BAD LUCK OR FILTH?

     I had an unpleasant surprise this evening. I went into my kitchen to make some microwave soup since I didn't feel like cooking. I didn't turn on the light, instead using the ambient light from my living room to guide me. When I placed the package on the counter, I thought I had seen something move around a small frying pan left on the countertop by the sink. I looked to where it had gone/blown to...and it moved again. Sure enough it was alive...and fast. Turns out it was a German cockroach. I killed it and went into my usual paranoia upon making such unfortunate discoveries.

     I've always found cockroaches offensive and not because I think they're icky but because they imply filth. Their presence is like judgement upon you.

     I immediately did the dishes, cleared the table, swept the floor, and searched the cabinets for any evidence of leavings or for a chance spying of roaches themselves. I found nothing. It made me wonder if the roach had been merely an anomaly rather than a vanguard for a much larger, heretofore unknown, infestation. I suppose it could happen. Hell, it happened before in my previous apartment when a giant winged cockroach found itself trapped in our bathtub after it came in through the bathroom window. We never had another roach after that one. It could be the same now. It's what I want to keep telling myself anyway.

     The damned thing could've hitched a ride on something I was carrying or been hiding under the door and scurried in when I had opened it briefly to come inside. I don't think I've got a bug problem because the out-of-the-way spiders I have a detente with in my living room never catch anything. It actually makes me feel bad for the spiders that their lives must necessarily end in starvation (or murder if they get a bit too bold with their choice of web placement) but then, that's nothing I intend to help them out with either.


     Then I also think that an apartment complex is only as clean as its dirtiest dwelling and as it may be, my apartment may actually be quite unworthy of infestation, but not necessarily unworthy of spillover from an apartment which is.

      Either way, I'm buying sticky traps and hoping nothing ends up on them but dust.

ADDENDUM: After more than a week I think it may be safe to declare my cockroach encounter a random one resulting either from a doorway dash or a window entry. All I've caught in all my glue traps was this little beetle:

It's small enough to fit through the holes in a screen

ADDENDUM II:  It turns out they were not mini roaches but rather phorid flies. This particular species frequents garbage and prefers running, flying only when necessary. After watching one I caught, its fly-like behavior was immediately obvious but when they catch you off-guard, their scurrying and coloration can, in my opinion at least, cause them to be confused for tiny roaches. What distinguishes them behaviorially is that they will scurry and stop whereas roaches don't stop running until they've found a dark place.
     The lesson here is to empty your garbage more often. I don't generate much trash at all so these flies actually had time to go through their larval stage and pupate. Lucky me!

They're about the size of fruit flies (but much faster) and their wings are not immediately obvious from a distance

Once it died I could get a clear picture. They have a noticeable hump when standing.

THOUGHTS ON THE ZIMMERMAN TRIAL...

     I'm just gonna state first off that I did not follow George Zimmerman trial at all. My awareness of it has been strictly limited to what could be gleaned from the front pages of newspapers and internet headlines. What struck me upon learning the verdict was how people reacted to it.

     I've noticed people treat these major trials like sporting events. They've picked their team and they root for it right to the end. If their side wins, justice was served. If their side loses, then an injustice has occurred. Of course when there's an acquittal there's no rematch so it can make people on the "losing team" a bit upset.

     The other thing I've noticed is that people pick their sides right at the start. The person on trial was judged guilty or innocent before the opening gavel and like I said above, this opinion - once formed - never changes. I first saw it with the O.J. Simpson trial. And what's more, I don't remember a single person I've ever spoken to who first thought that O.J. was guilty and then later changed his opinion based on the evidence (or vice-versa). This was also true with the Casey Anthony trial and more recently with the Jodi Arias trial.

      Knowing that makes me glad that the rule of law is what matters and not mob rule.

      As for the race-relations issue that has come to a head since the verdict, I dunno. I'm definitely not in a position to discuss that...not at all.

MEH...

     I've talked about this to a silly level of detail before and upon thinking about it further, I present the short version of HOW HOT IS SHE? but this time with words.

ALRIGHT: The pros outweigh the cons with an alright girl, but there are definitely cons.

CUTE: An improvement over "alright", but while there's nothing wrong with a cute girl, there's nothing particularly right about her either.

HOT: Me. You. Fuck.

OKAY: Eh, if I have to... Also, the longer the "kay" syllable, the greater the difficulty in accepting the choice.

RUBBER DUCKIE, YOU'RE THE ONE...

     I don't know. Maybe it was because I had a brother but I never saw Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street as a gay couple and at some level it bothers me that other people do. However, explaining why is no easy feat. And believe me, if someone wants to go around peddling the idea that Bert and Ernie are a gay couple, whatever. I'm not gonna fight it but I just don't know where the association comes from though I guess it's an adult perspective.

     My brother is close enough to my age that I have no memories of not having a brother so he's always been there. We also shared a room all throughout our schooling so the idea of two boys/men sharing a room together didn't exactly strike me as strange. But that's how those two came across to me...just two brothers living together and sharing a room with unseen parents (it's not like you saw the rest of their home - hell, even the bathroom was only implied on a sing-a-long record I remember having as a kid). It didn't occur to me as a kid that they were supposed to be grown-ups. The muppets on Sesame Street never struck me as adults, even the Count, because their behavior was decidedly more childish than even the actual kids on the show. Manifestations of id I suppose if you wanna go psychological here.

     I know now, many years later, that Bert and Ernie were actually based on the Odd Couple so they weren't brothers, they were roommates just like Oscar and Felix on that show and Bert and Ernie roughly paralleled their respective neat & tidy and messy & casual attitudes. One of the many things on Sesame Street intended as nods to the adults they knew were watching along with their children. Perhaps since The Odd Couple has been long off the air that the gay insinuations have come more into play as the original reference is lost to living memory...or perhaps it was always there but I was content with my "they were brothers" interpretation rather than friends living together (in the original television series, they were both divorcés sharing a Manhattan apartment).

     I guess Bert and Ernie are what you need them to be. Roommates to those who remember the original reference; gay for those who find comfort in them being a loving gay couple in an often trying (but forgiving) relationship; and brothers, for people like me...or maybe just me.

PROMOTION AND EVOLUTION...

     There's this concept out there called the Peter Principle. It is defined as "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In other words, people are promoted based on skills and achievements until they get promoted to a level beyond their abilities and there they remain. "[W]ork is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." It basically sounds like a recipe for a workplace run by idiot bosses...a formula endlessly exploited by comics, television series, and movies. While bored at work one night, I was wondering if instead of the Peter Principle, it was more like promotion is related to evolution itself and that while goodness could come out of it, it's ultimately based on people being bad at their jobs.

     It may sound weird, but one interpretation of evolution that I've had is that it is fueled by failure. In evolution, success leads to stasis. I'll start with fish to illustrate. The fish species which evolved into amphibians were not good at being fish. Their fins were bad for swimming among other things so they couldn't compete for food and resources like the other more suitably adapted fish species could. In this do-or-die situation, they learned to exploit the land somewhat. As you know with frogs and salamanders, they are tied to water but can exist in the air as well.
     Those amphibians which sucked at being frogs and such would evolve into lizards and those lizards which sucked at being lizards became mammals and birds. And finally with humans, those chimps which sucked at being chimps became humans. We are here because of a long line of ancestors which sucked at their jobs. And before you object, remember that species such as sharks and crocodiles have remained more-or-less unchanged since dinosaurs roamed the Earth over 65 million years ago. Sharks and crocodiles are VERY good at what they do so there's no pressure on them to change.

     I think the workplace operates in a similar manner. If you are really good at what you do, you will remain where you are because the Powers That Be will not want to lose their prized employee who allows them to not work as hard. Only those who are hampering efficiency and/or frustrating management get considered for promotion or at least lateral transfers to other departments until they find something the person is good at and leave him or her there.
     How do you know it's because you're good and not because you already suck? I would say if managers are seeking answers to questions they should already know from you then you are one of those hyper-competent people who's probably right where they belong (and almost certainly underpaid).
     If however management either leaves you alone or is always asking you to do other tasks than the one you thought you were hired to do, well then perhaps maybe you're not so good at your job and lacking justification to get rid of you, they're trying to see if perhaps you would fit better elsewhere because you're mucking up the efficiencies of the workplace where you're supposed to be. Maybe after a while, you actually get transferred officially (or even promoted) to another department (and thus made someone else's problem) and it will come with a pay raise in an effort to provide incentive to get you out of your current ineffectively performed job. And yes, this probably means the genuinely competent people who could've done the task the incompetent has now been assigned for more pay will now resent that person and/or the workplace as they languish in their same position for the same pay. But since they are competent, they can't mess up on purpose hoping to get the same result. They're too honorable to do something like this. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

     Put more simply, the people who aren't so good at the jobs they were hired for (but not so bad that they have to be fired) get more opportunities for promotion because management keeps shuffling them around in an effort to find their best fit. They "evolve" into department heads or managers because they suck at what they do. Ideally they become what they are in fact good at but I guess since we're usually witnessing the evolution itself rather than the evolved state, we are filled with resentment watching these people get ahead because pay raises are based on promotion and not competence in the workplace.

MY TWO BITS ON SNOWDEN...

     I fully support what Edward Snowden has done and I agree with Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War that this leak surpasses even their own in terms of importance. But why, you ask? It's very simple actually...

     The basis of the justice system in our country is presumption of innocence. Whether the job of the government or a prosecutor, it is their responsibility to prove beyond the benefit of doubt that the accused is guilty of a crime. It is not the job of the accused to prove their innocence.

      And no, I don't buy into the bullshit claim that one has nothing to fear if one has nothing to hide.

      The NSA surveillance programs that were revealed via Snowden's leak turned that presumption on its head. Understand I'm not talking about ordinary spying done by governments against other governments. That has a long history and what they do is fine. The problem here is that it involves U.S. citizens and when what you're doing involves U.S. citizens, the laws of this nation and the spirit of those very same laws must be followed to the letter if not better.
       Warrantless spying on U.S. citizens creates a presumption of guilt and I can't stand for that. It's also a violation of the Fourth Amendment which not only requires the government to have a warrant and/or reasonable suspicion to initiate a search, but it must also have a specific target in mind. Law enforcement agents cannot search for anything more than they are allowed to search for. There's a reason these limits on power exist.

      The NSA spying program works on the assumption that all citizens are terrorists or are aiding terrorists until shown otherwise. Also, there is nothing specific being searched for nor have the people being searched via this program been charged with or even accused of a crime.

       The fact that this isn't being talked about by the press has been infuriating. With rare exception, the mainstream press is actually condemning Snowden rather than the revelations made. This in turn makes me furious because since when did the press become official spokesmen for the government?

      At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, it really does bring about the feeling that we are in the opening stages of a dictatorship. Not now...not through President Obama (I'm not that crazy), but soon. That slow transition...

      It certainly does feel like the groundwork has been laid.