Definition:noun insincere or foolish talk : nonsense
Etymology:Buncombe county, North Carolina; from a remark made by its congressman, who defended an irrelevant speech by claiming that he was speaking to Buncombe
Date: 1845
Quotation: “Their whole future was at stake, and the future of their wives and children; if they could win the three-shift day, they would have leisure to study and think, and raise their own status, and keep their children longer in school. That was the real issue in this strike, and if democracy did not mean that, it had no meaning, and talk about patriotism was buncombe.”
- from “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair
Finally, a strike against another county not Gaston! I saw this word while reading “Oil!” and figured it had to be related to the more common (barely) phrasing “bunk”. A more in depth explanation can be found in the Wikipedia article for “bunkum“.
My apologies for the long absence. I have actually been somewhat busy the last week or so talking to potential employers. I think the New Year is going to be good to me in terms of finding a job.
Anyway, I did in fact buy and consume “The Beast”. Of course, the eating itself cannot properly describe the experience, so I will begin at the beginning. I strolled over to Harris Teeter around 12:30 failing to remember that this meant I was trying to get a sub right in the middle of the lunch rush. When I arrived there were about 20 people ahead of me in line. No big deal, I occupied my mind with a little Tuesday crossword on my iPhone. Just as I was trying to figure out a crucial answer I realized that I had made it to the front of the line and the sub lady was giving me the stink eye. “Can I have The Beast” I asked innocently enough. She rolled her eyes, took a long look down the line behind me (still about 15 deep), and barked out orders for grilled chicken and bacon to one of her many minions. Apparently I was the first to order The Beast and while the sub lady knew exactly how to make it, the sub station was ill-prepared for the order. When the minions came back with the various ingredients, she whipped it all together and started to wrap it up. Wait, what about heating it up? I asked her to heat mine, but she quickly snapped that they did not have a microwave in the back. Foiled! She briskly handed over the sub and took the order of the next patron. I felt like Ralphy as he whooshed to the bottom of the slide and lay motionless, mulling over holiday betrayal in The Christmas Story. I had come in expecting a beautiful, steaming sandwich to be constructed before my eyes and instead left the HT with a brick of disappointment. When I got back to my place I tried to heat the meat and put the sub back together, but it just was not the same. The sandwich was pretty good, but that is as far I will go. Hopefully the sub department will get their act together one of these days, but until then I can only dream of what might have been.
Times are tough and people all over the world are tightening their belts and looking for ways to pinch every penny. Cutting down on Cristal and high-class hookers is a given, but there are some things, like food, that are absolute necessities.
Never fear, Harris Teeter is here to help. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but they have the next best thing in the Sub Club. Every day there is a deal for a half sub for just $2.99. Subway gets all the pub for their $5 footlongs, but Harris Teeter’s deal is better for the tight budget. There are fewer toppings choices, but more meat choices. HT bread is thicker and better tasting in my opinion. And, most importantly, the sandwiches are cheaper. There are even Footlong Fridays when you can get a whole sub (actually bigger than a Subway footlong) for just $4. Added to all that is the Sub Club point system. You get 1 point for every half sub and 2 points for every whole and when you have collected 15 points you can redeem them for a free footlong sub. Cash!
Now this is old hat for most people I know, but my local Harris Teeter has added a new sub to the list. Pictured above is “The Beast” designed by Carolina Panther linebacker John Beason. I saw this when I went for my daily sub a couple hours ago and it looked pretty delicious. In case you cannot read the sign, it says “filled with grilled chicken breast, bacon, onions, provolone cheese with mayonnaise, BBQ sauce, and a dash of salt and pepper on a white sub roll.” Unfortunately I only noticed the sign after I had purchased my sandwich, but you can bet I will be back tomorrow to give “The Beast” a try. You will get the lowdown right here on kirkhamdotcom (.org).
This video may be so yesteryear, but it is still hilarious. Here we have nine full minutes of Tom Cruise’s unscripted babbling about Scientology. He never states the basic tenets of the religion or go into detail about how it differs from other religions — things that might might actually interest us normal folk not “in the know.” Nope, instead he glosses over vague acronyms while describing how “rough and tumble” and “wild and wooly” Scientology really is. Apparently, Scientologists are doing lots of “things” to “help” all of “us”. And when he runs out of words, he laughs hysterically…quite literally.
On a side note, I have just finished curing the website of its weekend sickness. Hopefully everything still works, but if you find something that does not (a broken picture or music link perhaps) please let me know in the comments.
Just in case you needed a reminder that the University of North Carolina is the best school in the history of history, check out this annual ritual. Every year there is a random act of stupidity, hilarity, or tomfoolery that goes down in the lobby of the otherwise quiet Davis Undergraduate Library in the middle of the day as students are preparing for their exams. In the past it has been traditional for a few folks to streak through the library. Apparently they decided to up the ante this year with a full on rave. I applaud the performance.
Most people who will ever read this blog already know what I am talking about here, so just think of it as my own personal therapy rather than new information for you.
Recently, my life changed when I got word that I was hired by this company called Utilities International, hereafter referred to as UI. They write financial software for large utility companies. While the projects and companies they work for are large, UI itself is a fairly small operation with 30 or so employees. They pick up two or three projects at a time and send their associates out to the client companies to set up their custom software package. My sister works for them and had told me about how much she enjoyed working for them. After I got wind of how much money she was making to boot, I figured I would at least send in my resume.
UI called me in for an interview a couple weeks later. I flew up to Chicago to talk with four of their mid-level associates and thought I did rather well. My optimism was confirmed a couple months (yes, months) later when they called me back for a second interview. It was not even really an interview. I met with the company’s president who basically laid out what my job would be like after I started if I so chose. I was excited. Three more weeks of waiting tempered my excitement, however they did finally send me a letter of employment. Due to a number of circumstances, I could not start right away. They were flexible on my start date, and I had some things (ultimate season, injuries, job at Clear Channel) that I needed to sew up before I moved on.
The ultimate season ended in early October and I set November 4th as my move date. I had decided to move to Charlotte since a lot of my roommates in Raleigh would be dispersing to various places around the globe and I already had a lot of friends and family in Charlotte. The injury I mentioned earlier was my wrist which I had envisioned needing surgery and I had planned to get the surgery after moving to Charlotte. Assuming a couple weeks recovery I would then start my new job with UI. I was in contact the whole time with UI about my plans and everything seemed peachy keen. They would be ready for me to start in late November.
Jump forward to November 6th. That morning I go to the doctor and after careful examination he comes to the same conclusion as my doc in Raleigh — unless you really really need it, we should not do surgery. I imagined the doctors improvising radical surgical procedures on my hand and thought better of it. “Well, my wrist is still out of whack, but at least I can start my new job early,” thought I. UI had different plans. Not two hours after returning from the doctor’s office, I get an email from UI informing me that they will need to push off my start date until after January 1st because one of their main projects got delayed. Great. Two days after quitting my old job and moving to a new city I am informed that I will be out of work for at least two months. The real kick in the balls was the fact that January 1st wasn’t even set in stone. I was promised a conference call to discuss the situation at the end of November which has since come and gone…no conference call. I have sent regular emails to the contact at UI…stone wall.
If it weren’t for the fact that my sister works at the company and feeds me tidbits of information, I would have given up on this whole venture a long time ago. I believe that UI will eventually hire me, but I am not holding my breath on any particular date. I have some money saved up to survive on for a time, but I have accepted the reality that I could be out of work for a long while and need to find something temporary. In closing, if you have any contacts or know of any leads on contracting/temp jobs for .NET programmers, let me know.
Definition:noun a beginner in learning; novice; amateur
Etymology: Medieval Latin, from Latin tiro young soldier
Quotation: “[McKinley] was going to be content to allow the Congress to lead and the leaders of the party to tell the Congress what to do. It would be the standard Republican mode of operating since after Lincoln’s day. Roosevelt’s friends signaled to the new president that the tyro from New York understood what was expected. He would be a leashed lion.”
I’ve been reading “Lion in the White House”, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt. It is written and simply and generally gets to the point without any flowery verbiage, but I’ve noticed this word “tyro” sprinkled rather liberally throughout. Apparently Aida D. Donald has a special place in her heart for this particular word. It is beginning to grow on me too.
Thanksgiving is upon us and when you are not lounging gracefully on the couch watching football or packing another helping of seasonal meats into your face you might find yourself clicking idly around the interwebs (in fact, that’s probably the only reason anyone would come to this site in the first place). With that in mind, I am prepared to offer a time-killing recommendation: MTV’s new Music Video site. While music videos are no stranger to the web, MTV’s vast archives might contain some gems that maybe you have not seen in a while, if ever. I have been keen on Michel Gondry’s work since it first came to my attention on a fateful New York City trip several moons ago. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
I caught a pretty interesting article in the New York Times (click on the picture above to go to it). I’ve been a satisfied customer of Netflix for a little over a year now and I have always wondered how they come up with the recommendations. For those of you not in the know, Netflix takes your ratings (1 to 5 stars) of movies you have already seen and tries to figure out which movies you will like. From a computer programming perspective this is an interesting problem. While it is easy to identify the categories of movies a person prefers (action vs. romance) there are some intangible aspects to many movies that are much harder to quantify. One movie mentioned in particular in the article is Napoleon Dynamite. Essentially it is a comedy, but it cannot be easily lumped in with other members of the genre because of the kind of comedy — hipster humor can be quite polarizing. As a result, Netflix’s algorithms cannot figure out which way a particular person will fall on this movie — even with a massive set of data to analyze. So Netflix has issued a challenge to all amateur computer scientists, statisticians, and brainiacs. If anyone can come up with an algorithm to improve on the predictions by at least 10% then they will be compensated to the tune of 1 million bones (that is six zeroes!). I have not read the entire article (it will come along in the NYT Magazine on Sunday) but it has been an intriguing read thus far.
Definition: noun a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing; also: extreme egocentrism
Etymology: Latin solus alone + ipse self
Quotation: “Two later collections of stories — ‘Brief Interviews With Hideous Men’ (1999) and ‘Oblivion’ (2004), which both featured whiny, narcissistic characters — suggested a falling off of ambition and a claustrophobic solipsism of the sort Mr. Wallace himself once decried.”
- from Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok, an article honoring the work of David Foster Wallace in The New York Times
David Foster Wallace is no longer with us, but his work remains. I spent numerous hours reading “Infinite Jest”, Wallace’s gigantic opus, and now I have just started “Oblivion”. While I cannot claim a thorough understanding of Wallace’s works, I can certainly recognize his talent. As a bonus, DFW was never afraid to bust out some impressive words. Potential readers should be sure to keep a dictionary nearby.
