Stuff and nonsense

Ok.

I get it.

Entropy, as I understand it, is that natural tendency for things to go from bad to worse.

I keep a small number of semi-exotic succulents on an outdoor staircase and landing at my apartment in the East Bay. In the spring, I do a massive cleanup of sweeping, pruning and replanting, once the winter is past.

This spring, I no longer finished when as many as four squirrels moved in to the neighborhood.

Now, when I step outside every day, I see squirrel damage. I repot today, tomorrow, that pot might well be dug up. If not tomorrow, then within a week or so.

There is new damage Every. Single. Day.

Because, someone close by is feeding these squirrels peanuts.

So the squirrels have taken to burying the surplus peanuts in my pots. The irony of this is that I’m allergic to peanuts.

I spend 30 minutes cleaning up; a squirrel spends 5 minutes digging it all back up.

The entropy of the situation: whoever is feeding these squirrels is doing it at relatively speaking, zero cost. Just a few bucks for a bag of peanuts snatched from the aisle in passing at the grocery store. Then getting lots of jollies as the squirrels “visit” for their feeding. Poor squirrels. So hungry.

I could spend hours every week dealing with someone else’s single moment of peanut purchase.

It’s a game I don’t think I can win. Whoever is feeding these varmints, and certainly the varmints, have more time than I do. They can spend a little time to cost me a lot of time. Entropy is on their side.

The upshot: someone else’s few moments of jolliness is likely to cost me my stairscape. Something I have taken a lot of pleasure in, and cultivated over the last many years.

In another part of the country, this would not be an issue. It would be Mulligan stew. But this is California.

…and it shows!

A fair number of articles here are my response to inanities and absurdities found in the news. But when the Chronicle slipped advertising onto the front page, I lost interest in reading.

Nothing personal against SFGate.com. I do hope they survive, I’m just no longer in their target audience.

Which leaves me hanging: what to write about?

…something like this pops up:

“If an American GI wanted to take home a souvenir, I’d say there was nothing reprehensible about that, it’s an act you can easily understand,” said Levisse-Touze, director of a Paris museum with exhibits on the city’s liberation.

and…

French officials have no intention of scolding him: They have only thanks and kind words for him, pointing out that he once risked his life for France.

Yes. Thank you. We would do it again if necessary.

(Read more at SFGate.)

Mitterand or DeGaulle or someone once stated that the US and the French were like an old married couple, always squabbling, in public. But in the end pulling together. Much truth to that.

Toulon is my favorite city in France. What’s yours?

Very interesting, and certainly very hip Rubicon culture.

How does anyone get the serious intellectual heavy lifting done without having some privacy and tranquility?

From the New York Times:

“Customers sometimes do not know what they want,” said John Seely Brown, the co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, a research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley.

Ok, that’s fine. Everybody knows this. I often (usually) don’t know what I want either.

But Mr Brown follows with this little gem:

“It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.”

Google is NOT listening to what consumers say they need. Google is testing and measuring the the behavior of consumers.

That’s a really big difference.

Meme alert!

From OpenCast:

I was sent this viral with an inexplicable German setting – but a very decent explanation…

I’m not sure I have even been sent a viral… or that I would know it if I had.

What about you? Have you ever gotten a viral?

In any case, first nounification of `viral’ I’ve seen.