Open letter to Don Imus,
Dude - wake up. You are a bigot in denial.
You need to attend some racial and diversity sensitivity training because bad things keep coming out of your mouth on the radio.
And you know what? I would respect you more if you stood by your words, however illspoken, rather than listen to you stutter and stammer and apologize and try to backpedal on what you said.
Last night I covered a carrier route for someone who had an emergency and couldn’t report to work. It was an interesting experience to be driving around the neighborhoods in the “Land of Excess.” I have to say that you can learn quite a bit about people by observing their homes at 4:00 am when they are sleeping or away.
This time of year one of the hard parts of a carrier’s job is keeping track of who has gone away on vacation and who has come back. I had to start a chart on a white board to keep up with all these wealthy travelers.
The hardest part of this job for someone new to the route is hunting and finding the right houses and driveways. Even in this “Land of Excess” there are people who use the cheapest stick on numbers they can find to put their house number on their mailbox, and it is interesting to see over the course of a few weeks which numbers fall off and which homeowners care not to replace the numbers.
Many mailboxes, the primary way to determine a home’s address, have vines and flowers growing up and over the the post and the box which completely cover or obstruct the numbers. Some boxes have no numbers at all - the homeowner has chosen to nail individual brass or painted numbers onto their garage door or adjacent to the entrance door. Try finding those numbers from the street in the dark and in the rain!
The state needs to pass a law requiring all buildings to be located on a named street or road (not just a highway route number) and to display their numbered address in a manner that will be visible from the road, in the dark and in the rain. The numbers need to be large, bright, reflective and easy to see by a driver coming from both directions of the road. In case of an emergency, this could easily save lives.
While surfing various sites today I’ve come across an unusual word three times, all in totally different topics and arenas. I don’t know if I just noticed this one particular word today and with increased awareness I am noticing it more, or is today just a day when this word comes across my screen several times? It’s very weird. If this was numbers instead of a word, I’d taken them to the convenience store and buy a lottery ticket.
The word is “robust,” which is a powerfully descriptive word and I really like it. I should use it more. I first noticed it used in a comment ties to an article in the New York Times on how flip flops are allegedly harmful to feet. I suspect that study was underwritten by the manufactures of athletic shoes and disagree totally with their conclusions. Nonetheless, a fellow commenter used the word robust and I thought it was well used there.
Then a press release from Mozilla and article on Yahoo News calls the new version of Firefox to be released tomorrow, “robust.” Well, I am a Firefox fan and am very much looking forward to the new “robust” version of Firefox.
And last, there is an article on the BBC website abut the advances in medical lasers that will help the biomedical field. The new lasers reportedly have a robustness:
Dr Graeme Malcolm, of M-Squared Lasers Ltd, added: “A step change improvement in the cost, size and robustness of ultrafast lasers is needed before they can benefit biomedical applications fully.”
I’m not sure what a step change is - perhaps a steep change? Or is step change a British expression?
Anyway, the word of the day award goes to “robust.” Now we should all try to use it in a sentence during a conversation with someone tonight!
I’m under the impression that the really big companies with major brand recognition have staffs for research and development and design engineers who are supposed to think things through and test them before the product goes into production and hits the marketplace.
So why are there so many obvious design flaws and shortcomings in all the products that I use day in and day out? The vacuum cleaner has a cord wrap that is on the wrong side of the handle. The retractable dog leash for medium dogs - which is what I have - has a plastic molded handles that is too small for my hand to fit through. Just because I have a medium dog does not mean that I am a medium human with medium size hands. The pouring spout on the laundry detergent bottle is oriented for right handed people. Well, what about the 20% or so of the women who wash laundry and happen to be left handed?
WHO are the people who design these things? Why do they still have a job after such proven incompetence?
Derby week is full of parties with great food and an array of celebrities.
Hugh Hefner and his three Playmate girlfriends—Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson—headlined a cast of stars Friday night at the Barnstable Brown Gala, one of the biggest parties of Derby week. Others on the guest list included Chelsea Clinton, actor Edward Norton, Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly, and Terrell Owens of the Dallas Cowboys.
Patricia Barnstable Brown and sister Priscilla Barnstable— you might know them as the former “Doublemint Twins”—were co-hosting the Derby’s 20th “Barnstable Brown Gala” party to raise funds for diabetes research.