Shoeless Kiwis

David Farrar reports (from an SST article) that a former Canterbury English lecturer, now employed at Syracuse University, missed out on a job at another university in the US because of a letter she wrote to the NZ Listener magazine disparaging the Kiwi habit of wandering about barefoot.

When Sue and I arrived here, we joked about setting up a fake charity, "Shoes for Kiwis", that would feature lots of barefoot kiwi kids and would promise that all funds raised would go towards buying shoes for folks here. That most of the shoes would be worn by Sue wouldn't go against the letter of the charity's incorporation documents. We of course never went through with it, but it was fun to think about.

Blogging and letter writing can be dangerous...there are lots and lots of veto players in hiring processes.

Cinnabon... [updated]

Would you believe I'm still getting Google search traffic to this post from folks looking for "Cinnabon Auckland international airport"?

Mmmmm...Cinnabon.

Update: And now a search for "cinnabon condoms". I hope that reader wasn't too disappointed.

Wishful thinking

David Boaz at Cato says Ayn Rand is in. Maybe. I've heard book sales are up. But you've gotta compare it to the competition. I haven't data on relative book sales, but we still have Google search data.

Google Search Insights shows a mild up-blip in Rand-related searches in the first quarter of 2009, then a drift back down; searches on Marx continue to dominate both in volume and in linked news stories. Boaz also notes resurgent interest in Hayek; Google Search Insights says nothing to see there.



Again, Marx in blue, Rand in red, Hayek in yellow. Clicking through on the Google link shows that in none of the top-ten Rand countries does Rand beat Marx in search popularity. Hitting any of the tags below will bring up previous iterations of the Rand vs Marx on Google Search Insights; do check there to see if your immediate objections to the use of this method have already been answered.

More reasons not to fly

LSG SkyChefs, who cater for 300 airlines including Delta, US Air, and Air New Zealand, has seen a spot of trouble with hygiene standards in the US. From the FDA warning letter:

At the conclusion of the inspection, on October 6, 2009, the FDA investigator issued a list of Inspectional Ohservations (FDA-483) to your firm. As documented on this form (copy enclosed), the following are the significant violations at your airline catering facility on which we base the "Provisional" classification:

• To comply with 21 CFR 1250.30(a), all places where food is prepared, served, or stored must be constructed and maintained as to be clean and free from flies and other vermin. However, our investigators observed numerous live roaches, dead roaches, and other insects, as well as food, and other debris, in various locations, including the following:
  
  
  • Cart wash area - Live and dead roach-like insects too numerous to count (TNTC)
  
  
  • Silverware station - At least 40 live roaches as well as other insects
  
  
  • The hot kitchen - At least eight dead and one live roach insects were observed in and around the walls of the hot kitchen
  
  
  • Repack area - Live roaches (TNTC), as well as ants
  
  
  • Pots and pans warewashing room - At least four live and dead roaches, flies
  
  
  • Dish machine wash area - At least 13 dead roaches inside the machine loading area and 31 or more dead nearby the machine
  
  
  • Wash area - At least four live roaches on walls and floors

I trust that this is isolated to its US operations...

Periodic table of beer

A Periodic Table of Beer. Found here, via BoingBoing.So the Renaissance Scotch Ale would be somewhere around element 65 (an Actinide?), Epic around 30 (but surely there should be more differentiation in that element). But where would you put Invercargill's Smoking Bishop?

Hypothesis Three it is

Like I said, Hypothesis Three:

There's nothing the TSA can really do, but idiots demand they do something and the only something that passengers can observe is how much they're being inconvenienced?

Reports Scott Beaulier today:

I travel a lot, and that's been true since well before 09/11. In that time, I've never seen or experienced anything close to the invasion Anemone and I experienced trying to get home yesterday at Heathrow and then again in Atlanta. 3.5 hours of additional screening were added onto our trip (i.e., normal harassment would have got us out of Heathrow two hours sooner and through Atlanta 1.5 hours sooner).

Far more disgusting than the TSA invasion and complete waste of time was the nonsense we heard from people around us all afternoon, such as, "Well, whatever it takes to keep anything bad from happening," and "It's really not that big a deal." Best of all, at the end of our trip, people in front of us were eager to jump into the "whole body imaging technology" machine when we arrived in Atlanta!

Who would have thought kissing your civil liberties good-bye could be so much fun, would be something people would literally run for, and would occur for many without even a momentary pause to consider the inconvenience and immorality of it all???

Ira turns two in February; his sister is on the way end-April. Fortunately, security lines basically don't exist in New Zealand and Australia, unless you're flying to the US. The biggest hassle is that customs in Melbourne always pulls me up for secondary inspection and interrogation, but that only adds 20 minutes. Unfortunately, Sue wants to go back Stateside for a visit sometime this year. I'm dreading having Ira in one of those lines. Absolutely dreading. It will be awful. If Ira were older, it could be an object lesson in the merits of voters and government. But there won't even be that upside.

Don't panic

A selling point of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy over the Encyclopedia Gallactica was its cover, inscribed with "Don't Panic" in big friendly letters.

Denis Dutton reminds of panics past in the New York Times. Highlights: countries that spent basically nothing on the Y2K bug suffered no adverse consequences compared to countries that spent billions on it.

KNOWING our computers is difficult enough. Harder still is to know ourselves, including our inner demons. From today’s perspective, the Y2K fiasco seems to be less about technology than about a morbid fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios. This ought to strike us as strange. The cold war was fading in 1999, we were witnessing a worldwide growth in wealth and standards of living, and Islamic terrorism was not yet seen as a serious global threat. It should have been a year of golden weather, a time for the human race to relax and look toward a brighter, more peaceful future. Instead, with computers as a flimsy pretext, many seemed to take pleasure in frightening themselves to death over a coming calamity.

Dutton concludes:

Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.

This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and recycle!

Excellent.