But be warned: This is not a real shield:

If it’s not impenetrable, why is it $10 at Walmart?

I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.

…

It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner. The girls working at the bar — they were so bright. Another shot girl had a journal that she filled with poetry that was — that rarest of all rare things — crisp and clean and very, very good. This was never a bar where everyone knew your name, but the cocktail waitresses came to know one another’s reading lists, and pitch letters, and audition schedules extremely well.

That is, she learned to recognize there in the wilderness of people working for a living that there were other clever people.

Who are the clever people?

The ones who read books like she does, the ones who write poems and other things that have to be pitched through letters, and the ones who want to act.

Take it from me, a literate guy with a college degree who likes to read books (not just the pulp ones) who spent years after college working in a variety of environments, from retail to warehouse to printing plant before entering the “professional” world where kids come out of college into $60,000 jobs without having to first learn how the world works.

Take it from me: There are more types of cleverness in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Cleverness is not just reading and writing. Cleverness can be doing a job well, with sprezzatura, because the person has learned it so well to have innovated tricks into it. Cleverness can be looking at something mechanical and immediately having a 3-d exploded view of it so one can take it apart, repair it, and put it together again without extra pieces. Clever can be so many things.

(Link via Instapundit.)

Well, not really, since the playback is in the same window as the original post. But I wish we could see some post headlines that refer to defenestration more.

But I fear that energy efficient windows and closed HVAC-based environments have taken this word from our national vocabulary.

Meanwhile, as the link above throws the target site out of the current window, I have virtual defenestrated Dr. Joyner.

The official version is on YouTube here complete with the “Visionary and Director, in that order” self-loving profile.

You know, it’s not bad enough that the Department of Treasury spent that much money buying space for an ad in the Superbowl. They had to make it worse by just giving a blank check to an ad company that proceeded to make an ad company ad for it.

I’ve done some work in the field, and you can tell an ad company’s ad (or an interactive agency’s Web site) because they’re not targeted to consumers. They’re targeted to other ad companies to show how cool the producing ad company is. The ad company can break all the rules of comprehensibility and including a call to action since the ad is not designed to convince you of anything, but merely to exist in its coolness.

This ad shares some of the core features of a hip ad-man’s dream ad:

• Incomprehensibility. They’re having a meeting. The title tells us that. What is the point of the meeting? In most commercials, it’s to get to the punchline. This ad doesn’t really have a punchine, nor a core call to action. What is the viewer supposed to do? Embrace the existence of hip use of tax money budget.
• Self-reference. It’s an ad company having a meeting to talk with a client. A stupid client! Haw! There’s your punchline. Also, it’s epic, because the lives and livelihoods of those who work at ad agencies are dramatic, glamorous, and exciting (see Mad Men or just interact with ad agency people. They’re thespians without any acting skill, so they live the melodramas in their own lives. And if you let them, they make advertisements about them.)
• Expensivity. When money is no object, it will be spent. On an ad buy. On expensive sets and catering. Money is no object!

As a conservative, I feel outraged enough that the government profligately wasted Chinese bondholder money on an ad in the Superbowl. As a viewer, I felt worse that the ad sucked that badly.

I also feel a little bad for the “client,” whatever government functionary signed off on this. Didn’t he or she realize that the ad company was mocking him or her? Or was he so hip as to accept its mockery, feeling that he was in on it even though the ad agency didn’t think so?

Click for full size

Where once in a lifetime* happens every day.

*It’s Steve Irwin’s lifetime.

You know why the man is smiling? Because in about 18 seconds, he’s not going to have to tell his wife that he impregnated the marketing intern.

After I finish with the back window and then the front window, less of a priority because it has better internal salt removal systems, I figure that the half tank’s worth of pumping should be done. The pump is not actively forcing fuel into my vehicle, and its internal mechanisms have shut it off at five cents’ worth of gas. .021 gallons, if you’re wondering.

I figure the seal between the pump nozzle and the tank has triggered. My pickup truck has a faulty seal here so that I have to pump gas by hand at slower than the lowest automatic notch or it will trigger the nozzle shut off. So I’m familiar with the vagaries of these systems. But when I depress the nozzle trigger, it does not pump at all.

So I wonder, is the gas station’s tank empty? Or has it stopped because that’s all my credit card authorized me? I push the help button that should intercom to the cashier inside to ask him what was going on.

No response. I’d have gone in, but that would have required unloading a pair of boisterons (the physics term for energetic male children) to ask a 30 second question or to leave them for 30 seconds unattended in a car, which is felony child endangerment in 21st century America.

So I instead replace the nozzle, take my receipt for five cents, and swipe my credit card again. This time, the pump says that it cannot accommodate credit card swipes at this time. The gas station attendant hasn’t replied yet, so I take my nickel of gasoline and leave.

Wondering, of course, what happened. Credit card problem? Computer problem? Or some problem with my newish credit card, perhaps a fraud alert. Maybe there’s an APB out for me in Battlefield, Missouri, even as we speak as they search for the three desperadoes in a vehicle that’s safely hidden in a garage.

Whatever else it is, it give me something to think about and to ruminate upon all afternoon.

Beyond that door lies more than a janitorial closet, although certain supplies are stashed within for easy access on the second floor. In addition to those supplies, the shelves contain various and sundry implements to perform the most basic of repairs throughout the facility and upon some of the machines within. Then my long limbs carry me beyond the doorway.

There’s something about a professional workshop that triggers a certain wistfulness within me. Upon each professional’s bench, implements and tools relevant to the job at hand lie within reach according to a logic and preference to the guy doing the job. He’s got the screwdrivers arranged as he uses them and the lead mallet on a shelf where he can grab it on his way to the end of the printing press to pound the empty paper roll from its roller. When I see the workspace, I can almost see myself doing the job, and in that moment, I slightly transcend myself.

I don’t get that sense in an office environment. If you’ve seen one cubicle, you’ve seen them all. Most of the customization from one job to another involves a different desktop wallpaper and set of applications installed upon a computer. A different set of binders on the bookshelf, if any. A different set of photographs or cutesy individual touches.

But workbenches, they have different tools and different things. I’ve worked enough different non-office environments that my different workspaces had a variety of implements. My produce back room had machete-like blades for splitting watermelon, knives for trimming ears of corn, Styrofoam trays for packaging product, and a toolbox containing numbers and signs for pricing. My art store shipping and receiving station had a tape gun for closing boxes, sundry pens for counting products, and trays for packing lists. My print shop workbench contained two bottles of highly caustic cleaners, numerous cans of differently colored soy-based ink, screwdrivers for adjusting wheels and for unlocking plates, and the aforementioned lead mallet along with a poem hanging on the file cabinet for me to memorize for my open mic nights.

Maybe my fascination with workbenches stems from my desire for a lost youth where I worked these jobs and marched ever higher in positions and placements until I broke the barrier into business casual and a career. Maybe I long for those olden days when I made something or moved some physical things every day.

Or, just maybe, they continue to trip my imagination in ways that office-based careers and their environments cannot.

How did you meet your wife? [They married in October 2008.]
In Fire Island. She’s French, so she had no idea who I was.

Well, that’s telling. Wanda Sykes thinks she has to go to Fire Island to meet someone who doesn’t recognize her.

Memo to Ms. Sykes: There are probably a lot of places in this country she could go an be anonymous. Most of the regions between the continent’s major mountain ranges, for instance.