one and who knows what.   Staring or barking at a vacuum cleaner or sliding on parquet floors is not what was in the grand design when these creatures came to be. Now take...

 There is a lot of chatter in the media about this wave of citizens saying so long to their jobs.  60 minutes felt compelled to get clicks and eyeballs by sending some veteran journalists to track down what this means. That interview with some woman from LinkedIn was not insightful in my opinion but it does beg the question, 'what are all these people doing for livelihood?' IMHO some of these are deadbeats who were always looking for an excuse to not do anything. If the amount of hobos at traffic lights is an early indicator I think lot of America is resorting to begging. That labeled euphemistically as panhandling or sitting feet up in the couch waiting for some government handout is really the same.  The latter can be done in the comfort of a rental where you do not pay rent. But I also believe there is no free lunch.  If we did not pay these bozos to lay low and absorb the free money they might ooze out and loot the retailers like some do. More havoc which we can ...

 In a courtroom anywhere in the world the prescribed operating model is to seek truth.  Veritas.  Mottos have been written and lot of prose and poetry too. Truth shall set you free.  Is truth reality?  The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Is reality sometimes disconnected from truth?  Truth is the government doled out a lot of aid to those that need it.  Locally and internationally.  But reality is lot of the intended recipients never got said aid.  Hence the inequality continues.  Those that need help did not get it.  So on and on. Truth is there are laws of the land to prevent corruption, and rape, and many other ills that ail society.  What is real is that we all live in a state of an alternate reality. Some months ago a large American corporation known for its social network that has billions to its credit announced a brand change.  FB the parent company that owns the namesake brand and some other glob...

 Corporate America loves jargon.  What is basic common sense stuff takes on a life of its own when people start yammering lingo to sound important. You see a preponderance of Corporate Round Tables to discuss matters of import with some other hacks who think they have profound things to share about whatever. First - do they actually sit at a round table?  Chances are unless they are in a Chinese restaurant with a lazy Susan on the table it is not going to be a round table.  There may well be a lazy Susan in attendance but again not at a round table. Most discussions in my experience were at a rectangle.  The idea for tables to be round was to ensure equal status at the discussion.  But today's world is inflated with multiple egos and people have quickly decide to switch to rectangles to exert power.  Hence we get head of table and other distractions. Next comes fireside chats. If matters spill over from said tables referenced above there is a need to h...

 I am not entirely sure how many humans know what a bassoon is.  I did not.  But it was brought to my attention in the unlikeliest of places. As a parent of a student now in college I vividly remember the days when we as a parent were supposed to take active interest in helping the said student chart a course out of high school.  Or so we thought based on the demographic that surrounded us. LOL. The above assertion belies the fact that our child (read student) rightly thought we were soft in the head to believe in this idiotic idea.  Any rate we attended a so called counseling meeting held by a private party to educate clueless parents on how best to help their investment (read kid) grow.  Oh the folly of Silicon Valley. It appears that shepherding your ward into a parallel universe for coaching to be what they can be (to borrow a meaningless alliterative phrase) outside of what their institution for learning (read school) is supposed to teach is the way to...

 I know its winter.  I know you know it is.  But that is not what I mean.  I mean I am cold as opposed to I am HOT. As in the self adulation of a desperate kind.  The kind that has been in our DNA from times of the Romans.  Or is it the Greeks.  Some mythical guy called Narcissus. In the days of declaring genders and what not perhaps we humans need to add that moniker to our titles? He/Him/Hot. She/Her/Flaming Hot. From spouses portraying their undying love or pretending to while they seek other entertainment people seem to plaster their social feeds with said adjectives of Hotness. Now having an obese trending tone myself and no concept or interest of what hotness might mean I have to rely on those that self-proclaim this attribute to be clear in their descriptions. Not to confuse with people running a temperature due to Covid.  Or other reasons.   And what of it you ask?  Well that is to be determined.  What do people do with...