Month: July 2019

I was a fugitive from the NCIS (part 1)

– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.

This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.

I call this story “I was a fugitive from the NCIS“. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)

Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.

Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.

That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I  would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation. 

The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.

In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.

It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did. 

She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.

I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now. 

But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking). 

One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!

CONTINUED in part 2 . . .

Career Aspirations

I read about these career survey results today: “Number One Career Choice For American Kids is to be YouTubers, For Chinese Kids It’s an Astronaut”.

The slant of the article was that this was more evidence of American decline. However, it made me think of a recent conversation between me and the grandkids, which I have cartoon-ized below. What I didn’t put in was that after the woman’s movement made it realistic for girls to have career aspirations, there was a wave of the ‘drop out’ movement which kind of negated it for me. By the time I really did get a career, as a computer programmer, it wouldn’t have been my childhood dream job because it wasn’t really a career that could be imagined back then. So, in spite of the Chinese having the more science-y aspirations, it seems like progress has been made in that at least half the kids aren’t left out anymore in having career aspirations. And being a you-tuber is probably nice work if you can get it!

Aminos update

– In which Dorn demonstrates the power of the post.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Modesty prevents me from claiming it must have been my mention of coconut aminos in a post less than a month ago that brought it such instant acclaim, but the facts speak for themselves. In today’s Washington Post, food columnist Ellie Krieger wrote that “Two formerly fringe ingredients go mainstream: Nutritional yeast and coconut aminos” (Washington Post Food Section, 7/18/19).

Her story concentrates on coconut aminos’s composition, flavor, and uses, mainly casting it as a substitute for soy sauce when the latter’s saltiness, gluten content or lack of Paleo-credentials disqualify it from the menu (you blog readers knew of these qualities of aminos already!). While generally positive about its place in the kitchen, Ms Krieger is skeptical about the health claims made by some coconut-aminophiles:

People are also buying into coconut aminos because they believe the many false and misleading claims they read about the ingredient online… though fresh coconut sap contains vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants, scant — if any — are retained in the processing of the sap into coconut aminos, and there are no studies to back up any disease prevention benefits.

In other news (specifically, other news on the same Washington Post online page), food and culture reporter Maura Judkis reports that “KFC’s Cheetos chicken sandwich looks toxic and tastes like a missed opportunity” . (Washington Post online, 7/17/19). She allows that eating the sandwich did not kill her, and in fact it actually tastes better than it looks (which recall from the article title is “toxic”), and she reminisces about the food she enjoyed when she was young: “In the early part of this decade, stunt food used to be stuntier.”

To be fair, Cheetos is a notoriously difficult ingredient to work into a recipe, compared to, say, Twinkies. My grandson K— showed me Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube show that subjected several ingredients to the same culinary test: each ingredient was substituted, one at a time, for almonds in the process used to make almond milk (basically, soaking in water). Twinkies made a passable twinkie-milk beverage; so did fried chicken. But cheetos-milk just didn’t cut it (“too greasy”).

I’ll bet two successful Cheetos substitutions are: (1) for Rice Krispies in rice krispy treats, and (2) for cornmeal in corn dogs. I haven’t tried either of these, but if I do, I’ll let you know.

Thanks!
Dorn
7.18.2019

Kids on Devices and the Point System

I had the pleasure of having four grandkids over last week, however, I couldn’t help but notice that they were all glued to their devices (as shown below).

I thought they were here to have quality time with ME!!! This led me to invent the point system, where a kid could earn points by doing non screen time activities. Points were easy to earn it just had to be by doing something active. Going down the zip line earns points!!! They loved it. They actually got really greedy for points. GD #1 helped me hang a door but when I dropped a screw I heard, “I’ll pick it up for an extra point.” I agreed to everything because for me ‘points’ are a fiat currency. At one point when they were tallying up their points GD #4 started crying because she did not have as many points as GD #2, her sister. “Well, I made the pancakes and you didn’t!”, exclaimed GD #2. But Gamma is a magnanimous ruler, so I said to GD # 4, “You get five points because you are making such a big fuss!” You may wonder what the points are good for. You trade them in for minutes you can stay up past your bedtime. Perhaps this is a deterrent to an actual parent in implementing the system, but it works for me!

Thanks to the point system I had a lot of takers when I wanted help walking the dogs down by the river and I was able to catch GD #1 in a Gaugin – like pose for my most recent painting.

Note: Thanks to Dorn you may see an email signup on the blog now. Please sign up so we can figure out if it works!

Epithets and expletives (part 1)

– In which Dorn tries on some new descriptors.

This post is called part 1, not because I have more to say on the subject that I’m saving for later–it’s debatable whether I’ve got anything worth saying now on the subject–but because it seems like a topic that could lend itself well to revisiting. It’s my short list of words or phrases that seem like they would contribute more to the English language if they were used as expletives or epithets. My rule for eligibility is that they have to be real words or phrases that I actually heard said or saw written recently.

My list is pretty short, but hey, this is only part 1!

1. “Horseradish mayonnaise“.  Stuff and nonsense. (source: Deb Naylor, reporting on her lunch at a Netherlands restaurant, April 2019)

Used in a sentence: “Your argument for global warming is just so much horseradish mayonnaise.”

This phrase has the same meaning, and falls in the same class of food-based epithets, as “gammon and spinach”, which found its way into the chorus of the nursery rhyme, “A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go”. I found this 1885 drawing of Froggie, Mr. Rat and Miss Mousie from the rhyme, where they actually seem to be dining on roly-poly, gammon (ham) and spinach, so I’m not sure if the phrase was actually being used epithetically in that poem.

Drawing of Mr Rat, Froggie, and Miss Mousie from "A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go", 1885, New York Public Library

(I grew up with a different version of the rhyme, Frog went a-courtin’ on an old Burl Ives record of folk songs and nursery rhymes. I used to love that record, but that song didn’t have “gammon and spinach” in it.)

My first acquaintance with “gammon and spinach” clearly used as an epithet (decrying the basing of work choices on anything other than gain) was probably in the 1951 B&W Christmas Carol movie starring Alister Sim. When I was growing up, this was the scariest, and I thought the best, Christmas Carol version available on TV.

“Gammon and spinach” has pretty much fallen out of the English lexicon, as food epithets have evolved over the years. I’m sure it’s a direct antecedent of the theme song of the 1990s show Frazier, “Tossed salad and scrambled eggs”.

In “horseradish mayonnaise”, the next generation can now carry on the noble tradition of food epithets. And because when my good friend Deb Naylor reported this phrase, she helpfully provided the Dutch translation (mierikswortelmayonaise), it is ready-made to be used as a bilingual epithet when needed.

2. “Epithetic”. Worthy of being described by a (derogatory) epithet. (source: the dictionary, looking up the definition of “epithet”, the other day)

Used in a sentence: “Our state representative is so epithetic!”

The official meaning of epithetic is just the adjective form of the word “epithet”, but it sounds so much like a fusion of epithet, pathetic, and apathetic that I think it deserves to be an epithet in itself.

The antonym of epithetic, meaning being so blameless as to be hard to apply a derogatory epithet to, would be “hypo-epithetical”.

When trying to thing of a sentence to use for an example of this epithet, I found that all the subjects that came to mind were from the Federal government. This may say something negative about my own feelings. Or it may simply be that our current governing officials are all just epithetic.

3. “Honey nut cluster crunch”. A disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking. (source: a store brand breakfast cereal box, June 2019)

Used in a sentence: “The initiative at work quickly degenerated into a total honey nut cluster crunch.”

Military types will recognize “cluster crunch” as a G-rated version of the term for an operation in which multiple things have gone horribly wrong. The military term, as I understand it, is sometimes abbreviated “Charlie-Foxtrot”, with a more serious disaster termed a “Royal” (charlie-foxtrot).

In the 20 years I spent working for the Navy, I learned to respect the military’s mastery of epithets, especially their way with acronym-epithets. Many of these, such as SNAFU, FUBAR and BOHICA, have worked their way into mainstream language.

4. “St. Lucy’s eyeballs“. I’m shocked!  (source: Kathleen describing a piece of jewelry, April 2019)

Used in a sentence: “St. Lucy’s eyeballs! You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

This expletive falls in the category containing saint evocations, which includes “Great Caesar’s ghost!” (from the 1950s Superman TV show), “St. Dan in a pan!” (from Serafina, a very good YA book about a girl trying to negotiate a peace between humans and dragons), and the doubly-euphemized “Jiminy Christmas!” (heard in the 1937 movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and again in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz). It is also related in some way to the expletive “My eyes! my eyes!” (as heard on Friends, and a million other places).

St. Lucy is a legitimate saint in the Catholic canon. Her name can mean “light” or “lucid”, and she is the patron saint of the blind. Icons often portrayed St. Lucy with her identifying attribute, her disembodied eyes. Her eyeballs are a motif represented in jewelry, and even in recipes. If “St. Lucy’s eyeballs!” hasn’t been used as an expletive before now, it really should have been!

That’s my list…. so far!
-Dorn
7/13/2019