Profunksticated

Just thought I’d share with you readers a well-done video on how we got into this so-called credit mess:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Random stuff:

The Spouse plans to petition for a recount in the recent school board election in our NJ township. Now that the absentee ballots have been counted, she is behind the third-place candidate (who is the only incumbent running this year) by only five votes of more than 3,400 cast. She plans to show election officials a pattern of impropriety, including the incumbent refusing to leave a polling place when told to leave by election officials and a poll worker at one site almost getting into my wife’s face because she was slightly within the 100-foot distance from the doors.

I’ve spoken to my landlady, who also is a teacher, about the results. She recalled that she helped a fellow teacher with a Virginia school board campaign some years back. Of course the teacher played up her educational credentials, just like my wife. But that woman lost. My landlady’s blunt assessment is that “no one gives a damn” about educational credentials when it comes to school board politics. She suggested that if my wife runs again next year, she hold her nose and try to align herself with the local political establishment.

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I saw the movie Obsessed with some friends at an early Sunday morning showing in Virginia. I sat with my arms across my chest for about the second half of the flick with a scowl. Why?

I really wasn’t feeling Idris Elba’s character Derek being put out of the house by Beyonce’s Sharon because he DID NOT MENTION that some crazy woman on the job was trying hard to come on to him. And Derek, unlike a lot of men and to his credit, didn’t bite. If I’m Idris/Derek, I’d have morphed into Stringer Bell and had the bee-yotch whacked.

Sorry, if that’s me, I’m gonna be real pissed if my wife tries to put me out behind a failure to say something. I’m not moving. She may have a right to be upset. However, not saying something, as a marital offense, doesn’t rise to the level of being asked to leave the home. And many men will tell you that the reason they won’t say anything is because they fear receiving precisely the same irrational reaction Sharon exhibited.

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I just wrapped up my first course in the IT master’s program, which was Managing the IT-Enabled Enterprise. Now it’s on to Business Architecture and Process. One thing disturbed me. We were assigned to review and comment on each others’ final group papers, describing a restaurant’s IT environment and action plan.

I found two of the papers appalling in that they were filled with misspellings, bad grammar and busted syntax. And this is supposed to be graduate-level work? I wanted badly to say something, but all the comments are open on a thread for everyone to see, and I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. I initially chalked the bad writing up to students for whom English is not their first language. I see that here at work all the time and have to clean up that writing. I checked the authors’ names on one particularly bad paper, but those names indicated to me they were born right here in the United States. I’m thinking I may speak with my academic advisor about that.

Fortunately, my group’s paper was relatively clean, thanks to yours truly.

The top three vote getters win three seats on the school board in our NJ town. When the votes cast Tuesday were counted by 11 p.m. ET Tuesday, my candidate wife ended up finishing fourth — by nine stinkin’ votes. So our hope now is that the still-to-be counted absentee ballots will pull her into third place.

And the guy she’s trailing is an incumbent who had to be told by county elections offiicials to remove himself from inside a polling place — where he was allegedly doing illegal electioneering. This guy was nose to nose at one point with one of my wife’s supporters, an incumbent board member who chose not to run this year and who doesn’t take no isht.

My wife could contest the result, saying the slate on which the three leading candidates ran on is illegal in New Jersey school elections. She did say she’d pray on it.

If anything good comes out of this, it is that my wife has thrown a scare into the political machine that influences politics in our town and county. This cabal is has been put on notice that there are some people who are sick of the culture of incestuous relationships and private gain trumping true public service.

Damn, this isht pisses me off.

Hello, all, today is school board election day throughout New Jersey. The Spouse, as I have blogged before, is one of four candidates vying for three seats on the nine-member Board of Education in our township. The other three candidates are running as a slate, which we believe is illegal, but illegality has never stopped folks in New Jersey from doing what they want.

We believe the current superintendent and some board members do not want to see my wife elected because, having been a teacher in our local high school who was placed in an illegal classroom situation (having more than a certain number of special needs students in a classroom without an aide), she knows where the skeletons are buried. It was a student in one of her classes that shoved her, causing her a permanent back injury and forcing her retirement from the district.

Does she have an ax to grind? Perhaps, but don’t we all? Her ax will be providing a quality education for the district’s student body, which in the last 20 years has become increasingly black, Latino and Asian. She promises she won’t rubber-stamp recommendations, but ask lots of questions and vote based on the information and her conscience.

Her three opponents have issued literature that basically says, “vote for us just because.” No listing of position statements on issues, no qualifications, nothing. But unfortunately, that’s politics even in school board elections, which traditionally see turnouts of around 10 percent of registered voters.

My wife’s gotten a lot of help from others in the township in her campaign, and of course I’m hoping she can pull this off. I’m a little nervous, but I have to remember that God’s got this. I ask for your prayers as well.

And you know I’ll update ya’ll as soon as we know the outcome.

Any of you who even have a middling interest in professional sports may have heard that Harry Kalas, longtime broadcaster for the Philadelphia Phillies, died Monday in the broadcast booth while preparing to call a game between the Phils and the Washington Nationals at Nationals Park in DC. He had been with the club since 1971, which was the year that the now-razed Veterans Stadium opened.

That represents 37 full seasons of calling Phillies baseball. And it was during those years the Phillies, as is the case throughout most of the franchise’s 126-year history, fielded some pretty lousy teams. Hearing Harry, which his distinctive deep voice, call a Phillies home run as “Outta heeeere” made watching the team bearable.

If you’re still not familiar with who Harry Kalas is, think “Inside the NFL” which ran for years on HBO. Harry narrated the filmed football highlights, following in the footsteps of another Philadelphia legend, the late John Facenda. NFL Films, which has produced countless hours of NFL hightlights, is located in a Philly suburb called Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

Below is Harry calling the final out of the Phils’ World Series win last October. Behind him celebrating is fellow broadcaster Chris Wheeler.

You’ve got to admit Harry is blessed to have been able to go out doing what he loved. RIP.

A question: Do any of you have a cat-herding aspect to your gigs? Or one where change seems to be the only constant? Why is it I set up a meeting send out the notice on Outlook, then get annoyed when someone wants to reschedule?

Do you dislike having to do things repeatedly, even though that’s an unspoken part of the job? Do you chafe against the lack of control of your own time?

What do you guys think about a 28-year-old woman who won’t let her 52-year-old mother stay a house she shares with her husband for a week while the mom is in between addresses, waiting for a place to open up? “We just bought this house and we need our privacy,” is her rationale.

Seems the daughter’s been mad at Mom since Mom left an emotionally abusive marriage. Her ex-husband, the daughter’s dad, is a minister with a long history of adultery to the point where the woman could no longer stay in the marriage. And the man told her she couldn’t take the two daughters.

I know there are two sides to every story, but what’s up with the younger daughter? Her mom says she did everything for her kids, but yet gets this kind of treatment. What say ya’ll?

I just realized we’re six days into April and I haven’t posted yet. Well, what with this school thing and work, I haven’t had a lot of time to write.

Just last week, I wrote a paper for school on data warehousing. I like that I’m becoming more knowledgeable about this information technology stuff.

The beauty of this online master’s program is that all we pretty much do is research and write stuff, which has been up my proverbial alley for years. I’m only in my first course, but there are no exams where one has to memorize material.

The longtime friend who years ago tagged me with the name of this blog is also in an online master’s program. He’s the human resources honcho. We talked the other day and marveled over how well we’re doing in our courses.

We talked about our respective high school and undergrad days, when academics were not exactly at the tops of our priority lists. So far, it’s looking like I have an “A” in this course. I lost 10 points because I made a mistake and didn’t upload a form that evaluated my teammates’ participation in a group project.

HR dude is about halfway through his program and is carrying a 4.0 GPA. That shocked the heck out of me.

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I spent Sunday afternoon canvassing our NJ neighborhood with The Spouse, knocking on doors and asking people to vote for her in the upcoming school board election. That was actually kind of fun.

I’m wondering what would happen assuming she gets elected. Would you believe all kinds of crazy isht starting going through my head? Today the school board, tomorrow the state legislature, then the next day, Congress, baby! And trust, I wouldn’t mind riding her coattails one bit.

However, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t want to go through all that, politics being the dirty game that it is. But it’s nice to dream….

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Oh, and April 7 marks the youngest son’s 9th birthday. Man, they grow like weeds. Seems like yesterday my wife told me she was pregnant with him, throwing me into a state of sheer panic and shock. It was summer 1999, our older two were 11 and 10 and we thought those two would be the only output of the kid-manufacturing division of Profunksticated, Inc.

I exclaimed, “How the hell did that hap-….Oh, never mind.”