August 22, 1996
Dear Everyone:
I saw in the paper
this week where the
British are
considering down-sizing the
Royal Family.
It was only a matter of time.
Everyone else is
down-sizing (a
term invented for cutting jobs), why not the Royal Family?
At least in their case, it would be pretty straightforward.
How closely are you related to the monarch?
Third cousin on your mother’s side?
Sorry, the cutoff line is at second cousin once removed.
It’s not like being
re-engineered, another misused term.
When you get “re-engineered”,
you’re required to prove that your job is non-essential; or prove that
the job is essential, but you’re not the best person to do it.
And then there’s “out-sourcing”,
which means that the job is essential, but it’s cheaper to pay an
outside vendor to do it for you.
Maybe the British
should consider out-sourcing the Royals.
Keep the Queen
Mum, of course, because she’s everybody’s favorite.
But they could jettison those unruly grandchildren and replace
them with some of Monaco’s
quieter offspring and have them only show up for important state
occasions, for an hourly rate.
And they could make staying out of the tabloids a prerequisite
for the job.
On the other hand,
if all those tabloids went out of business at the same time, it could
adversely affect the whole economy.
Meanwhile, back on
our side of the
Atlantic, the
Republicans have had their quadrennial
Convention,
pre-empting hours of reruns on TV, and proving just how boring they
really can be. (It rhymes,
so it must be true.) Next
week, the
Democrats will spend a week making speeches that no one will listen
to. And as for
Ross Perot and his
Reform party, never has a man been so willing to spend so many
billions of his dollars and ours, just to hear the sound of his own
voice.
Isn’t there some way
we can down-size politics?
Or better yet, out-source it.
In other news...
When I got back from
vacation, the jelly bean dispenser in my “Livermore” office was flat out
empty. This is a plastic
container with a little door on the top and a chute on the bottom.
You lift up the top and pour jelly beans in.
Then you place your hand under the chute and pull up on a plastic
lever. This opens the chute
and jelly beans fall into your hand.
It takes about $12 to fill the dispenser.
These are not
ordinary jelly beans, you understand.
These are
gourmet jelly beans in flavors like watermelon, orange sherbet,
coconut, buttered popcorn, and piña colada.
Lots of people come into my office to help themselves to jelly
beans from the dispenser which sits on top of my filing cabinet.
This is a good thing because it means that not everyone who comes
into my office has a problem that I’m supposed to solve.
Sometimes they just have a sweet tooth.
On the other hand,
sometimes someone will come in, bite down on the flavor combination of
orange sherbet and watermelon and announce,
“Oh, by the way, my computer just exploded.”
Movies...
Saw
Escape
from L.A. last Saturday.
This is a sequel to
Escape
from New York. The
premise is the same: A whole
city, in this case
Los Angeles, has been turned into a prison from which no one can
escape. The government needs
someone to go in and bring something back.
Like Escape from New York,
and
Blade
Runner, it presents the near future as bleak and dark.
In the case of this latest film, in which all the action takes
place between sunset and sunrise, it may be because the special effects
are so cheesy that the producers are hoping we won’t be able to see how
bad they are in the dark.
Personally, I can’t see the total anarchy that they predict taking place
in the next 15-20 years. But
then, I suppose a movie entitled
Escape from
Utopia wouldn’t have much of a box office draw.
As for the plot, I
think the most telling review comes from “Jeannie”:
She very nearly fell asleep during the finale.
Save your money for something better.
By the way, I think
I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that my ailing garbage disposal was
only suffering from a bout of carelessness on the part of the original
plumber who installed it. He
forgot to fish a little plastic plug out during the installation.
All is well now.
Love, as always,
Pete
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