Prologue
Vyasas' Dissertation
Chapter 1
The 60 Year old Virgin
Chapter 2
Indecent Proposal
Chapter 3
Bride and Prejudice
Chapter 4
Meet the Focker
Chapter 5
The Very Secret Diary of Amba
Chapter 6
Forest Hump
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Thursday, September 08, 2005
How much is a house anyway?
"Mr Bush asked agencies in the disaster zone to treat bodies with "dignity and respect", and announced initial aid of $2,000 (£1,090) for displaced families."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/4227974.stm
$2000, thats a perfectly reasonable amount right? That can buy a house, food, clothes, funeral services for loved ones who died, transportation out of the superdome, and maybe protection from the looters, muggers, and rapists.
Just a little math here....according to The National Priorities Project the cost of the war in iraq at this time is:$193,002,399,744
The population of New Orleans as of 2000 was 484674 people so that gives each person: $398210.75
or if we do it by households (188251)...$1 025 239.70, that'd buy a new house for sure....
So, if even 5% of what was spent on the war in iraq, that would give families $50 000 to spend, not enough to completely rebuild, but a semi-reasonable conservative amount for someone who has lost everything.
the $2000 offered of course is less than .2%
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/4227974.stm
$2000, thats a perfectly reasonable amount right? That can buy a house, food, clothes, funeral services for loved ones who died, transportation out of the superdome, and maybe protection from the looters, muggers, and rapists.
Just a little math here....according to The National Priorities Project the cost of the war in iraq at this time is:$193,002,399,744
The population of New Orleans as of 2000 was 484674 people so that gives each person: $398210.75
or if we do it by households (188251)...$1 025 239.70, that'd buy a new house for sure....
So, if even 5% of what was spent on the war in iraq, that would give families $50 000 to spend, not enough to completely rebuild, but a semi-reasonable conservative amount for someone who has lost everything.
the $2000 offered of course is less than .2%
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Overcontrolling Bosses Aren't Just Annoying; They're Also Inefficient
Cubicle Culture by Jared Sandberg
Overcontrolling Bosses Aren't Just Annoying; They're Also Inefficient March 30, 2005 by Jared Sandberg The Wall Street Journal
One of Ken Marcus's former bosses was so reviled by underlings that when he dropped dead, a colleague went up to Mr. Marcus and shook his hand. Unlike some others, Mr. Marcus never danced on his old boss's grave. But the soft-spoken reference librarian still smarts from the travails of working under a tormenting control freak.
The former boss wouldn't let his employees order personalized stationery or even use up the stationery they had left. "A lot of paper went to waste," Mr. Marcus says. The man also spent days trying to get in touch with employees on vacation and then had nothing much to say to them -- except "keep me posted" -- once he got them on the phone. And in a gesture that Mr. Marcus found impossible to believe when he first heard about it, his boss assigned middle initials to employees who didn't have middle names. "I guess it offended his sense of order," he speculates.
Mr. Marcus still struggles with the illogic of it all: "You get up to that level," he says, and "you don't need to worry about these little things."
But the problem is that a control freak most certainly does worry about the little stuff. Deeply untrusting and puffed up with some devil-in-the-details justification, control freaks wrest tasks from colleagues, along with the colleagues' sense of self worth. It's as if they were burned by someone or something long ago, and everyone they come into contact with is a walking evocation of the past demon. The irony is that in the name of efficiency and cost savings, these managers are often the most guilty of operating far below their pay scales.
Overcontrolling "can cost more money in a whole bunch of ways," says Richard Kilburg, senior director of the office of human services at Johns Hopkins University. They create, for example, a culture driven by the assumption that everyone can't perform. "If everybody's covering their tail ends," says Dr. Kilburg, "you have all kinds of processing losses. You also have a tendency to lose your most creative people. They're able to say, 'Screw this. I'm not staying here.' "
Just ask Rich Dowd, the founder of executive search firm Dowd Associates, who learned that lesson the hard way. He says he used to hover over employees and interrupt them because they weren't working "in the way I saw fit," even though their work product at the end of the day was "outstanding." He recalls that one employee told him that if he wanted to do her job, fine, she'd quit.
Asked by Mr. Dowd to describe some of his annoying behavior, colleague Stephanie Bates cites his yellow-legal-pad rule, which dictates that anything other than a yellow legal pad "doesn't work." Mr. Dowd questions whether he ever imposed this rule on anyone else, so Ms. Bates reminds him of the time she had the temerity to use a blue binder. "Yup," Mr. Dowd says sheepishly.
And another colleague, Lauren Hendrick, recounts how Mr. Dowd once sent her home from the office for being three minutes late.
So what taught Mr. Dowd to let go? "It's got to cost you money," he says. "I've lost people that way."
Most control freaks, though, can't laugh at themselves. Don Shobrys used to work for a boss who argued that the office should remain open during a blizzard even though the governor had declared a state of emergency. That boss also spent valuable time trying to scrub a stain out of the office carpet. And he even threatened to fire someone for leaving computer boxes stacked in the hallway in advance of the company's relocation to a new office.
The worst thing about his behavior was the corporate paralysis that resulted. The company had planned to paint the men's room in the new office, including the wall behind the urinals. The painters recommended using tile on that wall, but midlevel managers were afraid to approve the $1,000 expenditure. They eventually went with the tile, but "the whole organization was intimidated," Mr. Shobrys says.
What explains the penchant of many control freaks for performing menial tasks? "At some level of consciousness they don't believe they know how to handle the demands of the job they're in," says Arthur Freedman, director of organizational development and change at American University. "So they revert or regress down one or two levels to the level where they felt comfortable."
Marilyn Helms, a professor at Dalton State College in Dalton, Ga., says she has seen too many managers waste valuable time taking attendance. There was her boss at the Rotary Club in Memphis who always dreamed up an excuse to call the office at 4:59 p.m. to make sure no one had slipped out early. At a university, she had a department chair who would "come by with some stupid excuse just to do a bed check," she says. And still other managers have required her colleagues to produce business cards as proof they were soliciting new clients or to staple their name badge to travel receipts to prove they were at a conference.
"Don't they need to focus on the big picture?" asks Prof. Helms. "It seems like they don't know how to do their upper-management jobs."
Overcontrolling Bosses Aren't Just Annoying; They're Also Inefficient March 30, 2005 by Jared Sandberg The Wall Street Journal
One of Ken Marcus's former bosses was so reviled by underlings that when he dropped dead, a colleague went up to Mr. Marcus and shook his hand. Unlike some others, Mr. Marcus never danced on his old boss's grave. But the soft-spoken reference librarian still smarts from the travails of working under a tormenting control freak.
The former boss wouldn't let his employees order personalized stationery or even use up the stationery they had left. "A lot of paper went to waste," Mr. Marcus says. The man also spent days trying to get in touch with employees on vacation and then had nothing much to say to them -- except "keep me posted" -- once he got them on the phone. And in a gesture that Mr. Marcus found impossible to believe when he first heard about it, his boss assigned middle initials to employees who didn't have middle names. "I guess it offended his sense of order," he speculates.
Mr. Marcus still struggles with the illogic of it all: "You get up to that level," he says, and "you don't need to worry about these little things."
But the problem is that a control freak most certainly does worry about the little stuff. Deeply untrusting and puffed up with some devil-in-the-details justification, control freaks wrest tasks from colleagues, along with the colleagues' sense of self worth. It's as if they were burned by someone or something long ago, and everyone they come into contact with is a walking evocation of the past demon. The irony is that in the name of efficiency and cost savings, these managers are often the most guilty of operating far below their pay scales.
Overcontrolling "can cost more money in a whole bunch of ways," says Richard Kilburg, senior director of the office of human services at Johns Hopkins University. They create, for example, a culture driven by the assumption that everyone can't perform. "If everybody's covering their tail ends," says Dr. Kilburg, "you have all kinds of processing losses. You also have a tendency to lose your most creative people. They're able to say, 'Screw this. I'm not staying here.' "
Just ask Rich Dowd, the founder of executive search firm Dowd Associates, who learned that lesson the hard way. He says he used to hover over employees and interrupt them because they weren't working "in the way I saw fit," even though their work product at the end of the day was "outstanding." He recalls that one employee told him that if he wanted to do her job, fine, she'd quit.
Asked by Mr. Dowd to describe some of his annoying behavior, colleague Stephanie Bates cites his yellow-legal-pad rule, which dictates that anything other than a yellow legal pad "doesn't work." Mr. Dowd questions whether he ever imposed this rule on anyone else, so Ms. Bates reminds him of the time she had the temerity to use a blue binder. "Yup," Mr. Dowd says sheepishly.
And another colleague, Lauren Hendrick, recounts how Mr. Dowd once sent her home from the office for being three minutes late.
So what taught Mr. Dowd to let go? "It's got to cost you money," he says. "I've lost people that way."
Most control freaks, though, can't laugh at themselves. Don Shobrys used to work for a boss who argued that the office should remain open during a blizzard even though the governor had declared a state of emergency. That boss also spent valuable time trying to scrub a stain out of the office carpet. And he even threatened to fire someone for leaving computer boxes stacked in the hallway in advance of the company's relocation to a new office.
The worst thing about his behavior was the corporate paralysis that resulted. The company had planned to paint the men's room in the new office, including the wall behind the urinals. The painters recommended using tile on that wall, but midlevel managers were afraid to approve the $1,000 expenditure. They eventually went with the tile, but "the whole organization was intimidated," Mr. Shobrys says.
What explains the penchant of many control freaks for performing menial tasks? "At some level of consciousness they don't believe they know how to handle the demands of the job they're in," says Arthur Freedman, director of organizational development and change at American University. "So they revert or regress down one or two levels to the level where they felt comfortable."
Marilyn Helms, a professor at Dalton State College in Dalton, Ga., says she has seen too many managers waste valuable time taking attendance. There was her boss at the Rotary Club in Memphis who always dreamed up an excuse to call the office at 4:59 p.m. to make sure no one had slipped out early. At a university, she had a department chair who would "come by with some stupid excuse just to do a bed check," she says. And still other managers have required her colleagues to produce business cards as proof they were soliciting new clients or to staple their name badge to travel receipts to prove they were at a conference.
"Don't they need to focus on the big picture?" asks Prof. Helms. "It seems like they don't know how to do their upper-management jobs."
Five minutes of watching Indian channel leads to five hours of watching Indian channel
NEW YORK—A five-minute sampling of Hindi-language channel Zee TV stretched into a five-hour Indian TV marathon for Craig Mieritz, 23, Monday. "I have no idea what's going on, but I can't turn it off," the channel-flipping Mieritz said about a colorful, frenetic musical number on the soap opera Tum Bin Jaaoon Kahaan. "Maybe I'll just watch another minute..." Following the soap, Mieritz watched a Hindi pop variety show, 11 music videos, and the three-hour Bollywood epic Khuda Gawah, the remote in his hand the entire time.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Canada May Be a Close Neighbor, but It Proudly Keeps Its Distance
Canada May Be a Close Neighbor, but It Proudly Keeps Its Distance
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: March 23, 2005
TORONTO, March 22 -Every Canadian student of foreign policy knows the story, but few Americans remember. In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War buildup, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson suggested to a college audience in Philadelphia that the United States stop bombing North Vietnam in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was not amused. When the courtly Canadian leader stopped by for a visit to Camp David, Mr. Johnson grabbed him by the lapels and accused him, in so many words, of soiling his rug.
Emotions are a bit lower now, and President Bush is likely to be a lot more polite on Wednesday when he greets Prime Minister Paul Martin, along with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. But things could be tense nonetheless, with differences over trade and Mr. Bush's planned missile defense system adding to past strains over Iraq.
There is nothing really new about that. With the possible exception of France, no traditional ally has been more consistently at odds with the United States than has Canada.
Canada refused to take part in President Truman's Berlin airlift, withheld full support from President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and retains diplomatic and trade relations with Fidel Castro to this day. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau made a distancing from Washington a centerpiece of his foreign policy, going so far as to welcome draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. Ottawa criticized President Ronald Reagan's interventions in Central America and more recently split with the United States by pushing vigorously for the International Court of Justice, an international land-mine treaty and the Kyoto climate control accord.
While the leaders always claim the greatest of fondness for one another, more often than not they have not gotten along very well. When they have, Canadian leaders have sometimes had to pay a political price.
"It's something in our bones, it's part of our DNA," said Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign minister who is now president of the University of Winnipeg, "though it's not something we necessarily immediately recognize." The distinguished Canadian historian J. L. Granatstein has called anti-Americanism "Canada's state religion." For Robert Fulford, the Canadian literary journalist, widespread "prejudice" against the United States supposedly lends the country "an aura of virtue."
It has been that way since the American Revolution and the War of 1812, when thousands of Loyalists left their homes to go north rather than rebel against the British Crown and then fought off repeated American invasions. Their hardships and efforts to differentiate themselves from the rebellious colonists forged the dominant Canadian identity.
Brian Mulroney was the exceptional prime minister who embraced the United States and negotiated a free trade agreement with Washington. At a meeting in 1985, he and Mr. Reagan hugged and sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." But the coziness of that "Shamrock Summit" did not sit well with many Canadians, with one pundit commenting that "our prime minister invited his boss home for dinner."
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and President Bill Clinton got along, but relations soured when Mr. Bush took power and Mr. Chrétien's press secretary called him "a moron" (for which she was eventually fired).
President Bush acknowledged how much Canadians dislike him and his administration during his visit to Ottawa late last year by thanking everyone who waved at his motorcade, particularly those who waved "with all five fingers."
But the laughter did not help relations much. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Martin refused to join Mr. Bush's missile defense system, after defending it only a year ago, because of pressures in his Liberal Party.
His foreign minister said the decision reflected "Canadian values," the usual suggestion from Ottawa that Canada follows a higher moral calling than its American neighbor - a distinction increasingly applauded by American liberals.
"Whether it's nukes or Iraq," said Mr. Axworthy, "we're just not in synch."
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: March 23, 2005
TORONTO, March 22 -Every Canadian student of foreign policy knows the story, but few Americans remember. In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War buildup, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson suggested to a college audience in Philadelphia that the United States stop bombing North Vietnam in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was not amused. When the courtly Canadian leader stopped by for a visit to Camp David, Mr. Johnson grabbed him by the lapels and accused him, in so many words, of soiling his rug.
Emotions are a bit lower now, and President Bush is likely to be a lot more polite on Wednesday when he greets Prime Minister Paul Martin, along with President Vicente Fox of Mexico, at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. But things could be tense nonetheless, with differences over trade and Mr. Bush's planned missile defense system adding to past strains over Iraq.
There is nothing really new about that. With the possible exception of France, no traditional ally has been more consistently at odds with the United States than has Canada.
Canada refused to take part in President Truman's Berlin airlift, withheld full support from President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and retains diplomatic and trade relations with Fidel Castro to this day. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau made a distancing from Washington a centerpiece of his foreign policy, going so far as to welcome draft dodgers during the Vietnam War. Ottawa criticized President Ronald Reagan's interventions in Central America and more recently split with the United States by pushing vigorously for the International Court of Justice, an international land-mine treaty and the Kyoto climate control accord.
While the leaders always claim the greatest of fondness for one another, more often than not they have not gotten along very well. When they have, Canadian leaders have sometimes had to pay a political price.
"It's something in our bones, it's part of our DNA," said Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign minister who is now president of the University of Winnipeg, "though it's not something we necessarily immediately recognize." The distinguished Canadian historian J. L. Granatstein has called anti-Americanism "Canada's state religion." For Robert Fulford, the Canadian literary journalist, widespread "prejudice" against the United States supposedly lends the country "an aura of virtue."
It has been that way since the American Revolution and the War of 1812, when thousands of Loyalists left their homes to go north rather than rebel against the British Crown and then fought off repeated American invasions. Their hardships and efforts to differentiate themselves from the rebellious colonists forged the dominant Canadian identity.
Brian Mulroney was the exceptional prime minister who embraced the United States and negotiated a free trade agreement with Washington. At a meeting in 1985, he and Mr. Reagan hugged and sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." But the coziness of that "Shamrock Summit" did not sit well with many Canadians, with one pundit commenting that "our prime minister invited his boss home for dinner."
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and President Bill Clinton got along, but relations soured when Mr. Bush took power and Mr. Chrétien's press secretary called him "a moron" (for which she was eventually fired).
President Bush acknowledged how much Canadians dislike him and his administration during his visit to Ottawa late last year by thanking everyone who waved at his motorcade, particularly those who waved "with all five fingers."
But the laughter did not help relations much. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Martin refused to join Mr. Bush's missile defense system, after defending it only a year ago, because of pressures in his Liberal Party.
His foreign minister said the decision reflected "Canadian values," the usual suggestion from Ottawa that Canada follows a higher moral calling than its American neighbor - a distinction increasingly applauded by American liberals.
"Whether it's nukes or Iraq," said Mr. Axworthy, "we're just not in synch."
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