Further Adventures in Minion-sitting

I've talked about my minion in this space before, the wonderful lady who took over some of my job responsibilities and has been carrying them out with great zeal and an even greater lack of quality control. She has recently been asked to redesign our group's newsletter, and has attacked that project with her usual mix of eagerness, good humor, and failure.

I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of design; if I have a style, it's quick-and-dirty functionalism without bells, whistles or flourishes (see: this blog page). I've had no formal or informal training beyond an old manager who would occasional look at something I came up with, shake his head, and say, "Christ, that's bad. Try again." Which is what I'm longing to tell the minion. Her redesign prominently features the colors orange, black, and navy blue. She recently discovered the gradient function, so in several instances one of these colors fades into another. All of this is ugly, but not horrifying. What's horrifying is that in half the newsletter, she used navy blue as a background color for where the text goes. For the other half, she used a dark-colored tiled graphic. Trying to read more than a paragraph of this newsletter would make my eyes explode. I've spent all morning trying to come up with a way to tell her this that won't hurt her feelings.

In other work-related frustration, my usually awesome boss has been holding up another project by asking thoroughly useless questions. She'd understand the concepts if she'd read my responses, but she doesn't have time to do that because her daughter was cut from her top two choices during sorority rush, and needs to be talked off whatever ledge she's sitting on. I don't have much else to add here except to say that when I have kids, I pray to god they're boys.

Time-honored traditions

There's been another creativity drought lately, bringing with it the usual lack of blog postings. It's not that I was lacking material, just motivation. This time, instead of wasting way too much time on craigslist, I was actually reading video game forums, which feature the same grammar school dropout syntax as craigslist, but are devoted to imaginary characters and acts of violence instead of getting laid. Anyway, custom dictates that I break back into blog posting with some aimless venting, and that I utilize bullet points. If I lapse into 1337-speak or stop using capitalization and punctuation, blame the video game forums. Then come shoot me in the head. Now, on with the aimlessness and bullets.

• Enough with the goddamned gymnastics. I recognize this is not a unique point of view, that I am not exactly making groundbreaking, controversial statements. Still. The scoring system is a sick joke, and if your "sport" can be performed better by pre-pubescent children than mature adults, you've got some issues. The wife and I actually got sucked into the Olympics this year, but there's audible cussing and a scramble to change channels whenever coverage switches over to the Karolyis and the sequins and the malnourished girls lying about their ages. I spend one third of my time hoping someone will fall, another third feeling like a hateful prick because I'm rooting for a little girl to get hurt in front of billions of people, and the final third wishing NBC would show something else. It's not like there's a dearth of choices there, either. We were in France last time the Summer Olympics were going on. Handball is huge over there, and that is a bloody fantastic sport full of speed, athleticism, and dudes leaping into the air and winging balls at each other. Imagine junior high dodgeball played by Olympic athletes and you have some idea. America would fall in love with this game, if NBC could cut away from its creepy fascination with teenage midgets doing flips long enough to give it a chance.


• My company mystifies me sometimes. As previously stated, I work for a very large tech company. I recently dreamed up a project that would be a perfect excuse to learn PHP. For you non-web nerds, PHP is a pretty big deal when it comes to internet technology, to the point where most web developer job postings list it third or fourth among required skills. I don't know it, which leaves a pretty big hole in my resume. So I did some research and proposed my project to the senior editor of the internal website I post to. And he said, "What's PHP?" as I fell out of my chair.


• An open letter to the brains behind the new Mummy movie: if you're going to shell out whatever it costs these days to get Jet Li in your movie, it had goddamned better result in some kung fu. I don't care if you go the realistic route or shoot for more of a Crouching Tiger feel, but putting that man in your movie and forcing him to spend 90% of his screen time trudging jerkily around because he's supposed to be made of stone is an epic waste. I knew going in that your movie would suck. All I asked in return for my ten dollars was to watch Jet Li spin kick some fools, and you failed to deliver even that.


• The Brett Favre situation has been like Christmas in the summer. Not sure if I've delved into the subject in this space, but I hate Brett Favre. Hate how he's immune to criticism, hate how he publicly talks about retirement to goad the adoring media into begging him to keep playing, hate his faked good old boy persona. When he finally did retire, I almost drowned in my own bile during the the Favre tributes. What could save the situation? How about if he came back without even missing a season, but horribly botched a power struggle with his old team, lost the support of his adoring Green Bay fans, and wound up playing for a mediocre team in a vicious media market that will crucify him when he starts tossing interceptions and might actually see him for the diva he's always been? That'd be about perfect.