Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers includes a chapter on how many hours it takes to develop a skill (10,000 or 10 years) and how luck plays a part in allowing talented people to succeed.
Fire Her. Or Something.
Eileen Bernstein, a seventh grade teacher in White Plains, NY, has less common sense than, oh, my neighbor’s demented cocker spaniel.
She bound the hands and feet of two Black girls as part of a social studies lesson about slavery.
Worse, she evidently didn’t understand that she’d done anything wrong.
I dunno, maybe Eileen needs sensitivity training or a lobotomy or something.
Worthwhile
The villages and towns on the Cape have a neat custom called the Christmas stroll.
Tonight I attended the festivities at Bourne Village, which does an outstanding job of putting Christmas cheer into a historical context.
Before I moved to the Cape, I thought of Bourne one way, and have come to a completely opposite opinion. It’s a town that has tremendous pride in its history and which has done a fine job of preserving documents, artifacts and buildings.
Tonight, the Historical Society was open, as well as the Briggs-McDermott house, the grounds of which include a carriage house and a blacksmith shed. There was cheer and festivity in all venues, and I had a wonderful time looking at all the treasures from the past.
Top notch, and the event goes on through the weekend for everyone to enjoy.
What Are You Doing?
I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about social networking and Web 2.0.
It’s been an educational traverse between marketing and coding. It’s also taken a lot longer than I thought it would because the context had to be learned as well.
Surprising Results from Post-Election Number Crunching
The other day, I heard Mike Huckabee say it was not true that Obama’s campaign was mostly funded from small contributions, and I wondered where he got that.
Huckabee spoke the truth: an AP story reports today that “the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute found that Obama collected about 26 percent of his total haul from people who gave less than $200
Sweet Mashup
This won an award, and rightly so: http://www.ilive.at/Public/LocInfo.aspx And it’s written in .NET
Ya Want a Hankie With That, Fella?
Someone recently speculated that American males are becoming more feminized, proof being that the voices of male anchor persons are higher than in past generations.
Compare and contrast Charlie Gibson’s squeak with Walter Cronkite stentorian tones, for example.
I’d suggest that the tenor of today’s anchor voices is less indicative of diminishing manliness in public personae than their lack of judgment and character.
Can you imagine Chet Huntley or David Brinkley crying and babbling about a thrill going up their legs while listening to a political candidate?
Not to mention the piling on of Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin: it was unmanly and unseemly, and I would guess that it would have disgusted Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and any other classy journalist whom the world is poorer without.
Must be the water.
An Apology
Parents sometimes do shitty things to their kids that only come back to haunt them years later.
I’m not talking about starvation, torture, imprisonment or other forms of mayhem.
Rather, it’s small moments of thoughtlessness that can deeply wound.
Glad I Walked (First Marblehead)
No great secret, my hatred for financial services companies has been abundantly vindicated in recent months. I only fear that everyone else who needs to work for a living hasn’t caught on yet.
Years ago, I was “invited” to a recruitment activity at First Marblehead, a servicer of student loans to those who’d exhausted the less expensive, government-backed programs.
The career fair, or whatever deceptively positive descriptor they came up with for this exercise in sadism, took place in several rooms that were populated with terrified-looking applicants and steely-eyed, scowling First Marblehead employees.
I didn’t stay, of course, and read today that even the Wall Street Journal is so revolted by First Marblehead’s CEO, Daniel Meyers, that they tarred and feathered him in print:
Meyers earned nearly $100 million, almost all of it in the sale of company stock; together with other Marblehead insiders, $660 million was taken.
The Journal notes that Meyers used $10.3 million of his fortune to buy an ocean-front property in Rhode Island.
Leaves
James and I did some yardwork yesterday at 20 Dixon.
We (Peter, the kids and I) completed leaf cleanup at 11 Edgewater in 5 hours today – a record.
This was remarkable because the weather was simply frightful: rain alternating with freezing rain, so cold that we could see the vapor rising from the compost piles at the Transfer Station.
It felt like leaf cleanup was late this year: the last day of November. It’s not just us, there were a lot of other insane people dropping off leaves today, and at least 3 of my neighbors did their cleanup this weekend as well.