the new, healthier office.

it's the 21st century. everyone's worried about obesity. so sitting on the table in the lunchroom is your normal box of donuts. but sitting next to it is a bag of someone's homegrown tomatoes.

the healthier workplace. indeed.

i guess it works.

i turned on blogger's "word verification." now i'm not getting any comments at all *grin*

proof?

if we're looking for evidence of racism in our judicial system, i don't think we have to look any father than L'il Kim's impending incarceration.

L'il Kim, a black rapper, got the proverbial year and a day in an urban lockup for...lying to prosecutors.

Martha Stewart, a white homemaker-turned-businesswoman got 5 months in a minimum security prison camp for...lying to prosecutors.

to his credit, the judge did seem to see the similarities.

He [the judge] also considered how his sentence on "a young, black woman entertainer" would be perceived in the wake of the Martha Stewart perjury trial, which centered on "an older white woman entertainer."

Stewart spent five months in prison and five months home confinement for lying about insider trading. Prosecutors in Jones' case were pushing for 33 to 41 months prison time.

"Do you think I could justify to the newspaper-reading public why [Jones] gets a sentence seven to eight times higher?" Lynch asked prosecutors. He agreed with them, however, that Jones' case was "unquestionably a more serious case" because she perjured herself to protect "people carrying machine guns and shooting at people."

to his further credit, i suppose, the judge did reduce the requested sentence.

black man still looking for a fair trial, i guess.

happy autumn.

happy equinox.

new season. anyone want to help me find a new job while we're at it?

when you have a moment.

dear corporate america,

if you could explain why taking personal calls at work is ok, but checking personal email is "misuse of company resources," i think we'd all be a little more clear on these seemingly-arbitrary restrictions you put up.

no rush, i know it takes a while to think logically when you're out of the habit.

the cost of doing business.

DHL sent us chocolate. that certainly makes an impression ;)

some of us have to get up in the morning.

by the way, if it's illegal to utilize a water balloon slingshot and a bottle of bleach in a defensive manner when someone decides he's going to rev an engine with no muffler at 4am is illegal, IT SHOULDN'T BE.

i feel like shit. exhausted and allergy-ridden.

current reading.

Neuromancer

by William Gibson.

probably followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive (i believe they've been dubbed "the sprawl trilogy"). i haven't read this book for a couple years, and i'm really enjoying it again. it's unique as far as i know among gibson's novels in that it actually follows one protagonist and one plotline all the way through instead of interweaving four or five. while its title of the founder of cyberpunk occasionally has things thrown at it by the various elitists out there ;) it still stands as the seminal work in the genre, i think.

this is getting annoying.

second time now this blog has been spammed. i've heard bad things about blogger, but i never really paid attention to them much.

do i kill the blog, or do i disable anonymous posting? i don't really want to do either, but something has to be done, and i don't like being used for google bombing.

opportunity.

when people talk about helping minorities and people who are the first in their families to go to university, they're thinking, it seems to me, of ethnic communities in cities, not middle-class families in the suburbs. because the suburbs are white, right? or asian, and asians don't need help with school. ha. what asians are is proud. too proud to ask for financial or academic help.

he's just left to go to his first class of his third try at completing university. he's scared all over again. his parents are immigrants and refugees; they would not have gone to university in their home countries, and they only ever completed community college here. they had no idea what it would be like, they had no idea how much it would cost, and they insisted he work while going to school his first time around. and his second time. needless to say, the demands of feeding oneself quickly outweigh an educational goal that is treated as nothing more than optional glorified job training.

but this is, after all, the U.S. of A., and whatever else you may say about it, people here to get as many chances as they can make for themselves.

all my support and love goes with him. third time's a charm, right? :)