Almostgotit.com

Three Cheers for Three Wednesday Women:

Wednesday Woman #1:

Michelle Allen, of Middletown, Ohio was arrested last Saturday for allegedly chasing children and blocking traffic while wearing a cow suit. 

The Middletown Journal did not speculate on the reason for the cow suit, besides the obvious fact that it made for the best mug shot ever.

Ms. Allen reportedly wore the cow suit again on Tuesday morning for her court appearance.

Why? you might ask.

Well, I might ask in return, Why the hell not?

***

Wednesday Woman #2:

I do not know the difference between a functional saxaphone and good martini, but University of Tennessee music professor Connie Frigo sure does. 

And this week, Dr. Frigo went to bat for my 12-year-old daughter, who  is taking lessons from one of her graduate students.   The student teacher reported to Dr. Frigo that my daughter, a first-time sax player, had been provided with a seriously defective saxaphone by a local music store. 

Dr. Frigo fired off an email to me: This hits a nerve with me for many reasons!  and asked us to allow her to communicate with the music store on our behalf. 

She called the manager, and spoke with the repair man, whom she knows, and insisted they make things right for us. 

I will come down there, she told them, and look at the instrument myself, if I have to.

She called me back.  Take the sax in and ask for the manager by name.  Here’s his name.

And tell him Dr. Frigo sent you… 

(Wow, marvelled my daughter when we went to the store. He sure got NICE all of a sudden when we said her name, Mom…)

Ah, how much a woman after my own heart is the  Professor Connie Frigo.

Frigo is featured in this month’s issue of The Saxaphone Journal. 

She is also featured in this month’s Almostgotit Family Gallery of Heroes.

***

Wednesday Woman #3

Superfunny supergenius Sarah Haskins, for her video, Feeding your F—ing Family.

Hat tip to Beyond Help for this video on my favorite (not!) topic, which more politely might be subtitled “How the Media are Messing with Our Mommy Minds.”

Whist led to bridge-whist, which led to auction bridge, which led to contract bridge, which led, according to bridge historian Jack Olsen, to murder, divorce, suicide, mayhem, and other social evils.

- Maggy Simony, The Bridge Table, forthcoming

Since some of you have asked:  Cyn Mobley and I have been helping an 88 year old woman in Florida who is writing about the history of “ladies bridge clubs” (along with the gender food menus they created) from the 20’s to the 60’s. There are indeed murders, scandals, revolts — and also recipes. It’s quite funny. Would make a terrific play, actually…

The author plans to publish in early 2009, and I promised her I’d give her coverage on my blog.   Stay tuned!

A line attributed many times to Shakespeare but actually it’s from American author/critic/poet and wit Dorothy Parker. She is reported to have exclaimed “What fresh hell is this?” when her train of thought was interrupted by a telephone. She then started using it in place of “hello” when answering the phone or a knock at her door.In many ways she can be considered the patron saint of all tech support workers.   (Hat Tip)

And patron saint, too, of all people who work at home — especially those of us who need to answer anyway in case it’s one of the kids. 

Yeah  I know: “Must get caller ID… “

Cyn Mobley doesn’t love me at all.  She just wants a plug, and guess what?  I’m totally going to give her one, right here on this blog!  Because I am too busy to write anything else!

Cyn is looking for local (ish) writers and artists  for her upcoming Christmas Anthology.  Cyn is a best-selling author!  Who has her own press!  And last year’s Anthology sold very well!  So click on this link right now to find out more.

I’m on a deadline this week, so am pulling things out of the mailbag instead of actually writing anything myself. 

Gene left this comment for me, over the weekend, on an older post, but I loved it so much I’m giving it star treatment today.  

Dear Ms. Burman Almostgotit,

I regret to inform you that we will not be able to post your latest blog entry regarding rejections on either our website or our Facebook page. While we recognize you did not actually ask that your entry be posted on any of our internet real estate, we thought this “Bush doctrine-inspired-pre-emptive” letter of rejection would be a good idea should you possibly have entertained any notions of making such a request.

Personally, Ms. Burman  ALMOSTGOTIT, your non-request was given serious consideration, and indeed you were one of two finalists in our deliberations. We chose not to post the entry from the other leading candidate whom we favored over you because we did not receive her request before we didn’t receive your request.

We hope you can understand the complexity of our situation, and we wish you the best of luck with your blogging career.

Most sincerely,

Gene Murrow 

Who sez Tennessee is in the Boonies?

After all, it looks like it was one of our own who had the sophistication to hack into Sarah Palin’s email account.  Moreover, it’s looking more and more like the job was done by the son of one of our own rare but “Vile Democrat” Representatives, too.  Those people!

Not that it was hard.  The password reset feature on Palin’s webmail account apparently only required the hacker to answer some easy questions — e.g., what is your zip code and birthdate? — which only required a few minutes on Google to acquire. Webmail users, take warning.

On the lighter side.

A friend of mine sent me some delightfully Boony-ish news and said I could share it, though not with her name.  She lives out in the county, and wanted to update me on the status of the stray miniature goat she’d rescued a few years back.

Yes, really. Stray.  Miniature.  Goat.

The goat roamed around my friends’ property for several weeks as they looked for its owner to no avail.  Finally, after luring the feral creature towards them with some food, my friend and her husband were able to catch the mighty little beast.  The two then bundled the loudly-protesting creature into the family Lexus, voiding all warranties by so doing no doubt, and took her to a neighbor who’d offered to add her to his own small herd.

The news is that there are some new kids on the block.  Happily sharing quarters (and obviously other things as well) with her new herd, Nervous Nellie (aka Jumping Jane) has recently given birth to a pair of miniature goat twins.

If anyone is interested in the real names and locations of the parties involved in this little TAIL, they’ll have to hack into my webmail account, where they will also find several other juicy tidbits, including the name of the Japanese designer who made my fabulous contact lenses. 

. 

Fantastic book for parents of children applying to college, co-written by Marilee Jones and pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg.  I love my  copy!

Marilee Jones was the highly-esteemed dean of admissions at MIT until an anonymous tipster informed MIT that Jones had lied about her degree once upon a time, way back when she submitted her first resume for a low-level secretarial job that did not require a degree in the first place.  

I obsessed about her downfall for weeks on this blog. 

Yesterday’s story about the resignation of Lan-Lan Wang, the highly-accomplished dance professor who has also founded several dance companies, has made me think of Marilee once again. 

And again, the downfall of a qualified person was brought down by an email “tip” about bogus academic degrees.   What is really going on here?

Alison over at Ask A Manager fielded a question there on Monday from a person wondering if s/he should tattle on a coworker for misrepresenting her own qualifications, and Alison gave exactly the right answer:  No.

Lies are rarely if ever acceptable, and lies on your resume will invariably bite you on the butt.  Important note: don’t lie, and don’t ever lie on your resume.

But lying v. not lying is not my point here.  Nor was it my point when I blogged about Marilee Jones.  In fact, if anything, all of the noise lately about people who lie on their resumes, especially about their academic degrees,  only illustrates what I believe is an even bigger problem in the current job market.

We all need to stop worshipping the Almighty Academic Degree. 

An academic degree only maps a fairly specific set of accomplishments:  it cannot and should not be used as a catch-all measurement of over-all talent, experience, and skill level.     Much less a measurement of anyone’s essential value as a human being.

As a theoretical measure of teachability, academic degrees serve a bit better.  However, a history of accomplishments in one’s actual field can and should be the best measure of all.

Full disclosure: my husband is a professor, and both he and I have academic degrees from top-tier institutions. 

But a degree does not magically enable a person to invent Microsoft.  Bill Gates, who never finished his own degree, was clearly the man for that job. 

Nor did Marilee Jones become the best dean of admissions MIT ever had by getting a degree, and there is no degree in any case in “Dean of Admissions-ness.”  She started at MIT as a secretary, and worked her way up the ladder in a fully-transparent process of ever-increasing accomplishment.   Her experience was her credential, and everyone accepted it exactly as such.

I do believe that someone with an undergraduate liberal arts degree is going to be a better all-around job prospect — but not always, and not in any specific way. 

Again:  Bill.  Gates.

I’m also willing to concede that a degree in physical therapy can be a value-add for someone wanting to be, oh I don’t know, a physical therapist.

However, I’ve seen many job advertisements that require applicants to have an advanced degree without even specifying why, or what that degree should be in.  And I completely fail to see how a generic “advanced degree,” e.g., an online Masters Degree in basket weaving, better qualifies a person in a completely unrelated job, e.g., one in public relations.  

What do you think?  What is the proper place for an academic degree in today’s job market?

My 12 year old made this collage. It is captioned thus: “If we cut down the forests, where will we put the elephants?”

Today I’m trying to organize a lot of elephants myself.  After a weekend with gas hitting $5 a gallon, followed by yesterday’s stock market crash, it occurs to me that I need to do a better job at saving money *and* retaining the few clients I currently have.  Nor is feeling like a limp noodle for a week or so any excuse (though yes, thank you, I’m feeling much better.)

So:  I started off the morning with several car-less errands to save gas*and* get my sloggy old elephant blood going.  Trotted to the vet for some flea meds, then to the drug store, then to the housewares outlet store, and finally to the market for dinner makings.  The chicken from the market went into the crockpot when I got home, and that’s to save some money. 

Cutting up and pulling the skin off a dead chicken — eww.  I’d forgotten about that part of cooking.   Usually I just buy skinless chicken breasts, and *that’s* when I actually cook anymore.  Why aren’t we all vegetarians, again? 

And for this afternoon:  phone calls, emails, and hunkering down with my word processor. 

How about you?  How are you responding to the economic news of late?

Every millionaire I’ve met has a longer list of failures than successes.  If you’re always winning, then you aren’t competing against people better than you.  And that means you never get better.

- Farragut’s Mike West, who with his wife Tiffany recently donated $1 million to UT’s College of Business Administration (Bearden/Cedar Bluff Shopper-News, 9/15/2008)

It may still be in the mid-nineties out there, but according to farmer’s markets all around Knoxville it is officially Autumn.   The first home football game this weekend clinches it.

Fall means pumpkins, those round bundles of love that I have a positive fetish for.  The plumper and rounder the better.  Probably some latent lesbianism on my part, or maybe they just remind me of sweet little babies, so fat and yummy…

Anyhoo, for your weekend pleasure, I have snagged a top-secret recipe from none other than The Institute that Shall Not be Named (TITSNOB) . 

And heavens, it’s yummy, too.

TITSNOB Pumpkin Bread

• 1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 can (1 lb can) mashed pumpkin
• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 3/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/3 tsp salt
• 2/3 tsp cloves
• 2/3 tsp nutmeg
• 2/3 tsp allspice
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp vanilla flavoring
• 1/3 cup water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour two loaf pans.  Mix together sugar, oil, pumpkin and eggs until well blended.

Add all dry ingredients to pumpkin mixture and blend thoroughly.  Add vanilla and water, mixing until all ingredients are well blended.  Pour into prepared pans.

Bake at 35o degrees for one hour.  Remove from oven and place on cooling racks for 1o minutes.  Carefully remove loaves from pans and allow to cool before slicing.

TITSNOB actually sells these.  So let’s pretend this is like that  Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe , and that it cost me, like, several jobs to get my hands on it, and thus as my bitter revenge I’m now passing it on to as many people as I can. 

Go bake pumpkin bread.  That’ll show em!