Buca di Beppo

I just went there for dinner for the first time. I got a $10 promotional gift card in the mail, and we figured we should give it a shot. It was pretty good. The gift card basically let us get a free dessert, and the bellini was very strong. There's nothing I don't get about the menu, it's your basic Italian-American favorites served family style. However, if you are not dining with your family, there is a small selection of single-serving dishes. They generally cost about $2 less than the "small" family portion (serves 2-3 people). I totally get why they put it on the menu, but why would anyone order it? For $2 more, you get to take half of your entree home for lunch tomorrow. Sounds like a bargain to me.

We had the baked pasta sampler (the small portion), a caesar salad (with real anchovies on top), and the chocolate vesuvio for dessert. All of it was fine. I'm not sure we'd go back if it's just the two of us, but I think it would be a nice place to go with a group, so that way everyone could try a lot of different things.

Million dollar bonuses for sucking

Dear Board of Directors of Large Investment Bank,

I do not have any experience in the finance industry, and my education had nothing whatsoever to do with business. However, I am confident that if you gave me the opportunity, I could run your company into the ground and reduce the share price by a significant amount. I believe it would be in your best interest to let me do this for a period of one year, for which I will be paid a total of one million dollars. If, after this one year period, you decide that you want me to stay on leading your company into a financial crisis, we will need to renegotiate to a higher salary. Since I am offering to do this for only a million dollars, I don't see how you can afford to refuse.

Thanks for your consideration,
Apsalar

Morning Radio Shows

Why do morning radio shows only come in 2 flavors: boring and awful? Sometimes I listen to the boring shows, and they start to annoy me really fast because the hosts have the most stupid banter with each other, and with callers, and they never say anything interesting or funny. They trip over each other with their sucking-up laughter, and their pointing out the obvious. So dumb. So I get bored and switch to one of the other types of shows. They never use the word "woman" when "bitch" or "slut" or "chick" will do. I live in the Bay Area, which is overwhelmingly liberal, so of course the morning talk show people have to say antagonizing things so that people will call in to either be indignant (and entertaining) or even worse (and entertaining). I don't find this entertaining. I find it trollish. So then I switch back to the other show, the boring one, and remember why I don't listen to it anymore. The whole thing is terrible. I like Morning Edition on NPR, but it goes off usually while I'm in the car on the way to work, followed by Fresh Air, which I don't really like. There are no good solutions.

About the Oscars

Every year they have the montage of dead people, and every year there is a popularity contest judged by who gets the most and loudest claps. Why don't they say to please hold your applause to the end, out of respect? Of course Heath Ledger gets more claps than the sound editor who hasn't worked in movies since 1975, but that doesn't mean he deserves more, I don't even know what to call it, more acknowledgment from Oscar-goers of his contributions to movie making.

As always, there were some really pretty dresses this year. Helen Mirren, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Garner, I thought, made great choices. And you know who didn't make good choices? Diablo Cody (probably on purpose because she's afraid she would lose cred if she wore something flattering and shimmery, but if you have to walk in a particular way because of the way your dress is cut, you need to choose differently). Also, I saw other people saying nice things about Cate Blanchett's dress, but I think it just made her look like she had a bowling ball on her belly. Cate knows how to pick gorgeous dresses though, so maybe everything she tried on looked like that.

Why it's so hard to find a job I like

I've been doing the same computer-type job even before I graduated from college. I used to really enjoy it, and sometimes I still get a kick from solving a problem or learning something new, or figuring out a way to do something better. But these don't happen as often as they used to, and now I spend a lot of my time doing the same things over and over again. I'm also so good at managing my time that I often don't have anything to do for parts of the day. So I've been thinking that maybe I just need to find something new. It would preferably be something that lets me use my extensive background in the work I've been doing all this time, but it would be different enough that it wouldn't just feel like the same old stuff. I'm not sure these jobs exist. I saw one at a company that seemed promising, but they pulled the job from their careers page (and I never even got an official "No thank you" from the company). I just saw something for another company, a start up this time, which I'm sure I could do, but my resume wouldn't necessarily indicate I'm qualified for. I'm leery of working for a start up though, since I'm pretty concerned about work-life balance, and I like to be able to do my own things on my own time, without having to worry about work interrupting at any time.

I actually have a phone screen later today with another company, but it's not the company I work for now that's the problem. I think this job will be basically the same as the one I have now, so while I'm open to interviewing and looking around, I wouldn't leave for just another job that's exactly the same as this one. No, what I want is something that probably doesn't really exist (people who have my job are just supposed to keep doing it forever, I guess, or go find something related enough that it's still not really what I want to end up doing). Oh well, there's always a barista job at Starbucks.

People who can't separate ideology from reality

I bet we all know people like this, people who seem to be very normal, competent people who live unremarkable lives, who say crazy things from time to time. There's my friend Matt, who once told me that he doesn't believe in progressive taxation. This is right up there with all the people who think the Fair Tax is a great idea. I guess in their minds, poor people either don't exist, or they are poor on purpose (and if only they had to start paying a lot more in taxes, they'd straighten up right away), or they deserve any problems they have that are related to being poor. I don't know.

Then there's my friend Michael. He's a friend on Facebook, and he is always answering the political debate questions. The other day, the question was which one of the Democratic candidates do you not want to win. He said John Edwards, because he is very up front about his socialist policies. I think he's referring to things like universal health care and better college payment programs for working and middle class students. Alright.. but these aren't really socialist. The people (like myself) who are in favor of things like this aren't opposed to insurance companies or loan companies making money, we're just opposed to them gouging their customers, and making money too much at the expense of the people they are supposed to be helping.

When I was much younger, I thought libertarianism had some merit. Then I became more involved in the real world, and I realized that it just can't work that way. Places where there is less government interference in people's lives aren't paradises, they are places like Somalia and Afghanistan, where he who has the most and the biggest guns wins, and gets to tell everyone else what to do. There's no such thing as the rational actor. I think people who are opposed to government involvement on the basis that government screws everything up are wrong (or cherry-picking their examples so they ignore all the cases where government does a good job), but at least they can give some reasons for what they think. People who are too much in favor of regressive taxation and anti-socialism just don't match the real world with the world they think would exist if they got their way.

Hillary Clinton Hate

I don't get why so many people hate Hillary Clinton, but my best guess is that it comes down to sexism. They hate her for being frigid, but when she has an emotional moment, they hate her for being either too calculating _or_ too emotional. Some idiot in the press corps said, "Is this how she'll deal with Kim Jong Il?" Yeah, of course, just like George W. Bush read "My Pet Goat" to him. The moron on the morning talk show here can't resist referring to her as a bitch, and he said when women wear a pants suit to a wedding, they look like Hillary Clinton. WTF? Is this all just about powerful women making men feel uncomfortable? I saw the theory somewhere that aside from the most odious racists, it doesn't bother your garden variety racist if a few non-whites manage to make good, and most people in the mainstream are more put off than not by racist statements against Barack Obama. However, sexism by its nature has to be more insidious. Men and women live and work together, and if one powerful woman who actually has a shot at the presidency makes men nervous, how must they feel about women who are their bosses, or their coworkers who do the same work they do?

I don't get any of this. The stuff I'm describing is foreign to me. I'm an Obama supporter, but I do understand women voting for Clinton just to see this finally happen. Mostly, I think the idea of having a woman and a minority be serious contenders in the race, and still a middle-aged or old white man winning is very depressing.