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...