Category: Everything Else

Why Egypt? I understand why a fundamentalist Muslim group would want to attack the UK or Spain or America, or even Bali, but why Egypt? I’m sure there’s an explanation, but I can’t think of it off the top of my head.

At any rate, bombings suck.

We had the kittens out for a play session and I flipped on C-Span for some background noise. Sen Coburn was holding committee hearings on renovating the UN Building. And what do I see but His Hairpiece, Donald Trump, sitting there in the first row.

I’m assuming he’s there to testify but didn’t stick around long enough to find out. It did get me thinking though… the new UN building, brought to you by Donald Trump? It could happen…

I love the Smithsonian. Look what they just came out with:

Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, a trove of about 60 unpublished photos from the landmark case has been found in
Smithsonian Institution archives, including a shot of Clarence Darrow’s courtroom sparring with William Jennings Bryan.

[snip]

Among them is one of Darrow, the most famous defense attorney of his day, interrogating Bryan, the orator and presidential candidate prosecuting the case. The trial had been moved outdoors because of the heat. Bryan fell ill and died five days after the trial ended.

Here’s a link to the Darrow/Bryan shot in question. It’s grainy but still impressive.

Clicking through series of links this morning, I ended up coming across an article in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” regarding applying for jobs in academia and how reading applicants’ weblogs had an impact on the hiring process. I’m not looking to work in academia, but this did hit on an issue I’ve wondered about: could what I’ve written here come back to haunt me professionally down the line?

I’m well aware that what you post to the Internet never really dies. Knowing that, I’ve deliberately avoided some subjects in this weblog and tried to minimize the comments I made on others, including work. But according to this article, even that might not be good enough for some potential employers:

Professor Shrill ran a strictly personal blog, which, to the author’s credit, scrupulously avoided comment about the writer’s current job, coworkers, or place of employment. But it’s best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process.

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people’s choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one’s childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned.

[snip]

…in truth, we did not disqualify any applicants based purely on their blogs. If the blog was a negative factor, it was one of many that killed a candidate’s chances.

More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.

Well, Fiat Lux has been online for almost two years now, and judging on how much of my traffic comes from Google, even taking it down would not prevent people finding what I’ve blogged. If someone reads what I have to say here and decides not to hire me because I’m too opinionated, or because of my particular view on things, or because they think I’m a risk for what I might possibly say in the future …. well, that says more about their own issues than it does about mine.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care whether this blog could affect my job prospects in the future. Of course I care. But since I can’t de-Google myself, I’m damned already in some people’s eyes. I might as well keep going on.

Scott apparently was up late & heard about the bombings shortly after they happened, but unlike 9/11 chose not to wake me up for this one. So now it’s about 6 hours after the fact and I’m playing catch-up. I even turned the TV on to MSNBC but was soon treated to some utter stupidity: A nameless newscaster suggesting that commuters in major cities bear some responsibility for preventing these kinds of atacks, and since Londoners have lived with this sort of bombing attempt for a long time, it’s partially their own fault for not noticing the bombs.

Jerk. No wonder I don’t watch TV news anymore.

If this is another al-Quaeda attack, it’s a concern. But it’s also noteworthy that the attacks they have made have steadily declined in severity since 9/11. That attack killed just under 3,000. Madrid killed about 200. This one, so far, has killed less than 50. Whether that is due to AQ’s decreased capability or increased security measures taken after 9/11, I don’t know. Maybe both. At any rate, continued attacks = bad thing, but decreased casualties = good thing.

I expect the war drums will beat louder now. If anything good can come out of this bombing, it will perhaps call more attention to the fact that our misbegotten invasion of Iraq is not helping fight the “war on terror”. Although whether BushCo will see it that way, I seriously doubt.