"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

The company I work for is being split into two parts. They've been working on this for a while. Today they announced that the part of the company that I work in will be getting a new name (the other part is keeping the old name).

Our new name is

"'leidos' — a coined word, clipped from
'ka-leidos-cope,' signifying how the company brings together solutions
from different angles, yielding innovative and effective solutions."

Except that neither in breaking down words into syllables in English, nor in the Greek etymology of "kaleidoscope" does this come even remotely close to being right.

I work for idiots. In other news, the Earth is still smaller than the Sun.

House of Cards is a political drama television series developed for American television by Beau Willimon for the streaming network Netflix. The series stars Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood, a ruthless politician with his eye on the top job in Washington, D.C. It is an adaptation of the previous BBC miniseries of the same name. The first season premiered on February 1, 2013.

Is there basically nothing that US TV and film producers won't try to steal or imitate from somewhere else to avoid having a single $@$%^$% creative thought of their own?

In an article on apocalypse fantasies, the BBC states

This month marks Advent in the Christian Calendar, during which Christians are encouraged to read from the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic vision of St John the Divine.

Say what, now? I was baptised, brought up in the Christian faith, and confirmed (twice, in fact, though it seems not to have stuck), and I've never heard this. Tell me, Christian friends and relations, is this a piece of common knowledge I somehow missed?

Or is it a line of bullshit that some apocalyptic fed the BBC reporter, who was so clueless that she just published it as fact?

I stopped and got some groceries yesterday on the way home. The checker was very chatty, It wasn't until I got home that I was so distracted by his chattiness that I didn't notice he'd left half a dozen items out of my order: they were neither bagged nor (thankfully) rung up. So I have no milk, no bread, no strawberries or blueberries, no paper towels. I didn't pay for them either, but that's not quite the point. I now have to stop again sometime and get them, and it won't be convenient to do so for a couple of days. I'm really quite annoyed at "Randy" (as my receipt informs me he is named). I'm also slightly baffled; if he didn't scan those items and bag them, where did they go?

I came across a random blog while looking for something else, and read this entry because of the unusual title.

Are states really trying to create their own coinage? Yes, apparently so.

But the blog author seems to be, to put it gently, rather simple-minded.

"Why not have a universal state coin..."

Probably because there is only one authority or agency capable of regulating the financial actions of all states at once--the federal government. Which already has a perfectly adequate currency and coinage.

"By virtue of the coins being made of gold or silver they would have more perceived value and worth than a piece of paper."

But neither gold nor silver have any more *real* value than paper currency. Because there is no such thing as absolute value. Value is not fixed; it depends entirely on relative accepted worth.

"The coins would be minted similar to coins that are minted at different presses now under strict standards and supervision."

It's difficult to prevent counterfeiters from producing false currency with only one system and federal control. With as many as fifty different sets of coins (presumably of various denominations), is anyone really going to trust that all will come out to comparatively equal values? I wouldn't.

And what's to stop states from debasing their coins in order to inflate the value of their precious metal holdings? Or just to make them usable. A coin actually made out of (only) gold or silver would be worth so much, at current precious metal prices, that it would be useless for day to day spending. If the metal is degraded down to make the coins at all useful, the concentration of metal in them will be very low. Why not just push it close to nil, thus stretching a state's metal reserves that much further?

"I submit that it would also create more jobs with people accepting the coins, moving back to handling commerce face-to-face and locally versus the Internet. "

Bwuh? The stupidity here is too great to easily address. For one thing, even if this were true, it would be tremendously destructive to the economy. We get huge benefits in efficiency from being able to buy and sell all over the country. If we had to conduct all business face to face, it would cripple the economy. If we could only buy things from people we could walk over and see, our entire commercial transportation network would be destroyed, and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people would lose their jobs.

But don't worry--there's no way that banks could be kept from allowing customers to stash coins with them and then transfer portions of their value electronically or by paper bank draft or check. It's what banks have always done, even back before the greenback existed. After all, I never see most of the dollars I am paid--they don't exist in paper form, but go from my employer's bank to my bank over a giant system of tubes and then go the same way to most of the people to whom I owe money, via the medium of my swiping a card, writing a check, or inputing data in a computer.

"I wouldn’t like to see it devolve into dozens of states with their own currencies – that would make us as messy as Europe or the early United States."

Erm, OK, apparently the author doesn't know that (most of) Europe uses a single currency now. And they also don't seem to grasp that just what they are saying they don't want to see--dozens of different states having their own separate forms of money--is exactly what is being mooted.

"The American dollar does work great as a tool for commerce, thanks, but it wouldn’t hurt to actually deal with gold and silver just in case."

In case of what? This is what baffles me about the whole movement. The US dollar is not going away. Yes, it buys less than it did in 1789, but so does every currency on earth. A salary of £50 per annum in 1890 would be roughly equivalent to a salary of £20,000 today according to the calculators at Measuring Worth. But the dollar has survived over 200 years of crashes, depressions, recessions, and bank failures. It's not going anywhere.

A Brad Pitt movie is being filmed in Glasgow. The story is set in Philadelphia, so they are putting up all sorts of US street signs. One caption explains that Glasgow is being used because it's street grid system is like Phillie's.

Trust me. I've been to both cities. And they are totally dissimilar.

Ridiculous.

The CVS pharmacy that was filling my doctor's prescriptions for me insisted on refilling them automatically on their own schedule, nothing to do with how fast I used the medicine.

(This is the same place that, when I actually did want something filled--the blood-testing gear--put it back on the shelf after pulling it and calling to say it was available and then tried to sell me two refills I hadn't asked for when I turned up to collect the blood kit.)

I went into the store and asked them to stop the auto refills...and got a call the next day from their phone robot telling me that one refill was ready. I called and told them again to stop refilling them automatically and walked a very sympathetic young woman through the process of deleting the autofill from each prescription.

Then a few days later I got another call telling me a prescription had been refilled. By this point I was refusing to purchase them (having a double supply of everything I take), but I was so annoyed I called my doctor's office and asked them to take CVS off my record and add a different pharmacy (the one where I get the cat's prescriptions filled :-) They took down the information and promised to do it.

Today I called to get Busby's meds refilled and asked to make sure they had my record if I needed to get refills. They said no, they had no record of any meds for me. I called the doctor's office, and they said the only way they could actually send those records to the other pharmacy was if I had them refilled. I said, disbelieving, "You can't just send them the prescription and ask them to keep it on file?" "No, sir, we have no way of doing that."

So now I have to get another refill, even though I don't need it, if I want to have the prescription on file with the new pharmacy.

Stupid fucking waste of time and money.  Oh, and I got another call from CVS yesterday, and the doctor's office confirms that CVS refilled one of my prescriptions last week, even though it's been several weeks since I called the doctor's office and told them to stop authorizing refills at CVS. Morons.

33. For some reason, I got sucked into re-reading The Eye of the World, the first of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I'm still exasperated with his writing (if I had a braid, I'd be tugging on it). I really do enjoy the pace, the description, and the places where he just lets his own storytelling talent show through. But his compulsive need to take pieces from other writers' books and insert them into his own, covered with a shallow veneer, is just as annoying, if not more, than the first time I read him. And his inability to drop something, to say or describe or depict something and then leave it alone, instead of constantly repeating it--as if he either thinks his readers are idiots or as if he's so pleased with his own little joke that he can't stop telling it over and over again--it's amazingly tiresome and childish.

He was tremendously successful. It's a pity he never had an editor who he would allow to really work with him. He could have been a very good writer as well.