It would be easy to chalk this conversation up as the high hysterics of a tree huger, but that argument won’t keep oil slicks from embracing shores and silently nauseating a food chain that will eventually break. I just can’t get the idea of swimming in sludge out of my head. And you?

The voices are growing louder for the clean-up, as they should grow louder. Isn’t it scary that we allow companies to literally gamble with our collective lives; determining who lives or dies based on a cost-benefit analysis? I mean we allow folks to drill when they don’t have the ability to stop the poison they’re unleashing. And, evidently, no one in the world is capable of stopping it. That’s like licensing someone who is blind to drive as long as they stay in a parking lot. Once they get out of the lot though, regulations are useless.

So here is the really blood chilling part. If you thought I was talking about BP and the Gulf of Mexico, guess again. That big oil companies routinely lose large amounts of crude, on par with what’s spilling in the Gulf of Mexico in Nigeria and other areas speaks to a failure in the human spirit to care for one another and look out for the interests of our neighbors and ultimately ourselves. The news outlets seldom report it, “developed” countries seldom believe or act on it and we carry on oblivious to the idea that a community’s life expectancy has been halved because an oil spill now contaminates their ground water, their crops and their grazing lands.

Crazy part is, I simply didn’t know. I hate to be one of those alarmist folks but I’m a little scared. And, now that I’m aware, what is it that I do?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

I recently decided to overhaul my entire resume, starting from scratch. Instead of my normal technology focus, I wrote a transitional resume geared for a different career. This type of resume places the chronological job list secondary to functionally acquired skills. In writing and grouping these skills, I realized I’ve been viewing myself from a purely technical standpoint for a long time.

I was confronted with an unbounded view of my skills that I had been unable to see or define because of the strictly technical focus. A surprising view of myself emerged from the newly constructed paragraphs which outlined how skills used to serve a technology focus could be unleashed in other realms. It was an odd experience. On paper I could see how I could transform into something completely different. The experience opened my eyes, showing me a different way to see myself. Even for those not seeking a new field or new job, I found it to be a neat personal experience, something I highly recommend.

If you’re up for the challenge, here are some links to help you get started:

• http://careerplanning.about.com/od/careerchoicechan/a/transferable.htm
• http://careerplanning.about.com/od/resumewriting/a/resume_writing.htm

Helpful note:

If you want to see functional resume examples, try a Google search and add the following to your search terms – “filetype: doc and pdf“. This will locate actual resumes that are either Acrobat files or MS Word documents. For example, to find an airline pilot’s resume, I might type:

“Commercial Pilot” resume filetype:doc or pdf

courtesy Volkswirt

Bare feet ain’t just for country folk

My hometown of Roanoke, Virginia is nestled in the valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As mountain folks, we’ve had our share of pick up trucks, mullets and, yes, nasty bare feet. There, I said it; nasty bare feet. Crazy that it would take a trip halfway across the world for me to put my foot down on this grimy topic.  For my parents, my parent’s parents and all the country people in possession of their own teeth striving to exemplify dignity, there are places nary a bare foot should tread.

Here on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia I’ve found folk more country than the most backward, tobacco chewing, tar spitting, ragged-pant-cuff having hillbilly rebel ever could be.  How could I call folks in this cosmopolitan culture backwards? Easy, I’ve never seen a group of people more prone to stroll in bare naked feet. You’d think maybe it was just the kids. You’d be wrong.

What makes barefoot nasty

On a recent trip, we pulled over in one of those rest stops on the road. The ones where you guess the janitorial staff must live in an RV and travel up and down state roads cleaning new toilets everyday. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had cursed this particular rest-stop making a pact to never step foot in the cold cement enclosure ever again. The  flies were meaty, like little hummingbirds. The flies were so big they seemed to bump into people as folks walked into the bathroom. Other flies lay motionless in the off gray sink, basking in the dim haze of an overworked florescent bulb.  I wasn’t sure if they were dead or sleeping it off.

courtesy Nick Sherman

In much of Australia, they’ve gotten smarter about men’s toilets. Rather than develop individual stalls, they’ve taken the cattle call approach. Two adjoining walls that eventually run together in a corner are fitted with aluminum panels that run down into a trough. Water trickles from the aluminum walls to wash everything down the drain. Of course, men are not known for their accuracy in this department and this invitation for indiscriminate placement might seem to help. It doesn’t. Everywhere is wet. I can’t help but do my business mindful to touch nothing and avoid eye contact with everything if I can help it. The soap dispenser should have been filled with penicillin instead of soap. It was filled with neither.

As I’m standing outside, waiting for my son to come out, I see a young boy jump out of a van and dash into the same restroom. He has no shoes on, only bare feet. There is no running after him pleading, “for the love of all that is sacred, put your shoes on.” Nothing. My son comes out, his eyes wide as he points in the direction of the kid that just went into the bathroom.

I’m flabbergasted. From an early age boys and men instinctively know not to stare at a man in the stall next to you; I wanted to violate the rule to be sure I saw what I thought I saw. I Didn’t do it, but that kid did. He went into a public restroom with no shoes on. Ehhhwwww.

Courtesy ColorBlindPicaso

Later the next day we stopped at a gas station. There ahead of me pumping gas into a late-model silver Ford Falcon a man casually crosses one foot over the other. He would be the epitome of cool if he had shoes on, but no, he doesn’t. So his is not.

By this point, I’ve got to figure it out. Isn’t it bad to walk around barefoot? Especially in places where there are chemicals that can blow up or places that harbor body fluids?

When did shoes get so popular?

I give my kids grief for any journey outside of the house not accompanied by the shoes we’ve worked hard to put on their feet. I inherited this aversion from my parents who in turn learned from theirs. If you think about it though, somewhere up the line, some whining, whinging wimp couldn’t suck it up and wrapped some leaves around his feet, giving rise to shoes. For hundreds of thousands of years, the human race has lived without shoes.  I’m reminded of this every year during Black history month when I watch the mini-series, Shaka Zulu. There is a scene where Shaka Zulu eschews shoes, demonstrating the superiority of the human foot by stepping on a hot coal with his bare feet.

Researchers still debate exactly over when footwear was invented. The plant and leather material used for early shoes degraded quickly, leaving few clues for archeologists say scholars. You can look at their study of feet here.

However, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis examined partial skeletal remains of feet in Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. The feet were weaker, which was explained by the introduction of shoes.

This ” shows the reduced lesser toe strength, all dating to about 26,000 years ago,” said Washington University scientists.  In other words, shoes are actually bad for us. Yikes.

“I discovered that the bones of the little toes of humans from that time frame were much less strongly built than those of their ancestors while their leg bones remained large and strong,” Trinkaus said. “The most logical cause would be the introduction of supportive footwear.”

Shoes can’t be all bad, can they?

So there it is. Scientists say, wearing shoes weakens your feet. True, but the bottom of my feet coming in contact New York City subway station concrete weakens my knees. The idea of skipping without shoes next to pumps at a gas station nauseates my understanding. NOT, GONNA HAPPEN!!! Don’t care how weak my pinkie toe gets, I’ll duct-tape that sucker till lack of circulation turns that puppy blue.

In his  stellar article, You Walk Wrong,  journalist Adam Sternbergh crushes myth after myth about walking bare foot. In his article, he explains that adding padding to our feet dulls the more than 200,000 nerve endings in our feet preventing them from transmitting vital information to our brain which in turn coordinates the entire body’s reaction to our feet. Without this information, the brain allows the body to absorb more stress than it should and eventually leads to foot problems.

I knew there was a reason why shoes are necessary

The research is not looking good for my paranoia. But at the root of my paranoia is the nastiness of walking around barefooted. You could step in spit, boo boo or on some dangerous animal like the hookworm. While spit and boo boo are just plain nasty, hookworms are bad news.

These nasty parasites hang out in the intestines of infected animals, then hitch a ride out of the bowels to see the light of day. Once at their final destination, they infect the soil and can infect a person walking bare feet.  The CDC has the gruesome details, check it out.

Like forgotten bogey men of our parent’s day, these nasty critters once prevalent in developed countries, are now, for the most part, ghosts of the past. But you never know when you’re walking on infected soil, do you?

On a serious note though, “Hookworm’s neglected status partly reflects its concentration among the world’s poorest 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day,” says a report issues by the Public Library of Science. You can read the entire report by visiting here.

Knowing what I know about those critters, I’m sticking to my guns. Barefoot folks in gas stations, public restrooms and restaurants – I do not want to see crusty nasty soles while I’m eating my burger – are gross. Sorry, Robinson edict. Now everywhere else, I think I may get a pedicure and let me feet feel the pavement. Oh, and yes, I’ll be passing my misguided paranoia on to my kids, although I’ll let them get away with one now and again.

Study: Pac-Man on Google wasted 4.8 million hours | Geek Gestalt – CNET News

In a recent NPR piece, Americans Distrust Congress? That’s No Surprise, writer Andrea Seabrook interrogated  America’s growing distrust of congressional leadership. Seabrook starts the argument well but just flat misses the big picture. One of the building blocks of her argument is a Pew Research Center survey which indicates 22% of polled respondents (2,505 adults) were satisfied with the government. That is not good. The numbers also show that just 25% had a favorable opinion of Congress; 40% had a favorable opinion of President Obama. Now if that were you or I and 60-75% of those we worked for disliked us, it would be a wise to polish the resume and send out those Linked-In requests before the door hits us in the rump.  In follow-up questions, 56% of the respondents said they were “frustrated with the federal government.” Given the state of the economy, the jobs market and the housing slump, I can appreciate her findings with only two additional words; well DUH!!!!.

Seabrook talks with Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. He says the frustration stems from the “permanent campaign.” A great phrase for the continual political push for electoral popularity that spills beyond campaign season tainting the motivation for governing. I call it constantly kissing the public’s @$$.

Continually kissing the public’s @$$ is not good for your pride, your lips and most importantly, the country. It robs the people of tough principled leadership, replacing it with governance by popular opinion, which as we’ll see shortly is contrary to American principles. It’s important to note that the play for popularity stokes the fires of divisiveness, keeping the country divided making vision based leadership and extremely difficult proposition.

The idea that polls should determine policy is un-American and shows a breakdown in our founding principles.

The representative government provided by the constitution was supposed to protect us from this type of fickle temperament.  Check out this defense for the creation of a senate written by James Madison in the Federalist No. 63:

To a people as little blinded by prejudice or corrupted by flattery as those whom I address, I shall not scruple to add, that such an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions. As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.

In other words, folks will get themselves worked up and bring about the downfall of the government if they aren’t protected from their passions.

Principled leadership? What a neat idea!!

Politicians should make decisions in the best interest of  the electorate, not what’s most popular. This would be rule by majority which fundamentally sucks chicken nuggets and is one of the reasons our “forefathers” sought to establish a representative government. Leading through vision is what we call principled leadership. Typical of the American political landscape, there is little agreement on the value and usage of principled leadership. In the case of George W. Bush, Republicans applauded him while Democrats derided him. Now that Obama is in office the argument is the same, the sides have merely switched. Carl Cannon wrote a great article pointing to the lunacy of governing by polls instead of principled leadership.

As is demonstrated by the divisions over principled leadership, the electorate is polarized. In her article, Seabrook interviews Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center who sifts through the data and confirms that “Americans themselves are extremely divided.”  So, as Seabrook concludes, how can we hold our officials accountable for their pandering divisiveness when we as Americans are so divisive? The prudent question; why are we so divided?

As the electorate, we send our politicians to Washington to not only legislate on our behalf but to make the Federal government work for our personal communities through legislative initiatives and federal funds. Sadly, projects destined for our districts other than our own are deemed “pork barrel” while those that fill our local coffers and slim our local mainstreet unemployment rolls are “essential.”

As Americans we won’t give up our guns; primarily cause we’ll need them to shot dead anyone trying to curtail our individualism. There is no judgment on the value of individualism here. It has played a vital role in the rise of capitalism and the generation of the American entrepreneurial spirit. It is simply an assertion that its presence is fuel for a bi-polar political process that rails against pork spending, while individually seeking government grants and subsidies.

Political figures generally are not spared affliction of indidualism and pander to the petty politics that arise out of electorate ME-ism and poll popularity.  Unfortunately, America’s Not In My Back Yard mentality is subject to the laws of reaping and sowing. Our hypocrisy is sown throughout or political landscape and we reap divisive, knee jerk governance and ever shifting foreign political climates. Hopefully we can begin to set aside just enough of our individualism to act in the best interest of our entire country and not just the block we live on.

Politico.com has some good stuff

In the age of blogs, tweets and megabyte data streams, crisp clear communication is seldom seen. Few endeavor to contemplate how to communicate clearly. The Elements of Style is the guide post in this blizzard of messages. The books is tremendously old, but still recommended reading in writing courses and newsrooms around the world. Why?

Is humor possible while discussing grammar? Uhm, yes. The trick, evidently, is in clarity.

The Elements of Style covers grammar usage, composition, form expressions and style. All of which are critical elements in communicating tone, style and information. Even if I get labeled a nerd, I have to say one of the best books I CONTINUE to read.

View all my reviews >>

There is a sense of pride that engulfs me when those strings saunter through the air. This is the song I taught my kids when they were young. This is the song the three of us would croon on the way back from school in the afternoons. This was the song that hastened history lessons to them about the South, segregation, the chitlin circuit and even blindness. This is the artist I was so proud to have shared with my children. The same artist who they took as one of their favorite entertainers, happily feeding a jukebox at the  Waffle House on Sundays to hear him croon. In Ray Charles my children found someone who stood up for justice, even when it meant losing something dear to him. They knew his story as much as they knew the song.

Half a world away from my home, I found a joy that comes from the familiar in an alien setting. A world with foreign sounds, strange tongues, and odd tastes is made familiar. As the song faded from the cafe’s speakers, I fumbled to locate my iPod, I was enjoying a high and didn’t want to give it up.

While searching for Ray Charles, I came across some Outkast songs. Now that I was in the space, I curiously pressed play. My earphones bumped and banged as “Aquemini” flooded my eardrums and colored everything before my eyes. A moving expeience still. I had never known how powerful music was. It could transform a foreign landscape into the familiar, with just a couple of touches on an iPod.

With Georgia still on my mind, I began thinking about where I could find a high mountain peak.  I had Eric B queued up, and as Saul Williams once said, “not until you’ve listened to Rakim on a rocky mountain top have you heard hip hop.”

Visions of drunken teenagers rampaging through the night toppling mailboxes in an alcohol induced prank spree looped endlessly through the rational part of my brain. The four foot tall letter box, as they are called here in Australia,  lay toppled and broken, unable to testify on its behalf, unable to soothe my growing anxiety and name its assailants.  The beige letter box silently lay there, its cracks shouting obscenities at me.

I put pants on and sauntered toward the crime scene, mindful to subtly spy distant trees in case the perpetrator lie all night in wait to collect the satisfaction of my disappointment. No such luck for them. I was tight lipped and somber like the professional detectives of my favorite crime show, First 48. I looked left and right, selfishly hoping to see toppled mailboxes to my left and to my right. That would mean, in the oddest of ways, that I somehow belonged. I would’ve settled for an empty toilet paper roll rolling aimlessly in the wind or simple chalk marks from an abandoned hopscotch game. Any semblance of dereliction elsewhere would do. There was nothing.

I stood, looking down at the broken concrete mailbox, the sun rising at my back exposing doubts hidden in the dark crevices of my mind. With my feet firmly planted on Australian soil, my transplanted American insecurities continued to grow. I wondered why my mailbox alone lay broken. With its wide concrete base and hefty disposition, this was no accident. As sure as a semi-trailer doesn’t fall over from a gentle breeze, my mailbox was on its side for a reason.

My mind raced, what other secrets could this place hold. As tempting as it is to play the race card, my foreigner card, my English speaking card, or my right handed card, I slide them all back into my mental card deck. I know this paradox all to well. You can never say with certainty that it is what you believe, but you can never rule it out.  So I bent over and picked up the pieces of my insecurity, piecing them together as best I could. There is always the thought, but seldom the proof.