There are several, dare we say “viral videos,” that have given me a good laugh this week and although I thought everyone in the world must have seen them, thanks to multiple facebook appearances, I ended up showing one of these to people twice today so I thought I’d add them here… if nothing else, to make it easier for me to find them to keep showing people!
Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy
This one was particularly good for an engineer. One of my team was complaining this week about a piece of equipment not working reliably, and I had to shake her and say “this thing makes measurements with nanometer-scale accuracy… this is amazing!”
Sell the Vatican, Feed the World (NSFW since it’s Sarah Silverman, duh!)
I love Sarah Silverman. Love her. And I’m not a huge fan of the Vatican (just a mention of Catholics and contraception in Africa in the same sentence gets my blood boiling…)
Rachel Maddow on the Obama Nobel Peace Prize
I was originally not so keen on this award but I find Rachel Maddow’s analysis quite compelling. I particularly liked the clips of the Republican media types saying outrageous things near the beginning of the clip. Oh Rush Limbaugh, you manage to make a complete arse of yourself every time you open your mouth!
Tiny children who must come from a circus family, on Ukraine’s Got Talent
I wish my Russian was better so I could catch more then the little performers saying hello and what their names were. But they’ve either been in ballet school or gymnastics school from a tender age with the level of skill (and balance!) that they’ve got. Thanks for this one to my favorite professional friend blogger.
I’ve done this before when I had a bunch of random US-UK tabs open in my browser window. In the spirit of the game, I will leave them in the random order they’re in, and not edit the order to group things on common topics, hopefully creating an interesting non-pattern.
Former president Jimmy Carter dares utter the word “racism” in the context of the vitriolic partisan politics eating at America right now. I’m not sure what I think, but it’s gotta be a possibility with some of the ahem more senior members of congress. My grandparents would say the most shocking things in a most innocent way at times, they really grew up in a different era. Although, come to think of it, Jimmy must be the same vintage as my grandparents, has he become enlightened?
Fantastic commentary on hidden socialism in America… loved it, loved it. It exposed yet another one of the US/UK differences that I had not thought about before but find fascinatingly and utterly reversed: America has ’socialist’ education, it is state supported by taxes and open to all, and University entry uses affirmative action to balance the scales. In the UK your performance in school (and likely your performance in and after University) is highly tied to your parents’ ability to send you to a posh private school to prepare you for your Oxbridge entrance exam. Yet Americans are against universal access to health care and constantly complaining about the NHS???
Finally, Thomas Friedman on how the US is the leading supplier of equipment for producing solar panels… but the equipment is all installed overseas, although not in Britain (for obvious reasons to do with the lack of sunshine, I’m sure!) Again, not a big Friedman fan but I am a HUGE fan of Advanced Materials, probably have an old grad school friend or two working there, and thus I’m not one of the people he addresses in the first sentence who have “probably” not heard of AM.
There we have it, bits and bobs for a crazy Thursday. I took my team to the pub tonight to introduce a few new recruits, and it turns out that if you count passports, birthplaces, long-time residence locations and birthplaces of parents, we are a mini-United Nations with all 6 inhabited continents represented, most more than once, and a remarkably complicated set of allegiances. This I love about my line of work. Although it just reinforces my relatively new prejudice that I get along best with people who have also been expats or closely allied with expats…
I thought I would be blogging practically daily after coming back from the states, but of course instead I’ve been busy and not spending much time online in a non-work capacity. My week, which started out looking quite blank and productive, got increasingly packed with meetings, including three really high-level things today that required a great deal of concentration. But generally I’m not sure where the hours have gone. Although I do know that I’ve been pretty productive lately, albeit in non-technical aspects of trying to regain control over my life, and more directly, the cluttered mess that is my closet-less flat. I had a massive re-organization of my wardrobes on Saturday (needed to be able to unpack and put away my recent acquisitions from Anthropologie!) and then on Sunday I decided to attack one of those projects that had been sitting staring at me for literally years, six crates full of files and papers from my grad school days that I had moved over here without sorting, due to the relatively fast circumstances of my relocation. Five of the crates are now gone, only one remains, plus a stack of papers that need to go into the office. I’m really on quite a kick at the moment, need to do my office next–booked time at work for next week and I’m hoping this time it will stick (I’ve tried twice before but things came up…) I even managed to go to the gym on Tuesday, and I plan to go again soon (although not tonight as I have a social outing with my new Minnesota friend planned… the perfect antidote to a day of high-level meetings!)
I’m annoyed at the American press at the moment, who are becoming as shrill as the locals. What part of this:
do people not understand? I have a short-list going of people who run on the Republican fringe and may not be my facebook friends for very much longer And yes, as people keep asking me, I am indeed a fan of universal healthcare. I’ve tried both systems and believe me, the stress of finding bridging health insurance when you have a month between jobs AND you have a pre-existing medical condition is something no person should have to go through. No battered woman should be worrying about losing her insurance if she leaves her abusive husband. Health insurance should not be a preoccupation should you want to switch jobs or move locations or generally change your life circumstances. The system is broken, Americans spend too much on healthcare because it’s too much run for profit, so let’s stop complaining and do something about it.
It’s amazing that I have been here more than a week and a half already, and have been through three main stages of the trip. Part of the nature of my whirlwind start to this trip was due to the fact that I was traveling with a junior colleague. I wanted to show her an awesome and multi-faceted technical experience as well as a bit of my country, as long as we were here. So after working solidly all weekend, Tuesday was the day for a bit of fun, and we went to pay tribute to a few of my favorites in the Nation’s capital. Almost first was Einstein, but I was so busy taking photos of my colleague in his lap that I forgot to take a photo myself. On to Lincoln.
Washington.
And my personal favorite, Jefferson.
Inspiring stuff. I was never quite so patriotic before I moved to England.
From there it was over to Georgetown for lunch and shopping on M street. I think I showed my colleague a nice day in DC, and for me it was nostalgic to be back in my old haunts.
There is finally a result in the Minnesota senate race. The elections were in November, and today is (well, over here in Southeast Asia when I got the news) the 1st of July. A senate term is 6 years, so more than 1/12 of the term elapsed while the politicians wrangled, the judges judged, the counters re-counted, and Minnesota sat with a single senator. Am I happy with the result? Yes, I grew increasingly disrespectful of Coleman as the charade wore on. Was I a huge primary fan of Franken? No, and I think the MN Dems could have fielded a stronger candidate in the first place. But at least this morning I wake to the news that the whole danged charade is over. It’s been a blight on American politics and a symptom of the modern era that a simple vote is no longer so simple. Now can we just get on with some actual law-making?
As one certain B. Franklin said, “Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Today was tax day for many of us Americans including those of us who are expats and subject to the rules of foreign living. Slate covered this issue as though we expats were all living a cushy life abroad; after paying British tax all year, the fact that I manage a zero balance in the US is only due to the fact that I am a scientist (and thus not a banker earning real money) and so my US tax return falls under the level of the not-quite-poverty-stricken. Of course, it took 30 pages (prepared at a cost in pounds that I don’t want to admit, due to my lack of understanding of legal- and tax-speak) to demonstrate my lack of taxable US income this year, as opposed to 23 last year, and I’m mystified by this in light of the fact that the fall in the pound against the dollar means that I’m earning about 1/2 of what my compatriots in the US are earning for my same job (when the pound was worth something my salary was not embarrassing in dollars). What can I say, it’s the hard-knock life for us American expats in the UK. Perhaps I’m lucky to still be under the US tax limit and not starving to death in England.
Yes, I am from the lovely state that makes the Bush-Gore battle over hanging chads look organized by comparison… Al Franken was declared the winner by a unanimous ruling of three judges, albeit a winner by a few hundred votes out of nearly 3 million cast–that’s 0.01% for those who think of these things in numbers. Now Coleman is due to appeal. Again. This thing is never going to end! And unlike the Bush-Gore battle, where it was important to get someone into the office of the POTUS, the Senate is humming merrily along with only one Minnesota senator. And increasingly I feel guilt over my not having sorted out my registration to vote in the election, which increasingly seems to support the idea that Minnesota is where I should have voted. Cause all the times you fell like your vote doesn’t count, in this case it might have. Of course, it’s absentee ballots at the heart of the appeals court claims, so maybe not
The stories about Obama’s entourage for the G20 summit in London read like the anti-environmentalist diary: I had no idea they brought the presidential limo overseas. Apparently Obama travels with his medical staff, back-up blood, the helicopter, and the military guy that knows the nuclear codes. I have no idea if the process is typical–I’m not sure we all followed Bush’s movements around the planet with such thirst for knowledge. But aside from my joking comment about the environmental impact of all of this, my serious question concerns cost. The presidential election and now the presidential operations seem to be associated with a huge amount of expense. Now admittedly the London G20 summit is supposed to be associated with improving the economy, but it does make one wonder if the business of running a country in the modern era isn’t neglecting the usefulness of the technology we’ve developed in the last decades. Surely the Blackberry president would be safer (and spare taxpayers the expense of traveling with such an entourage) by using Skype sometimes???
And yes, as people keep asking me, I am indeed a fan of universal healthcare. I’ve tried both systems and believe me, the stress of finding bridging health insurance when you have a month between jobs AND you have a pre-existing medical condition is something no person should have to go through. No battered woman should be worrying about losing her insurance if she leaves her abusive husband. Health insurance should not be a preoccupation should you want to switch jobs or move locations or generally change your life circumstances. The system is broken, Americans spend too much on healthcare because it’s too much run for profit, so let’s stop complaining and do something about it.
