Saturday, December 28, 2013

Dollars & sense, Part 2: Continued notes on other blog plans

Subsections below:
5. One inspiration for the series will be the focus of a separate “miniseries” of beefy entries: on the placement firm GLG  [JCP]
6. Obamacare—Full Adult Diaper? (“OFAD?” would be my mini-series designation)  [RVT]
7. Memories of freshman year in college: Alan L., a presuming “social arbiter” with a voice like a mafioso’s  [RVT]
8. A tonic for when you’re ginned: The tale of “Hillary” and the house fire  [RVT]  [copy not included yet]
9. Patchouli and B.O.: Entries reflecting on the 1970s

[Edits 1/2/14. Edit 5/28/14.]

5. One inspiration for the series will be the focus of a separate “miniseries” of beefy entries: on the placement firm GLG  [JCP]

Two things I discovered very recently have somewhat primed me for the “Dollars & sense” series. One is my clot of files on the breakdown in 2007 of what I have pseudonymed The Gary Laverne Group, a placement agency that seemed favored by medical-promotions firms from 2000 to 2006. Its real name, I reveal now (because for whose benefit should I hide its identity seven years later?), is The Guy Louise Group. (Revealing this shouldn’t hurt “those who don’t deserve it” because the principal who was left holding the bag, winding down the company’s operations in 2007, is working through another employment-related operation that doesn’t make his name too obvious, as far as I last saw. So I shouldn’t be killing his work prospects.)

I’ve written a blog entry on it, but in finding my files and, from these, remembering what a shockingly horrible situation it was to deal with its breakdown, where it was late with four paychecks to me (the last I received about four months late), and it was late paying numerous other workers too (probably multiple paychecks to them, and some fellow GLG workers ended up getting their last money later than I did). I started a formal complaint with the state Department of Labor, which was just about to ratchet into action in June 2007 when, on Guy’s coming up with the final checks, I called it off (as seemed eminently appropriate).

I will want to tell this story more fully than I did in 2012, with some exhibits, to show what a big bear it was. This will not be a way of pillorying or casting a harsh light into every last corner of the firm; in fact, one thing I will want to do is to show—as part of showing more broadly how you can and should be practical in dealing with these issues, not looking to hold “show trials”—how I worked with Guy to iron out certain issues, so that he seemed to trust me, or so at least he would want to “work with me” on the disastrous 2007 money issue, more than maybe he did others.

(Or rather, other GLG workers, I found, ended up having a very low opinion of GLG, as if it was incontrovertible sleaze, but I didn’t really think the same, though I certainly frustrated, vexed, and mystified with the situation at the time, and in retrospect, the way the firm folded does raise some stark questions of how much the principals were aware they were, by late 2006, in a seriously legally dicey situation, and why didn’t they take other measures to perhaps prevent it?)

My story on GLG will be a separate one or more entries that will be labeled as outside the “Dollars & sense” series. [Update 5/28/14: See change of plans explained here.]


6. Obamacare—Full Adult Diaper? (“OFAD?” would be my mini-series designation)  [RVT]

I did a few entries in 2012 on the messes I encountered with certain employers and employer-offered health insurance. Might I follow this up in 2014? For one thing, I started signing up for insurance on the federal HealthCare.gov marketplace site (I’m in New Jersey, and we have no state Web site for this). I could tell about my experience with this (getting to a certain terminus point on December 12 was a bit of a pain but easier than I expected; but now I’m waiting on what I thought would be some forms in the mail, or an e-mail, and nothing has come—for more than two weeks).

But I don’t necessarily want to talk a lot about my own experience with the health-care marketplace situation, when so many other people—with stories recounted in the media—have had more interesting stories than I. But I will play this by ear. I won’t really diligently start following up on my Obamacare application until early January, and then we’ll see what kind of nest of weirdness might inspire a blog entry.


7. Memories of freshman year in college: Alan L., a presuming “social arbiter” with a voice like a mafioso’s*  [RVT]

*Yes, this subhead has a sort of blog-snarky crudeness to it. The fuller story of Alan L. will be more nuanced, but it still will reflect a blunt, alien set of behaviors of his.

[Important fixes to this subsection.]

I think I can get some series mileage out of some stories from my freshman year in college, for reasons I won’t fully divulge yet. Let’s say it (in 1980-81) was a time of cold-environment, bitter-encounters growth for me, and some of the rudest peer behavior I’ve ever seen. There broadly seems to be some controversy about how much there is the phenomenon of the “nightmare freshman-year roommate,” such as I found in Alan L. I mean, certainly some of us have had them, and I certainly did. How edifying to a range of others would be my story of mine? I’ll tell you one thing, I have remembered his hard-ass behaviors ever since—for more than 30 years—and my sense of grievance at them seems to well up whenever I deal with particularly severe career threats/insults.

This story will be very interesting to me on one level—I seem to have been warming up to it for many months—and it may also give me cause for pause where I delay getting it out. But here is a nice “teaser”: my most difficult roommate didn’t just have a strong Long Island/Jewish accent that made him seem almost like a thug or a punk, hardly eminently promising material for legal education, much less college education, and he wasn’t only tremendously self-centered in a way that was decisively remarked on by a later roommate of mine, who was a “nice” self-centered person, named Eric. But after a long year Alan and I roomed together, Alan and I agreed, as an elective thing, to room together for sophomore year, when we found from the college housing lottery that we couldn’t separately get in to the dorm of our choice (the fuller story makes this situation seem more reasonable and partly a matter of chance). The irony of our acceding to room together again will be crystal-clear when I show just how we seemed like we couldn’t stand each other more, in our freshman year together in GW’s most notorious dorm, Thurston Hall.

One of the amusing things about this area of concern is that it would really help if I had an audiofile I could share (which I’d made), to demonstrate Alan’s accent. Instead, in the blog entries, I will spell his words phonetically when I can, but you really have to have heard the accent in person. For instance, way back in those days, I had the nickname “Lurch,” from high school. How this got started was, when I was in about fifth grade, a classmate named Mike Barone was amused that I knew what the meaning of the word merchant was, or something like that. So he started calling me “Merchant.” Later this devolved—as it was shared by other students, not that I minded—into “Lurchant” and “Lurch.” By high school it was my nickname among a fairly wide range of classmates.

I almost never hear this name used in recent years, and when I do, it’s from a high school classmate I almost never see, and the nickname actually embarrasses me today.

When I got to GW in 1980, somehow it came out—and I wasn’t embarrassed by it at the time—that my nickname was “Lurch.” So my roomie Alan L. went along with using it, but the way he pronounced it, with an r that wasn’t simply missing but was twisted by his tongue into who-knew-what, was like “Luytch.” Try pronouncing that.

But he didn’t just gamely use this nickname (and heaven knows he had plenty of other antipathetic behaviors toward me over a dense year). Once he reported back to his friends when he visited home in Bellmore, Long Island, that my nickname was “Lurch.” As he told me when he got back to GW—and he said this as if he was to be taken as reflecting true, “eminently moderate “ values—when he had old his friends this was my nickname, “They wanted to beat the shit out of you!” That was Alan’s way of showing what True Good Sense was.

Yes, he was a bully—a Jewish bully from the hard-nosed town of Bellmore, Long Island. You’re starting to get a taste of what this story about Alan will be like. And in terms of published material, I’ve kept it under wraps for over 30 years.


8. A tonic for when you’re ginned: The tale of “Hillary” and the house fire  [RVT]

[The copy for this isn’t edited yet, and it involves sensitive issues, so it pays for me to go slow with it.]


9. Patchouli and B.O.*: Entries reflecting on the 1970s

*This isn’t the name of a TV show from the 1970s, though it may sound like one.

I wouldn’t be the first to say that the 1970s were great. In fact, for me they were depressing. But there is something to be said for today’s youth, who in no way could have been born then, understanding what that decade was about. Yes, the clothes were awful (even boys could wear something for their school class picture that had some purple in it). Yes, the popular music could be great, and could be awful (disco is known among even young people today who were born well after the 1970s as a kind of cultural blight, or cancer: but how bad was it? Was some disco actually good? Why was it shaped as it was? And is there, perhaps, no real unitary cultural set of ideals or effluvia identifiable as “disco,” but instead it is an after-the-fact concept that loosely applies to a wide range of different cultural artifacts? Maybe people had an idea of what “disco” was in the 1970s that focused their revulsion, but maybe the concept today doesn’t apply to its referents so easily, and it may overlook some important values that we can see as germane to us).

This occasional series will encompass, among other things, movie reviews, and the movies at issue either were made in the 1970s and piquantly reflect the culture from then, or were made later and supposedly ape 1970s style (whether satirically or for “period piece” purposes). With this latter type of movie, my reviews may look at this imitative aspect for verisimilitude, or some other comment to make.

By the way, recent social behaviors and economic conditions, to me, make this time in the U.S. echo the 1970s more than any decade between now and then. But young people who weren’t alive in the 1970s wouldn’t know that.

Dollars & sense: A new series; and some notes on other blog plans, and blog “logistics,” Part 1

[For those who don’t know where it is, here is the “index” to the entries on this blog, through a date in May 2013. Edits 12/28/13 p.m. Edits 12/31/13. Edits 1/22/14. Edit 11/20/14.]

Subsections below:
1. Statistics from different parts of my blogs
2. Toward the “Dollars & sense” theme: A passing note on my Marvin Center series
3. The “Dollars & sense” series—what it should be about, and what inspires it  [JCP]
4. “Running with the bulls in New Jersey”  [JCP]


I’m at a position in my blog work where I can state with some confidence some of what I can do in the new year. The things I said I would work on in 2013—in my “signpost” entries of last winter and spring—I’ve mostly done, and on just about all the balance, I’ve said I would hold off till a more or less later time. Some of these latter items can possibly be posted in the future, but I am in no rush to post them.

One item, on the radium-soil affair in Vernon Township in 1986-87, I would like to work on for 2014, because it will have some relevance in more ways than one.

Note on special codes: I will put a sort of code before some of the subsections below, based on whether they relate to one of two or more categories of alternative “story distribution means” that they can be transferred to, as emergent circumstances warrant. This means that the possible blog series (or one-entry idea) noted below may end up being shunted to, or finished in (or otherwise dealt with), one of two avenues for future production and distribution I will use for the stories: (1) the collection called “Jersey Combo Plate” [code JCP], which I’ve previously mentioned (in this entry), which was languishing and didn’t get off the ground, and now might (and is a relatively CHEAP avenue—more details to come [update 11/20/14: JCP is not available in print, as has been detailed to people on my mailing list]); and (2) the project titled The Revenant [code RVT], which for now I will delay commenting on very deliberately until the time is right. This is a classier project whose nature will indicate why it is being handled more “with cards behind my vest.”

When you see the code JCP or RVT beside an idea/series category below (and you will see it on the relevant blog entries to come), this means the entry/series may end up being partly or wholly done within the “Jersey Combo Plate” project parameters, or alternatively The Revenant parameters, instead of on this blog. How you may access material at least in the “Jersey Combo Plate” realm will be made available before terribly long. (I am doing this partly for reasons of convenience and “business sense.”)


1. Statistics from different parts of my blogs

Maintaining my two blogs has required me to wear three hats: writer, editor, and publisher. (As you know, each can have their down side; get three such persons together with their down sides, and you have quite a committee, presenting some kind of business for your consideration.) Now I add my least favorite kind of functionary, but so necessary in today’s media-besotted world: marketing analyst. (By the way, though my statistics on links to specific entries may make it seem like my blog isn't much read, the total number of page views for both my blogs is over 12,000.)

With my marketing analyst hat on, I find:

* In my top 19 list for the present blog (with results as of December 4), all the entries are from 2012. Why are these so popular? Was the quality of them, overall, better than those for 2013? Possibly. I do know my mood in writing the 2012 entries was generally different from that for 2013. In 2013, I was both “slower” and more self-conscious in fashioning the entries.

Speculated reason. The fact that links may have started to my 2012 entries so prodigiously in 2012, for reasons apart from perceived quality of the entries over the longer term (into 2013), may have set up a continuing potential for increased links to those entries to go on through 2013, with concomitant indifference to my 2013 themes. More specifically, these links may have happened for such reasons as (in 2012) perceived relevance for some readers to stuff in an outside context going on in that year (whether workplace-related or otherwise). For instance, to take one especially conspicuous example, the Gene Mulvihill stuff (posted in November and December 2012) became of note in 2012 among a subset of readers (say, people in Vernon Township, N.J.), and they shared them with like-minded or equally local readers, and the amounts of links snowballed for these entries from there, over many months.

* Concomitantly, of my 2013 entries on this blog—and I’ll admit, I had less enthusiasm (in a sense) for prodigiously doing entries in 2013 than in 2012—very few have numbers of links that approach the most popular of those from 2012. (Update: As of December 26, the entry in the spring on the films Freaks and Pink Flamingos had 55 links, putting it into the Top 19, the only 2013 entry at the time to get this distinction.)

For instance, one of the most popular, “Pentimento pause 2…” (on the Bauer lawsuit), has 43 links at last check on December 26. OK, so maybe what I was interested in writing about in 2013 didn’t float the boats of many of my readers. Something for me to consider as I embark on 2014 work.

* On my other blog (“Missives from the Jersey Mountain Bear”), there are some interesting facts, but one thing I won’t do is post a “Top 10” or “Top 15” list for it, or tell you numbers of links for certain entries. A few things, though, can be said, which may not entirely surprise you.

(1) Among the seven most popular entries (for the total set of the blog, which is about 42 entries), the numbers of links are a good bit higher than the links for the five most popular entries on this blog for 2013, and they approach many of the numbers of links for the top 19 for this blog (though the 10 or 12 most popular entries for 2012 for this blog have higher numbers of links each than all the most popular on the “Bear” blog).

(2) It’s reasonable to suppose that increased popularity of entries on the “Bear” blog, generally, can happen more readily because there are fewer entries overall to wade through, and hence people’s choosing (and linking to, or referring to another person) items of interest can happen more easily there.

(3) The general nature of themes on the “Bear” blog, which is more personal and more detail/context-oriented, seems to condition the increased popularity of the more popular entries there, though measuring this in any precise way is hard.

(4) The phenomenon of certain entries being more popular for seemingly obscure reasons on the “Bear” blog happens as it does on this blog, and the reason may be the fact that subgroups of people with particular interests happen to share these entries eagerly, kicking up the link amounts, in a certain self-potentiating “engine” of a “subgroup” and/or “subcategory of heightened interest,” without the readers’ looking more over the whole set of entries for ones of almost equal interest. (For instance, a summer 2013 entry on a turtle and with reference to “teleological suspension of the ethical” continues to get more links, and who knows why.) In a very general sense, this is as with the Mulvihill entries, but frankly, why one or two of the entries in the “Bear” blog is of such interest and still grows in links (particularly one from fall 2012 that is superseded by later entries) is puzzling to me.

Anyway, there are three sets of “values” suggested here, which I am quite mindful of in deciding how to proceed with my blog work in 2014:

+  The sense of a certain relevance/piquancy seen in the 2012 entries on this blog and perceived to be missing from the 2013 entries

+  The fact that fewer entries makes it easy for people to browse for entries they’ll like (as on the “Bear” blog)

+  The “subgroup”/“cliquishness of certain interest” phenomenon (noted in (4) above)

All these lead me to decide how I will do future blogging, without losing what value that my own means and agenda of 2012 and 2013 have brought to this.


2. Toward the “Dollars & sense” theme: A passing note on my Marvin Center series

I make a point of not publicizing my “links”-based statistics on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog, though I am heartened by how popular are numerous of its entries, which as a collection are different in tone and substance from a lot of what’s on the present blog.

But one entry surprises me a bit as to the fact that it’s among the top five or so most popular on that blog (of a total 39 or so entries). It’s the long version of Part 13 of my Marvin Center series, which series I unfolded mainly on this blog (last winter/spring). As I said, there being fewer entries in the “Bear” blog may be why the long version of Part 13 (which is only on the “Bear” blog) happens to receive more attention, but I wonder why it has so very many more links than all the other Marvin Center entries on this blog, including the short version of Part 13.

I will hypothesize (for now) that for the readership of the “Bear” blog, which I have a feeling is overall a bit different than for this blog, the MC 13 entry is especially interesting, particularly as it may bear on this question that my readers may have had: “What kind of job did he have in D.C., after college, before he came to Jersey, where we all might admit there are so many career-related pitfalls? And especially, why did he leave that D.C. job?”

I’ve already given some quick account of why I left the Marvin Center in late 1985. I was going to move on from D.C. anyway, for graduate school; that essentially was in the works since 1984. Money for grad school was a prime issue; I wanted more financial aid in order to be practically able to go than I was getting with earlier grad-school applications (spring 1985), which led me to apply again for acceptances to come in early 1986. The only sticking-point question was when I’d leave the MC. I thought that if I left many months before I really would forced to leave the D.C. area for school (presumably late summer 1986), that could serve the MC well (I initially gave about six weeks’ notice) and serve me, too: months before school was to start, I could find another job maybe where I’d be going to grad school. (I am working to reconstitute my careful thought of that time, over 25 years ago. I didn’t make impulsive career decisions at the time.)

But my real point here is this: Do you blog readers feel I let a magnificent job, with the MC, slip through my fingers? If (as I said in this GWU-related entry, at the end of the subsection “1. Lloyd Elliott, 1918-2013”) I was several steps down from President Lloyd Elliott’s level, was I foolish to, blah blah blah?

It’s funny how people have interpreted that MC job over many years. In my first few years back in New Jersey, occasionally I’d hear people talk as if it was just a “student” job. One man I interviewed with for a job in about 1989—I think for a firm that made ventilation equipment for houses and businesses or such (yes, it was a weird choice for me to apply to, but I was desperate for income)—seemed to remark off-handedly about it being a student job, and he asked me—in a way that has irked me ever since—why I’d gone to grad school in 1987 (three years after I’d graduated from college); and he asked me this twice. As if he didn’t understand when I first told him. He was a real ass for this. It’s always the really bad, insulting job interviews I remember.

Well, aside from what my career aims were, the MC was certainly not a “student job” when I left it. I mean, I had many of the same responsibilities as I did when I worked there, from early 1982 through spring 1984, as a student, but there were more (and more serious) I had as a staffer. But even for a student, the responsibilities were heavy enough. You didn’t merely serve ice cream, or operate a cash register. Among many other things, when the fire alarm went off, you had (sometimes, depending on emergent circumstances) to help evacuate students from the building (including someone in a wheelchair, carried down the stairs, of which I was only one of several who helped in that). You kept an eye out for criminal situations. You dealt with homeless people who came into the MC. You dealt with the “bathroom gays” (see Part 8 on that). Etc., etc.

And it was a wonderful job to have, not only to serve my needs for money, but in how it expanded your knowledge with its exposing you to so much—not just negative experiences, but so much of the culture of GWU.

But come later 1985, along with all else, it was time to move on. I’d worked at the MC in one form or another since 1980 (with two summers away). That’s a long time (at approaching-five years) for someone of that age (19-24) to be with one firm, especially when I was like so many other students of my age, really forced by circumstances to work at a ton of various jobs just to patch money together for school and other little necessities of a student (I think the statistic I long used is that I had about eight jobs by the time I graduated from college and about 12 jobs by the time I left grad school).

Well, here’s the big point: guess how much my MC staff manager job paid? I used to know the hourly rate, but forgot it: but yearly, to judge from my tax information, it was about $12,000-13,000 a year.

Yes. You use your own calculations to see what that’s equivalent to in 2013 dollars. The job was 30 hours a week, at that yearly rate. The only benefits: health insurance that I had to pay half of (because GW had a rule where “part-timers” paid for half of health insurance, and even though part-timers often were 20 hours/week, I was 30 hours, and still had to pay half—my insurance premiums weren’t prorated per the 30 hours). I eventually dropped the health insurance because it almost did not pay at all for the one regular expense I had (it covered $4 of a $200+ bill for a kind of alternative therapy).

The other benefit was that you got three credit hours for taking classes, free, at GW. I took advantage of this. This was the one benefit really good to me.

There was no retirement plan. There was no life insurance (certainly, I never signed up for any as an employee, though I had life insurance that my mother first bought—I think it was marketed through the association I had with GW as a student—when I was a student, and then which I assumed the payment of myself, and still have today). I don’t even remember if the option was offered of free parking in the numerous GW parking garages (though I didn’t have a car down there at the time).

And here’s something else, though this wasn’t a function of my being a staff worker there in 1984-85: when I was a student employee, in the game room and then as an assistant building manager, GW did not take out Social Security tax. I found this out many years later, maybe 10 years ago. I contacted Social Security about it, I think it was, and they told me GW had a deal where they did that with student workers. So, when I looked at my statement of “pay history” and projected benefits that Social Security used to mail out each year, the GW student work isn’t represented. It’s as if I hardly worked from about 1981 through 1984. Shocking.

Do I feel I was ripped off by GW with how I was employed as a staffer in 1984-85? No. It suited my needs at the time. And since it wasn’t a career job for me anyway, I didn’t really care that the pay was what it was—actually, it was a definite step up from what I’d ever been able to get, for the hours, as a student.

But was I a grand administrative sort who was paid “big bucks” who frivolously left the job? Well, is that what you young Turks (or whoever you are making the MC 13 entry on the “Bear” blog so popular) think? Guess again.

But the more salutary point here is that, throughout any of our careers, it is a journey we take—from lesser to better, learning along the way. And I can encounter plenty of situations today where young people have a rather cruddy deal fobbed off on them as they work as earnest sorts, e.g., working a register at a supermarket while attending college, etc. You can look back years later and appreciate some things about those early jobs that you didn’t at the time, and also may be struck by how you accepted some kinds of grubby responsibilities in your early twenties that you would never, for the same pay, in your forties.

It is in view of this sort of thing—discovering as you go, from whatever your starting point is, what kind of ambiguous, lesson-teaching “roommate” your own personal work history is as you try to ascend the ladder—that I present what I hope will be a useful series following the theme ideas shown immediately below.


3. The “Dollars & sense” series—what it should be about, and what inspires it  [JCP]

[Two entries in this series are here and here.]

One set of concerns I think I am ready to make a few trenchant entries on, in a series: the level of pay, and the problems you can run into regarding pay—and what I found you can do about them—in the print-media industry (and this can include certain firms related to medical promotions, which area has some important divergences from the more traditional print media industry—some divergences relating to issues of common sense—as I grew versed in it in the 1990s). On this blog in 2012 and less pointedly in 2013, I have done all kinds of entries revealing some of the “dirty secrets” of the print-media industry in its traditional forms, but have rarely touched on pay.

Pay level as an abstract matter, of course, is ordinarily a confidential matter, per the usual convention. But of all the horror stories you can tell about the print media world, the phenomena concerned with pay (the level, and some conditions about how/when you get it) would really scare off some people new to the area—because so many laypeople seem to think that the print media is a field that is for “people of talent” or “is a privilege to be in” or “is an area all about honor” or such, and along with this they think that the pay is good. Boy, would they be surprised.

Another thing some snarky laypeople to the industry might think is that, well, maybe some people—like me—get raw deals pay-wise because they’re some kind of noodge, and they weren’t diligent enough, or they somehow had it coming. All not true. Especially when you find that other people are subjected to the same deals, including older and more experienced workers, you know that the field is one endemically rife with pay difficulties. Over the longer term, you have to almost be a clergyman taking a vow of poverty working in this area (as I suggested on my other blog in “The courage of Kate Brex,” subpart Z).

But of course, it is a business, too, and you may reach a point where you think that the managing types who try to foist off on you a stinky deal seem to think that “you have to earn your wings” or “you have to learn that it’s a tough business”—when you know this in spades already—really themselves are in deep need of being held to account in some pungent way. There are things you can do to get, perhaps, a little higher pay rate. Or there are things you can do—some of which may seem a little hardball-like in other kinds of industries—if your pay is being delayed (which, yes, happens more often than outsiders would think), or there are some other doubts you have about how some specific pay you should have coming is or will be handled.

I will look at some concrete examples of this sort of thing in future entries; be patient—it will take some time. Also, see subsection 4 immediately below for some notes on how relevant, or not, my stories may be to you.

Meanwhile, for some basic info on one of the biggest, weirdest examples of this in my entire work history (i.e., the story of GLG), look at subsection 5 in Part 2 of this extended introduction.


4. “Running with the bulls in New Jersey”  [JCP]

This series will have some thematic overlap with “Dollars & sense”—in fact, for specific blog entries, I will put them under the banner of either subhead or of both. [Update 1/22/14: Anticipated entries will be under the banner of "Running with the bulls."]

I definitely want to do a mini-series headed “Running with the bulls in New Jersey”—about how tough it can be to pursue a prissy editorial career here. You’ve heard a lot of my stories already. This will be a very “occasional” series—when the spirit moves me, I’ll do an entry. But I won’t be as dogged about it, or apt to supply as dense a parade of entries, as I was in 2012 on this sort of thing.

Look at it this way: the entries from 2012 are rather a prelude to what I might say in the “Running with the bulls” series. Now, granted, these entries were not all that popular; next to each title in the list below, with its specific link, I include the number of links done by others as of December 15, 2013.

Note on relevance to you: If you read the 2012 entries just noted, my future “Running with the bulls” entries shouldn’t be such “musty old war stories”; the future entries will be more on nitty-gritty procedure on what I did to iron out standing, difficult problems. But also note: this does not mean that my experience will mean you should do the same thing, or that you should expect the same results. There is a certain more-or-less grubby art to dealing with the problems I am to address. How you are to learn how to deal with them is like learning to ride a bike: everyone might have his or her own way, in terms of passing details, of how to do it, but you “learn” by seeing the Gestalt of someone “mystifyingly” riding the bike, then you try stumblingly to imitate this, then, Voila! You might actually start doing it your own way.

The 2012 entries that in some sense are “prefaces” to the “Dollars & sense” and “Running with the bulls…” series:

March 28, 2012
0 links

March 31, 2012
5 links

April 6, 2012
12 links

April 27, 2012
38 links

May 2, 2012
19 links

July 9, 2012
19 links


Anyway, I will be more practical in the future series than those 2012 entries might have seemed.

One story in particular is from 2005, when I worked for the firm AM Medica in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, as placed there by The Guy Louise Group. That, I assure you, will be an interesting story. If you feel that I had “finally arrived” by working in New York City, guess again.

##

Introductory notes to be continued in Part 2.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

An update on my top 14 “hits”—now the top 19

[Edit 12/8/13.]

Doesn’t it give you a pain in the tail to hear all those space-filling year-end wrap-ups in the media? Top stories of 2013…. Top news-makers…. Those who died….

I mean, it’s as inevitable as the Hess toy trucks that are available each Christmas, and we can half take it in and not be too taxed by it, but good grief…. Your local newspaper (and many do this) can load up pages with “top stories of the year” and basically it is a running of a long piece that was worked on by probably lower-level news writers over months beforehand, and comes out when a range of the staff are probably on vacation and aren’t available to cover more normal news. And unless a meteorite slammed into San Francisco and wiped out half the city, there’d be no serious news between Christmas and New Year’s.

Well, in the spirit of doing some year-end wrap-up of sorts, here is an update on my “top 14” list of early August. I post this—after looking at updated figures for my own interest—finding there were some interesting changes. Not only are there a few new entries to add to the top 14—as well as several ties—but there are enough entries that have at least 45-47 links—which is close to my July criterion—that now the list stretches to a top 19 (a nice, round number).

The numbers of links with the entries below are what was seen Dec. 4. There may be some very minor changes since then to a few of the below entries, which aren’t significant.

Still #1:
Initial remarks on Gene Mulvihill (November 6, 2012): now 771 links
Some added perspective on Gene Mulvihill, the New Jersey businessman (active in Sussex County) who passed recently

Still #2:
Review of Winter’s Bone (May 15, 2012): now 151 links
Movie break: Why deny the parentified child (in meth territory)? Winter’s Bone (2010)[:] Under the heading of “Beowulfian Protestantism”: A wildly tested backwoods young woman keeps honest while her frayed community can’t quite

Still #3
Second part of my review of The Insider (October 3, 2012): now 105 links
Movie break: An “adult picture” on an issue that concerns everyone—corporate malfeasance affecting nationally distributed products and health: The Insider (1999), Part 2 of 2[:] A drug-delivering business acting like a Mafia

New #4! (tied with #3): 105 links
(November 29, 2012): Some already-publicly-released information on heroin abuse over a wide region, and easily derived facts on the related prescription medication of buprenorphine

#5
Why no blog comments? (November 13, 2012): now 104 links
Why don’t I allow blog comments? A quick explanation; “Beowulf don’t text”
[Note: The new placement of this entry makes me think of a future possibility for my blog work, which may include allowing reader comments…you should hold off on concluding something will happen, but I am deciding…]

#6
My review of Girl, Interrupted (April 19, 2012): now 97 links
Movie break: Winona Ryder as “power waif”: Heathers (1989) and Girl, Interrupted (1999), Part 2 of 2

#7
Third part of “What in the Name of Medicine?” (December 28, 2012): 95 links
What in the Name of Medicine?, 3 of 6:  Focus on the Silliest Clown in this Mess, in view of violations of editorial standards, and religious hypocrisy in the workplace [CC #4, 5]

#8
Second version of my review of The French Connection (May 24, 2012): now 78 links
Movie break: Slobs and anger, cops and drug-conspiracy: The French Connection (1971)

#9
Part 2 of my review of Matchstick Men (August 3, 2012): now 77 links
Movie break: Matchstick Men (2003), Part 2 of 2: Family opportunity counterbalances the story’s grim side

#10
Signpost 2 (May 22, 2012): now 74 links
Signpost 2: Showing what’s ahead for late May and early June [2012]
[The only reason I can think that an entry like this, which doesn’t have much substance, is ranked so highly is that maybe it is linked to by various people as a sort of path to other entries that are of more interest, and this as a result of whatever circumstances of readers’ having earlier linked to my blog. If that makes limited sense, it echoes what is the vagueness of my own theory on this. The same applies to #18.]

#11 (tied with #10)
The second of my series on films on “females’ psychological odysseys” (February 17, 2012): now 74 links
Movie break: Films about young females’ psychological odysseys, Part 2 of 3[:] More clinical tales, or stories of immersion in personal instability or growth

#12 (new entry): 69 links
(November 25, 2012): Movie break: A family reunion would seem a winning ideal, but it runs aground on moral complexity and interpersonal tumult: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
[If I had known this one would be so popular, I would have spent more time last year writing it.]

#13
My review of Blue Crush (August 21, 2012): now 63 links
Movie break: “Perfect Pipe Now”: Blue Crush (2002)[:] Update on surfer movies is best for its water-level view of the most dangerous type of surfing

#14 (new entry): 57 links
(November 12, 2012): Some clarification and adduced evidence on the issue of Gene Mulvihill’s local reputation (in Sussex County, N.J.)[:] Showing that views of Mr. Mulvihill weren’t merely matters of gossip, but could significantly affect elections; with a note that I will pull back from much discussion of incendiary local politics

#15 (new entry): 52 links
(December 10, 2012): Fraud in the Caymans (1970s), News-Editor Bias (1989), Part 1 of 2[:]  Mulvihill may have been “dreaming” (per recent obits) with results entailing economic benefit to part of Sussex County, but he was realistic in pleading guilty to federally sanctioned, felonious charges

#16 (new entry): 47 links
(May 29, 2012): Movie break: The best Pink Panther film: A Shot in the Dark (1964)
[I can’t take any credit for the popularity of this entry; chalk it up to the genius of actor Peter Sellers and director Blake Edwards.]

#17 (new entry, tied with #16): 47 links
(July 27, 2012): End note 2 to July 25 blog entry: Clarification on identities of two problems: schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

#18
Signpost 1 (May 3, 2012): 46 links
Signpost: Showing what’s ahead for early May [2012]
[See my comment under #10.]

#19 (new entry, tied with #18): 46 links
(April 16, 2012): End notes to April 13 blog entry on film The Front
[I can only figure this has the rank it does because it contains statistics on that ever-favorite focus of recent-history courses, totalitarianism, and maybe it has clued off some kids to potential substantiation elsewhere for their term papers. Who knows.]