Moving into 2021

 

www.psci.com

It is the last day of 2020.  I wrote a bit about that yesterday.  It is also my daughter, Armené’s birthday.  As she is in California, we will rely on FaceTime to wish her well and sing happy birthday.  Hopefully we can be with her and her family a year from now.

A lot of us are placing a great amount of hope on 2021, the new year, being a great improvement over the one that is just finishing up.  It is hard to blame any of us for thinking this way. 

I had intended to write this post about the post I penned with the start of this year, 2020.  I meant to write that post on January 1, 2020.  While, I did indeed start writing it on January 1, I did not finish it that day.  It wasn’t until January 4^th that I actually posted it.  I titled it, The Dawn of a New Year and Decade.

Honestly, I had not read it for several months.  Somehow, I was under the impression that I was being optimistic about the dawn of 2020 and was going to write about how wrong I was and that the lessons learned from the challenges and dangers of 2020 were really to prioritize what was important in our lives and appreciate those people and simple pleasures. 

I read the piece and simultaneously felt foolish and was pleasantly surprised.  I basically made the point back then that I had intended to make today.  Well, so much knowing my own writing and so much for my memory.  Heck, I barely remember what I posted earlier this month. 

The message, however, is still one that many of us should heed.

The sacrifices we made in 2020 shouldn’t propel us to Another Roaring Twenties.  I tried to use the time for reflection and self-improvement.  First, I feel quite fortunate to be able to work from home and thus be in a financial condition where I had the time to self-reflect and improve.  Secondly, while we all struggled with the stay at home and social distancing orders, it is nothing to obsess and get depressed about.  It is the hand we have been dealt and we need to it for both our own health and well-being and that of others.  Not everyone sees it this way.  I know a number of folks who either are constantly lamenting a lifestyle on hold, or they are doing whatever they want in defiance of the protocols.  This is not to say that I haven’t had my ups and downs during the pandemic.  The few days before Christmas were as low as I felt this most interesting year.  But my mood improved by the FaceTime and Zoom enabled gatherings on Christmas Day. 

It truly is our choice on how to react to the restrictions under which we are living.  We can make ourselves anxious and upset about it all, or we can go with the flow and appreciate what we can do.  We can improve the bonds of love and friendship, in this time when we all need such the most.  As stated above, we can appreciate the simpler pleasure, revive old hobbies, or begin new ones.  It is not for me to tell you what to do but mores so for each person to decide for themselves. 

It seems that the pandemic and the protocols will last several months into this new year.  Furthermore, this is the time when we set resolutions.  While in most years this can be a futile exercise, it doesn’t need to be so, and probably shouldn’t be so, in these troubled times.  I will give it a more serious effort this year.

In May, I wrote a very hopeful piece that was a hope than a Promise of Utopia.  While the pandemic probably won't push us closer to a utopia, we can aspire and move our own lives in that general direction.

A most happy, healthy, and prosperous 2021 to everyone.

2020: Quite a Year

 

2020 has been a memorable year.  It will be a year that will be highlighted in history books.  Collectively, the consensus seems to be that it has not been a good year.  It is a year many are happy to put behind us.

It was the year of the Covid-19 Pandemic which was for many a year of social distancing, mask wearing, having to stay at and work from home, and not travelling much, if even at all.  This certainly bothered many of us.   It was a sacrifice.  It was a hardship.  We yearned being able to gather and mingle with friends and family.  We missed not being able to, on a whim, go out for dinner.  We missed having to cancel vacations we were looking forward to.

But, if this was the extent of downside experienced, you have to consider yourself on the fortunate side in this pandemic year. 

For others who truly had the worst of it, this pandemic year was about the agonizing loss of friends and family members to the disease.  We were living under rules that prevented people from being bedside at the hospitals as loved ones were succumbing to the virus.  Then, the funerals and memorial services had very strict limits on how many could gather. 

I know a friend whose parents were in a nursing home.  They both contracted the virus and passed on within five weeks of each other.  I have another friend whose mother passed away, not from the virus.  Within the next month, her brother was infected with the virus and passed away.  In both cases, hospital visitations were prohibited, and the funeral and memorial services were limited to just a few.

I had a few other friends and several students who got the virus and survived, thank God.  The two friends, males about my age, really suffered with the disease but did recover.  My students, young men and women, had mild symptoms from which they bounced back quickly.

There were others, people in the lower economic strata people that work in factories, warehouses, and in the food supply chain.  They didn’t have the luxury of being able to work at home.  They had to go to their places of business if they wanted to keep their jobs.  For most, they had to keep their jobs to support themselves and their families.  It is no surprise that the incident rates soared for these folks.  Consider, also, those that worked in restaurants, movie theaters, and other sectors that got decimated in this unparalleled economic shift.  These folks had to live on government assistance that became totally politicized since the November election.

In the middle of all this, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis on national TV.  Floyd was face-down on the pavement, the policeman had his on Floyd’s neck, and asphyxiated him despite his pleas that he couldn’t breathe.  This incident sparked protests around the country with hundreds and thousands of people taking to the street to protest the racism that still grips this country.  The protests were for the most part peaceful.  There were many incidents of looting and destruction of store fronts and police cars.  People against and fearful of the Black Lives Matter movement, claimed the movement was populated with criminals and left-wing anarchists who wanted to bring down America.  People sympathetic or in the BLM movement, accused right-wing militia groups of instigating the violence and looting.  No matter who started the looting, there were protesters and others who took advantage the smashed windows of the stores to get themselves some goods. 

It was a year of a highly contested Presidential race and election.  The polarization of politics of the past forty years surged to new heights this year.  There was no middle ground.  People were either for Trump or Biden.  The people that were for Trump, were really for him.  They liked his brash, America first, no nonsense, “you tell ‘em Donald,” Fox News approach to politics and governance.  To me, the pro-Biden people were really anti-Trump people who wanted him out because of his ego-maniacal attitude and policies that weakened our stature in the world and ignored the problems of race, climate change, and the changing demographics of the country.  I think the election swung to Biden on Trumps handling of the pandemic.

Before the election, it was clear that if Trump won the elections, he woud deem them fair and claim he had a mandate from the American people, if he lost, he would claim election fraud.  The only thing I can say about him is that about half the people fervently support him, the other half fervently do not, and the middle ground is a lonely desolate place.

For Armenians, the first half of this fall was a horrible time for us with the War in Artsakh.  Azerbaijan under the direct military supervision of the Turkish army (a recent revelation), with Turkish supplied mercenaries, and drones from Israel and Turkey split Artsakh in two.  It was so sad and a devastating reminder of our history.  We were reminded, again, of Khirimian Hayrig’s message about the paper and iron ladles.  Our naïve Prime Minister was taken to school by Russia and Turkey
at the expense of the people of Artsakh who were driven off of their ancestral lands. 

There were four weddings we would have attended this year.  None were as the bride, groom, their families, nor friends would have imagined.  Like all social gatherings, the number of attendees was much smaller.  We watched three of the wedding ceremonies live via zoom and for the fourth, we were sent a video after the fact.  These four couples did indeed get married, they started their lives together and may or may not have more festive celebrations. 

We all had to do, as the Clint Eastwood character in the movie Heartbreak Ridge, said.  “You adapt. You overcome. You improvise.”  We did exactly that at work, in family life, and in our social interactions with other.

It was a troublesome and concerning year in many ways.  Everyone is looking forward to putting this year behind us and start fresh in 2021. 

There are lessons we can and should take with us into 2021.  More on that tomorrow.

The Third December Potpourri

 

Snow:  It is a beautiful snowy night here.  Like the first snow of any year, this one is beautiful and welcome.  I have nowhere to go, the neighborhood is adorned with Christmas lights, and everything is covered in a blanket of white.   I should take a walk in it, but I will wait for morning to do that.

The forecast is for another snowstorm with more accumulation on New Year’s Day.  Hope that happens as well.

The Virus:  There were reports today that the more contagious strain of Covid was detected today in Colorado.  This was not good news.  It makes me want to be even more of a homebody than I already am.  In the headline of the story, The Washington Post called it the “highly infectious coronavirus variant.”  It seems that this variant has showed up in seventeen different countries that include South Korea, Australia, and Canada.  We have to assume it is even in more countries.

I am wondering if this has all spread from the UK where it was first detected. Or has this mutation simply happened in several countries simultaneously?  Without any expertise in virology, I am guessing the simultaneous evolution is less probable.

“The good news is that B.1.1.7 does not seem to cause much more severe disease, and there’s no evidence that it is managing to evade the immune system, which means vaccines are expected to protect against it,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health…

I hope further mutations do not make the disease mortality rates increase nor result in the vaccines, we are placing so much faith on, to be ineffective.

Lazy Day:  I had a lazy day.  It involved reading a few chapters of a few books, a couple of meals, a movie, and a nap.  I didn’t intend for it to be so lazy.  I had a list of things I wanted to do.  But, for me, this easily happens when there are no pressing deadlines.  This is a well-worn groove or path for me.  It is a habit that I wish I could change.  Progress, however, in this regard has been minimal over the years.

The only deadlines that are effective are those that have to be done and there in no slack or zero postponement time.  Yes, this means that I have waited until the last minute.  This also means that I only focus on work related assignments and those imposed by the government (think taxes for example).  Anything self-imposed, becomes, well, way less imposing.  Self-imposed deadlines, tasks, and to-dos are much more subject to procrastination that I have natural refined to world class levels over the years.

Sure, I could make to-do lists with deadlines.  There are even apps for this and I have tried a few.  Heck, I actually teach project management.  I am well aware of what to preach.  I am just not good at the practicing part when it comes to more discretionary, self-improvement kinds of tasks.

There is a long vs. short term component to this as well.  I am much better at self-imposed deadlines to write several blog pieces a month rather than write a book over that might take two years. 

I could be fully retired if I wanted, but my biggest fear is I would start to wrack up lazy day upon lazy day.  Thus, it is good that I am not ready to fully retire and enjoy my encore career at the university.

My December Challenge Update:  With this post, I will have only two more days to achieve my goal of posting something everyday this month.  I am feeling pretty good about this project.  Not all the posts are winners.  Yet, I think the distribution of good, mediocre, and not so good posts has not changed this month compared to total history of the blog. 

Will I continue to write and post every day in the new year?  I will continue to write everyday, but I will not be posting every day.  I am thinking every other day... or less.

I have been posting late into the night most days this month.  I probably should establish a routine of getting up early, exercising, writing, and then starting my day university day.

We shall see.

Other Planets Heard From

 

I posted yesterday about the Christmas Day bomb in Nashville.  The news about this up until today has been relatively factual.  Sadly, that never lasts these days.  Every viewpoint and faction put their own spin on items when it suits them and this bombing if rife for spinnings both to the left and right.

A colleague of mine posted several screen shots of tweets and FB posts today on his FB story.  The point of them all can be summed up as “it is never called terrorism when a white person does it.”

Someone else I know and am quite close sent me a link from the Hal Turner Radio Show in which he makes a strong conjecture that the bombing was really a directed energy weapon attack.  He goes on to claim that the ATT Data Center is used by the NSA to monitor, and manipulate, election results.  As a result of this attack, the elections in the January 5^th runoff elections in Georgia will be fairer.

There were a couple interesting ones gathered and reported in the Daily Beast in an article:  Conspiracy Theorists Race to Defend Nashville Bomber Anthony Quinn Warner.  One is that Warner was influenced and motivated by the conspiracy theories related to the 5G technology.  They also reported that: 

Moments after his name emerged in connection with the case, subscribers to the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement began flooding Twitter with absurd ideas, falsely claiming that Warner was an actor, partially because a different Anthony Quinn was a Hollywood star before dying in 2001. Other QAnon followers broke down his name to associate his initials with made-up clues, or to dissect parts of his name to display “Q WARN.”

Well, gee whiz.  There are certainly those looking for deeper and more nefarious reasons for this bombing.

Let me start with Hal Turner.  I had never heard of him.  Upon googling his name, the top search articles used words like far-right wing, white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and conspiracy propagator.  His theory here seems far-fetched.  He went to great lengths in the link that was forwarded to me to make it sound plausible (I am not providing the link because I believe it is bunk).  I can buy a fellow turning his RV into a bomb more than I this theory about the directed energy weapon.  There was no speculation as to who did this.  Could it possibly be a shadow deep state entity?  The Russians?  The Chinese?  The Borg?  But, this is how conspiracy theorists work:  they introduced doubt.  In the process of doing so, they create converts who then, believing they are armed with inside privileged information, spread the theory with gusto. 

What are the 5G theories?  This also is news to me.  It seems like the two most prevalent ones are the 5G accelerated the spread of Covid-19 and that 5G and that it is designed and used for mind control.  Maybe, I only think I am writing this bloggy bit whereas the deep state is directing to do it through mind
control.  I mean how could I ever know?

As for the “analysis” of the bomber’s name.  Really, they are talking about him being an actor because his first and middle name is Anthony Quinn?  Q Warn is a bit more subtle, but equally stupid in my view.

Lastly, I am not sure where the white man thing works in this.  Of course, being a white man, I am by definition incapable of being to analyze, dissect, and have any opinion on this.  Maybe, in this case, I am being directed by the shadow deep state or some other deeper eigen-state.  I ought to be having a migraine if all this is true. White men have committed, like, the overwhelming number of mass shootings and bombings in this country.  It must be a white privilege, systemic racism, that I am again incapable of seeing or understanding.  Should I be feeling some blame for this bombing in Nashville?  Should I Can’t it be both [1] terrorism and [2] committed by deranged and psychologically damaged white men?  These are not mutually exclusive categories.

I wanted a witty and insightful ending to include here… I drawing blanks.

The Christmas Bomb in Nashville

WSJ.com

Christmas was lovely day.  We were on Facetime and phone calls almost all day with family and friends.  I didn’t catch the news on air or the internet all day.  It was a great respite.

The day after I took the trash out and retrieved the Wall Street Journal at the end of my driveway.  I was taken aback by a photo on the front page about the Christmas morning bombing in Nashville.

It seems police responded to an early morning report of gunshots in downtown Nashville.  They found no evidence of the gunfire.  They did, however, find an RV parked on the street by an ATT building.  There was a computer-generated female voice booming from the RV saying it would explode in fifteen minutes.  It then began a countdown.  The police rushed to evacuate the few people living around this largely commercial area. 

The RV did explode causing damage to buildings near the blast and shattering windows for blocks.  The ATT building housed the controllers and switching used for  cellular and other communications in the region.  The airport had to suspend operations.  911 systems were down for hours.

The caption in the photo on the front page of the Journal included this sentence.  “Police said the explosion seemed to be intentional.”

Huh?

What was their first clue?  I am not a law enforcement professional by any means.  But when there is a vehicle broadcasting that it is about to explode and then does as advertised, I would have no trouble deciding that the explosion was indeed intentional and premeditated.

Nevertheless, law enforcement, both local and the FBI, committed a lot significant human and technical resources to determine get to the heart of this Christmas morning explosion.  They quickly determined the make and style of the RV from surveillance footage and located a similar vehicle from other, older, surveillance video.  They narrowed it down to a person of interest and investigated the person’s home.

At first, they thought no one was killed in the blast.  A few people, however, were injured.  Then, given the small army of hundreds of federal, state, and local investigators poring over the blast site, they found human tissue and a VIN number for the RV.  The VIN was registered to the person of interest and the tissue DNA was also his.  Law enforcement was pretty certain that one Anthony Quinn Warner was responsible for this bizarre and destructive act. 

This fellow, Warner, is described as a self-employed IT professional.  He lived alone.  In the past few months, he informed all of his clients that he would no longer be working for them,  He transferred the deed of his house to a woman in California.  In the digitized countdown to the blast, the system doing the announcing and counting down from the RV also played snippets of the Petula Clark song, Dowtown.  The parts used were, “When you're alone and life is making you lonely you can always go downtown” and “When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help, I know.”

Clearly, he was lonely and beset by worries of some form.  Perhaps, he was targeting ATT for some reason.  There are speculations that he did this on Christmas morning the cause economic damage and to disrupt telecommunications and internet services but that to cause death and injury to people.  Law enforcement is working hard to determine Warner’s motive, if indeed it can be determined.

It is horrible when such things happen. The is some small solace that it was not terrorism and act of a lone troubled individual.

I wonder what makes someone tidy up their personal affairs, plan such an act, build the bomb in a vehicle, install a speaker system in the car and set up the digitized warning, countdown, and music to kill yourself and cause damage to forty-one downtown businesses?  It is a lot of determined effort.  I was blue on Christmas Eve, but it was temporary.  Many people are Covid weary but we deal with it.  I imagine, on occasion, people wonder what it would be like to be an assassin, hit man, vigilante, hacker, spy, bank robber, or jewel thief.  Reading a novel or watching about such things is about all most folks need in this regard.  Why do some people need to actually act on what the rest of us at most wonder a bit about?  What drove Warner to this?  What makes someone else go on a suicidal shooting spree?  It is an intriguing mystery to me.  I can almost understand a spontaneous act along these lines more than I can understand the meticulous planning and execution that consumed this fellow Warner.   

I may be trying to explain and understand things for which there are no good explanations. 

Cursed Location

 

In the world of restaurants and retail stores, there are locations that are seemingly cursed.  Not cursed in the horror movie sense of being haunted by spirits or apparitions, but that no business is able to thrive in the location despite the best intentions and efforts of the proprietors.  We have two such locations near our house.  Both are restaurants and both have had several restaurants start and fail in the fourteen years we have lived here (I am assuming our moving here did not curse the locations). 

One is within walking distance of our house and the focus of this bloggy bit.  It is on Waukegan Road, US-43, just north of Everett Road and is kind of the retail and banking center for the west side of our town.  There are three other food and beverage stores in the same small shopping plaza as the curse location:  Starbucks, Lou Malnati’s, and Jimmy Johns.  They do quite well and mostly carry-out.  Across Waukegan Road there is another small shopping center featuring a grocery store with a vibrant carry out department, a well-known and popular sushi restaurant, and a local pizzeria which closed this location early on in the pandemic. 

The cursed location at the end of the L shaped strip mall can’t seem to sustain any restaurant that goes in there.  We have tried out each of the four restaurants that have been in that location.  There has been an Asian (Thai/Sushi) restaurant, followed by what I would call an eclectic bistro, another Asian place, and the latest was Little Tails.  We tried them all… a few times each.  We liked having a restaurant that close and wanted support these start-ups.  The food was good and the prices reasonable for nicer but casual ambiance of each restaurant that took a shot at the cursed location.  The problem has always been a lack of customers.  We would go on a Friday or Saturday evening and there were never a lot of people there no matter which restaurant was there.

I really thought Little Tails was going to make it.  Tails, as we learned, was short for cocktails.  So, it was a place to go have a few drinks and enjoy a fare of really good steaks, huge delicious burgers, salads that easily served two, and other bar food served in generous portions.  The first time we went, the owner came by, introduced himself, and thanked us for coming.  He had several TVs and around and wanted to create a place folks could come and watch their favorite sports teams, have a great meal, and a few drinks.  He was enthusiastic and very committed to creating a popular family friendly sports bar and grill.  I thought, we might finally have a restaurant that would break the curse of the location.

Sadly, Little Tails did not last one year.  Each time we went, only two or three other tables were occupied.  The fourth time we went there to dine and watch a football game, it was closed.  All the lights were on, but as they say no one was home.  The door was locked and there was no sign on the door indicating the demise of the business.  It closed six months before the pandemic started.

I went to the Starbucks today and notice that the Little Tails sign was finally down.  The windows of space were papered over.  There was a poster announcing that two new restaurants were coming in March 2021.  Two restaurants?  That
sounds double ambitious.  The two restaurants will be Everett Farms and The Station.  Both are billed as “farm to table.”  Everett Farms will be an American Café where The Station is to be Mexican. 

My first thought was an obvious kind of question in these times:  Who opens a restaurant in the middle of a pandemic?  The poster also touts that these restaurants are the creations of chef and proprietor John Des Rosiers.  I did not recognize the name, but a quick Google search revealed that this Waukegan native is the creator and owner of highly regarded and successful Innovasi in nearby Lake Bluff.  He opened two other restaurants Wisma (Sandwiches) in Lake Bluff and Moderno (Italian) in Highland Park.  Both have closed, I am guessing due to the pandemic. 

Maybe, two restaurants will be the ticket to finally break the curse of this location. 

The poster has websites for both restaurants… and both links go to a “want to buy this domain name?” site.  Not encouraging .  So, we have well-known chef and proprietor open two restaurants in a cursed location, during a pandemic, and neither website is functional.  I am not feeling optimistic.

Nevertheless, we will try them both when they open and wish them luck.

Christmas 2020

 

It is Christmas morning.

It is a great time for reflection as I have done in previous years.

Yes, this year is different.  Yes, our gatherings have been and will be smaller.  I wrote about that yesterday.  Yes, I was feeling blue about the lesser Christmas gatherings and for the family I would not be seeing this year. 

But, truly, it is a matter of attitude and perspective as most things are in life.  This is something I have to keep reminding myself.  Duh, I know this but need to be reminded often.

By the evening, it all changed.  Photos, calls, messages, and video came from loved ones.  It was good.  The world seemed as it should on Christmas Eve.  We were enjoying the smaller celebrations and family time. 

As I type, it is still dark, this house is still quiet, I am enjoying coffee in a Christmas mug, and I am writing this Christmas letter.  I am also getting photos of the East Coast Gavoors opening their presents.  I am not there.  They are not here.  But, I am enjoying their Christmas morning none the less.

Well, here is a great Christmas morning revelation and insight, while all our celebrations are less than we are used to or want, technology lessens the separation and isolation.  Duh #2.  Am I the last person on the planet to realize this?

It is not the gifts, the food, and the commercial hype that drives this holiday season.  It is, of course, the people in our lives.  It is the blessing of children and grandchildren, my mother and sisters, my mother in-law, my wife’s sister and brother, and their families.  It is our valued friends.  It matters not if they are down the street or half-way around the planet.  (This would be Duh #3 if you are keeping score.)

Last night, I got to talk to my friend Andres from Uruguay.  It is a yearly tradition.  I have been in touch with friends and family from Prague, Barcelona, Glendale, and even Palatine. 

I just got a text and photos from my daughter in LA.

People are indeed stirring and reaching out.  It is good.

In this relative world, in this pandemic year, these small things I took for granted are all blessings.  (Is this a full blown Duh?  Or just half a Duh?)  They are blessings that I need to be thankful for.  For some reason, this is too easy to forget in the day-to-day world of schedules, appointment, dang the car needs new tires, classes, grading, committee meetings, dealing with Ara’s incessant badgering about every little thing (OMG, he never stops), paying bills, taking out the trash, watching my lawn guys rake the leaves… oh the stress of it all.

Where was I?

Oh yes, it is the family and friends that make life wonderful.  It is easy for me to forget this simple truth.  I want to call it a lesson, because I have to keep learning and relearning it every year. 

I suspect that I am not alone in this.  Duh.

It is a good thing we have this holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s with Christmas, for m
e, being the crown jewel, to remind me every year. Duh #5.

In this challenging, strange, pandemic year, the value of this truth, this lesson, is more profound than ever. (And this makes it 6 Duhs in total.)

Merry Christmas to one and all.

Contagion: Christmas Eve

 

We will not have a white Christmas.  We will, however, have a cold one. 

Today, Christmas Eve, the temperatures will not crack 20 degrees.  It is cold and it is windy.  Christmas day will have the temperature will creep into the 20s.  Consistent with the warmer globe, we will be in the 40s by Sunday.

Cold and no snow aside, it will be a very different Christmas.  Whatever we do will involve less people… much less.  We normally host Christmas Eve and have 20 to 30 family and friends over.  We set up tables in the living room and another in my office.  Every room of the house is decorated as you would expect to see on the pages of a glossy magazine.  It is a real effort of which my role is minimal as many of you might suspect.  It takes several to prepare the décor which add as much to the festivities as the house full of people brimming with Christmas cheer. 

Tonight, instead of 25 or 30 people, we will be down to a handful.  For the second year in a row, we will not have our children of grandchildren with us.  We will be just 3 people:  my wife, her mother, and me.

This is the number we had at Thanksgiving.  It was nice.  It worked.  It was acceptable.  It was OK.  We were thankful to be together and break bread.

Somehow Christmas is different.  Christmas involves weeks of preparation and twelve days of festivities.  Christmas is a house full of people with tables full of family from Christmas Eve to New Years day. 

It will be lesser this year.

We have less decorations.  We will have less people and food.  We will open gifts with a much smaller gathering. 

But, we will celebrate this holiday… this holy day.

We will have the meals.  We will exchange and open the gifts.  We will enjoy the ambience of the decorations we did put up from the glow of candles in our windows to the warmth of the hearth and illuminated tree.

Most everyone else will have less this year as well.

We will have less people, less noise, less banter, less chaos.  We will still have the warmth of each other.  We will have the noise, banter, and chaos in the style of FaceTime and Zoom.  While we appreciate and are thankful for this technology, these calls are shorter and are a substitute, a much better substitute than mere phone calls, for the real thing.  We will work with the hand we have been dealt.  We will appreciate every moment of every call.

There are others that truly have less.

We all know people who have lost loved ones to this virus.  We know or know of people whose businesses and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by the life-style change thrust upon us by this pandemic.  If we are a little subdued, I can only imagine what these folks might be feeling.  I hope that the spirit of the season will bring them some comfort.

It is not Thanksgiving, but we are thankful as if it were.  We pray for those in emotional pain or economic duress.  We pray that next year, we may be able to gather as we like, as we were used to, and that, speaking for myself, may have taken a little for granted.

We will count our blessings.

We will pray for peace on earth and health, safety, and goodwill for all people.

Contagion: Changes in Office Space and Business Travel Markets

marketingnewsng.com

This pandemic will eventually pass.  We are vaccinating people and look to sometime in 2021 to return to some kind of normal.  Will it be the normal we know, or will it be a “new normal,” dusting off the phrase that was popularized during the Great Recession?

Many people are working from home and doing it pretty effectively.  Cloud based collaboration applications and video conferencing tools like MS Teams and Zoom have made the transition kind of quick and kind of seamless.  Some of us have it easier than others.  It is better if one has a home office with a setup that includes a larger monitor or dual monitors.  It is easier if one doesn’t have school aged children learning at home and requiring some amount of managing and monitoring.  But, it is doable.  Many businesses are in fact doing it quite well.

It has been a while since I worked in an office; almost ten years.  I recall many mid-level managers to senior executives wanting their people to come to work.  They wanted them in the office during business hours.  They were, in general, hesitant to let folks “work from home” simply for a lack of trust.  It is easier to keep an eye on them when they were on-site.  An occasional walk around the office gave a warm feeling of folks hard at work.  But let’s be honest, shopping online and working on spreadsheet or ERP system has the same look and feel about it and office workers are fairly skilled at shifting from Amazon browsing to a spreadsheet when they see the boss. 

The true measure is really whether the work was getting done.  Was it getting done on time or sooner?  Was the quality adequate or superb?  Taking “work time” to shop on Amazon for 15 minutes or 30 minutes actually allows folks to work longer as they don’t have to watch the clock and leave, consuming more time, to do physical shopping. 

Anyone that ever travelled a lot for their job and was remotely effective knew very well that venue doesn’t matter.  Have laptop and wifi, work from done from anywhere in the world.

The pandemic hammered this fact home.  Zoom, MS Teams, and even Google Hangouts provide a virtual office connectivity that makes all this work even better.  Files are shared and worked on collaboratively.  There is built-in texting and video conferencing in these applications that we have all gotten very good using and navigating between them as needed.  We are sharing screens and presenting.  Cell phones are almost unnecessary except for texting colleagues in a conference call to either caucus or complain.

There are a couple of questions to consider about white collar work life after the pandemic.  One, will we need the same amount of office space as pre-pandemic?  And two, will business travel return to pre-pandemic levels?  I say no in both cases.  This does not mark the end of offices and business travel by any means.  But, there is so much money and time to be saved, I believe businesses will take advantage of it.

Why commute to the office?  Save that one to two hours a day and work longer.  More productivity for the same number of hours.  Offices could be downsized depending on how many workers can and would want to telecommute.  Office space could be reconfigured to assign different workspaces to employees who infrequently come into the office.  The savings could be considerable as could the impact on traffic and energy consumption.

Why spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to travel across the country or world for a business review or meeting?  We have proven this can effectively be done via Zoom and MS Teams.  The travel will not go away entirely, however.  In mergers and acquisitions, operations, IT, sales, and other functional areas, there will still be the need to walk the floor of factories, build relationships, finalize deals, and such where being face-to-face meeting and working may be more effective. 

Of course, this does not apply to all people and jobs.  Some will want the change of venue from home to office.  Some will want to alternate between home and office as business priorities require.  Some jobs simply require all workers to be on-site e.g. managing factories and distribution centers.

I imagine the commercial office space market which has shrunk, will be smaller once the pandemic ends.   I imagine that business travel, which has really diminished, will come back a bit though nowhere near the pre-pandemic days.  My guess, and it is just a guess, is the commercial office space market will take less of a hit than the business travel.

In either case, it will be a “new normal.”

Gotham

 

theoutline.com

What is he writing about today?  Batman?  New York City?

Not quite.  The topic is much more mundane and in line with the Seinfedian “blog about nothing” description I have used for this blog.

Gotham is a font.  Yes, a font. 

In 8^th grade, at my mother’s suggestion, I took a typing class.  We used manual typewriters for the most part.  There were a few sleek, state of the art, IBM Selectrics that we waited our turn to use.  Instead of a carriage that moved the paper with each key stroke and strike of a typebar, the very cool Selectric had a ball with the all the letters and symbols on it.  The ball would move across the paper twisting and striking the paper.  It was almost impossible to jam the Selectric the way the typebars could easily jam on all other typewriters.  An astonishing feature was that you could actually change the ball and have different fonts.  That was a great innovation and feature back then.

In reading about this now, there were many fonts available for typewriters.  The most common was Courier. I was thinking that Elite and Pica were fonts, but the terms referred to the letters per square inch.  Elite was a 12 letter per inch typeface whereas Pica was 10.

With the advent of personal computers and word processing software, the number of fonts available to the average user increased dramatically.  I was amazed by the variety and sizes available, even though I used essentially three almost 100% of the time.

My own favorite has evolved as Microsoft’s Office Suite has evolved.  At first, I used whatever the default was in Microsoft Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint.  At some time in the 1990s, I started playing around with fonts and settled on Helvetica.  I loved the sound of it.  Even better, I liked the look of it.  I used Helvetica for a number of years.

But with updates to Microsoft Office, I noticed Ariel.  Perhaps frivolously because my daughter’s favorite movie ever was The Little Mermaid, I tried Ariel and liked it.  It was the default MS Word font and, honestly, I could not tell the difference between the it and Helvetica.  I would alternate between Ariel and Ariel Narrow for about twice as long as I used Helvetica.

 

With another update, the default font in MS Office became Calibri.  I kept overriding the default and sticking with Ariel and Ariel Narrow.  But with the passing of time, I started using Calibri… again exclusively.

So, why write about Gotham?

I had never even heard of it until I read a blog, How This One Font Took Over the World, by Rachel Hawley.  And, I was equally unaware of its popularity.  I was in the dark about simply because Gotham is not in the list of fonts available in MS Office.

The font was created in 2000 for Gentlemen’s Quarterly.  Per Hawley:

 

Gotham is everywhere, as the name of one of the Tumblr accounts dedicated to tracking its prevalence suggests, but how did it become so ubiquitous? How does a typeface take over so thoroughly in such a short period of time — and what do advertisers across every industry like so much about it?

 

The simplest answers are the technical ones. Gotham is a geometric sans serif — sans serif meaning it lacks the little feet in the corners of letters you’d see in a typeface like Times New Roman, and geometric alluding to the influence of basic shapes in its design. It has a high x-height, meaning that lowercase letters like x and e are comparably large, and its different weights — bold, thin, medium, et cetera — are very distinct from one another. All of this is to say that Gotham can be easily read from a distance on a billboard or sign, making it a natural choice for print advertising.

The list of businesses and political campaigns that use it is impressive.  From Saturday Night Live to Spotify, from the Obama Presidential Campaign (HOPE) to The Tribeca Film Festival.  It is a minimalist easy to read font.  But, it is not available in Microsoft Office.  A google search to determine what freely available font in the Office Suite is closest came up empty.  

 

 

     Everything about fonts has to do with readability.  Fonts are either monospaced (every character takes up the same amount of space) or proportional (the widths of the characters vary).  Courier is the only monospaced font discussed in this piece.  All the other fonts discussed here are proportional in the letters of the alphabet but monospaced for numbers making both easier to read. 

Another classification of font is if they are serifed and sans-serif.  A serif is “any of the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter” per merriam-webster.com.  Times New Roman and Courier are the only serifed font, the remaining are without or “sans” serif.  Most everyone agrees it is easier to read text in a proportional font.  Venerable newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Times – the UK paper for which Times New
Roman was created in 1931) use serifed fonts because they believe they are easier to read.  The creators of all the sans-serif fonts believe their fonts are read.  Where do I stand?  The smaller the font size, I believe a serifed font is easier to read.  The larger the font size favors the sans-serif fonts.

I think fonts are like fashion.  A style may become immensely popular and then, at some point, everyone tires of it and wants something different.  Right now, Gotham may indeed be everywhere… until something else replaces it.

 

Note:  The typeface I use in this blog is Verdana because I think it is more readable.  All the font graphics are from Wikipedia.