Rescue this word — CANTANKEROUS, as in to be difficult or irritating to deal with:
I’m cantankerous without my coffee in the morning.
Teabaggers are douchebags cantankerous when the government tries to get its hands on their Medicare.
The checkout clerks at the grocery store were understandably cantankerous during the pre-Snowpocalypse hoarding rush.
As always, try to use this word at least once in the coming week.
Thanks to various friends and hangers-on, here is a list of upcoming words to be rescued (in no particular order):
Keep your eyes peeled!
Every year around Martin Luther King, Jr Day, I pull out Selections from 199 Years of The Atlantic, which has his famous 1963 piece commonly-known as “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” (sorry, Mom, I filched this from you guys in the 1980s). The power of his argument against admonitions of patience and condemnations of law-breaking blow me away every time I read it, and I reflect with sadness on the plight of Roma in Europe, Dalits and others in India, Copts in Egypt, and indigenous and other repressed minorities in countries around the world.
I find it personally and professionally inspiring…wish I’d assigned it for my course at Elite DC University, it would’ve been appropriate.
The fourth dimension is the passage of time, and is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.
Professionally, I am selling the use of my expertise for periods of time, and managing all of the (often conflicting) demands for my time can be quite difficult. The hardest part is when the demands are vague or flexible, such that they impinge on time I have set aside for my personal life, or raise fresh business scheduling conflicts that may be irresolvable. A slightly different aspect of professional time is the long periods of time that elapse between when major proposals are submitted and when a decision is made. I was a key expert on a proposal last February for some big big BIG business in Volatile South Asian Country– which we were rumored to have won, pending some diplomatic activities – , but we just found out this week that that particular part of the assistance portfolio had been cancelled completely. Greeeaaaat, I was a little concerned about political violence in the country, but it would have been three years of very interesting and lucrative work…projects come and go, though, and I have (and will have) enough work to keep busy. A more important aspect for independent consultants is the level of advance planning that must be done. This goes beyond the standard delays between work and payment, rather it is about guestimating when opportunities are going to pop up and how to position yourself to take full advantage of them.
Personally, I am beyond 40, so that’s not the joke here. I started up on Facebook last summer after much mental resistance, but I have been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed it so far. My family moved from my hometown after I graduated from high school, and I never returned afterwards. My career changes and geographic wanderings really cut me off from any attempt to re-connect. Now, though, each week I find a new old friend, and our re-introduction conversations are couched in terms of decades: I haven’t seen him in 30 years, the rowing club I co-founded at Another Prairie University is now 25 years old, I’ve been married for 20 years, that sort of thing. People I didn’t like or didn’t like me 30 years ago, now I communicate with happily and enjoyably. Looking the other direction, some of my local friends have kids in college or heading off to college soon, and it isn’t that much longer until my own kids will be off, so I’m beginning to worry about paying for their educations.
This is an interesting point in my both my professional and personal lives, in that I’m trying to abstract away the passage of time as if it were a variable I can control, yet it is that exact passage that I cannot change and completely shapes my activities.
Here’s a quick ‘n’ easy chart for understanding Afghanistan: Counter-Insurgency Chart
The XKCD comic below captures the dynamic of consulting quite well. Many consultants are the ‘Smart Engineer’ guy, but I think a consultant that wants to do the job right should combine lessons from all three guys: don’t game the client, don’t be pedantic about technical details, and be grounded in the reality of doing something.
I periodically check the traffic stats for this blog and for my business website, just to see what’s going on. Unlike stats for my website, which give me IP addresses and pages/documents viewed, the blog doesn’t provide IP addresses, just visitor counts, links used to reach the site, links used from the site, and search terms. The search terms that are used are often amusing, strange, and potentially disturbing…recent examples:
I’m intrigued by ‘funny story about a persnickety,’ I may have to use the googles on the inter-tube to see what they may have been all about. ‘Elbow patches Heathrow‘ absolutely cracks me up, I think that might defy rational explanation. People looking for a Kahlua & cream recipe got my story about flaming Russians. I’m not sure I want to know what ‘planet 9 consultant‘ was about, I wonder if that person’s other searches were ‘area 51′ and ‘fake moon landing.’
I’m nearing the end of a business trip to So-So Capital City in Pretend Balkan Country, the first time I’ve been here. I wouldn’t mind coming back, but this wouldn’t be near the top of my list of places to visit on vacation.
So much of this is so familiar to me as a post-communist place: my language/Cyrillic skills have come in handy; the same sort of communist mentality legacy; nearly everyone smokes during nearly every minute of the day; the cuisine is tasty although the range is somewhat limited; no washclothes in hotels (seriously, bring your own for post-communist countries); and even the same styles of buildings from the late 1800s to early 1900s (Art Nouveau and Secessionist) that you can see throughout Europe from Paris to Sofia. The overlay of Ottoman Empire history is a neat twist on what I’ve seen before, though, but I’m undecided about the local-language version of the Eagles’ Hotel California that has been on heavy radio rotation.
What is new to me is the extent to which the political arrangements here are just pretend. Goodness gracious, I haven’t seen so much pretending since my daughter and her friends dressed up as Disney princesses. Ethnic differences may have been wallpapered over with the assistance of the West, but the differences have become more meaningful, if anything. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to wake up one day and hear on the news that fighting between ethnic groups had broken out, EU and NATO be damned…or to hear nothing because everyone’s OK with pretending…could go either way, really.
Generate your own academic sentences — it’s easy and fun for the whole family:
Actual conversation with my middle-school-aged son tonight:
The Boy: What’s that you’re typing on Facebook, Dad? What? Whaddya mean I’m contrarian like you — I’m not contrarian!
Me: Okaaaa-hahahahahahaha!
The Boy: I’m not contrarian! I’m NOT contrarian! I’m not contrarian!
Me: Hahahahahahah snort hahahahahaha!
The Boy: I’m NOT contrarian! I’m not contrarian!
Me: Hahahahahaha, do you even get why I’m laughing so hard that I’m crying?
The Boy: I’m not contrarian! I’m not contrarian! I’m not contrarian!
Me: Hahahahahahaha omygod I might pee in my pants hahahahahaha gifted & talented huh? hahahahahaha!
[some of you might recall my Contrarian post]
Random observations from my trip to Interesting Andean Country:
I’ve been catching a small amount of tongue-in-cheek joking from friends about how it is that I’m able to post tourist-y pictures, seeing as how I’m on a business trip to Interesting Andean Country. The answer is that I practice Guerrilla Tourism.
I have a small $40 Vivitar point/shoot camera with me on this trip, which I keep in an outer pocket of my briefcase or sometimes an interior suit coat pocket; in the past, I carried disposable cameras. Whenever I’m walking to/from a meeting and come across something interesting, SNAP! take a picture. Sometimes I’ll have a couple hours on the day I arrive somewhere, so what I do is get a tourist map, scout out a reasonable path, and then off I go: cathedral (SNAP! check), medieval castle (SNAP! check), main square with beautiful fountain (SNAP! check), mountains/river/ocean/whatever natural beauty is nearby (SNAP! check). Voy-lah, travel pics!
I’m on my way to Interesting Andean Country for a few weeks of business, and the connection through Atlanta-Hartsfield has been a mixture of the banal/expected and the strange/amusing.
Banal/expected: I deliberately scheduled a 4-hour connection, not 2-hour, because I know how this airport is. I was right, would’ve missed the one and only flight out of here today.
Strange/amusing #1: There’s a pianist playing in the food court of the intl concourse, and I think he’s a little off…first I noticed that he was playing Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ (this is ground control to Major Tom), and then it was Boomtown Rat’s ‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’ I should probably move along to my gate before it gets ugly.
Strange/amusing #2: The lady sitting next to me on the plane to Atlanta kept looking very intently at various people around the plane from her aisle-seat vantage…and would note on the back of an envelope their seat numbers under a heading of ‘People After Me,’ no joke, I wasn’t worried since my seat wasn’t listed.
Maps and visual presentation are like catnip for me, and anyone who’s had me as a teacher can attest to the mismatch between my desire to hand-draw maps and the quality of said maps.
Here are a few fun map/visualization tools and resources I’ve found in the last year:
And of course, for those of you who don’t know this site, there’s the Perry-Castañeda Map Library at the University of Texas.
Enjoy! Feel free to suggest other resources via comment.
I think I may be coming to the end of my college teaching career, and I’m remarkably neutral about this development. I enjoy teaching, and the last couple years of teaching a grad course at Elite DC University and an undergrad intern course for Prairie University have been loads o’ fun in different ways.
It was great to get back into teaching after a couple years of not teaching; the last time I taught full-time was at Prairie U, and I had two classes each with 300 of my favorite students…ugh, I often thought of such teaching as ‘info-tainment’ or ‘performance art,’ not teaching. Students who had taken my upper division seminars on foreign policy knew enough about me to discern my dislike for the large intro classes.
Lately, the consulting side of my portfolio of income-generating activities has really picked up, which means international travel for 2-3 weeks at a time. Weeks of travel impact both courses, but it is the Elite DC course that would make me turn down business, a bad trade financially and professionally. It is one thing to schedule the policy experts for my Prairie U interns and ask a program colleague to herd the student-interns around once a week for a couple weeks, it is something else entirely to cancel a few weeks of a grad course because it would be tremendously difficult to find a volunteer with enough expertise to handle the class meetings for that period of time.
In addition, part of the reason I was teaching was to keep my hand in academia, because I always thought that under the right circumstances I would take a university-based research/project management/teaching position. As the years go by, though, I’m less and less interested in anything besides research projects, but even then I want them to be my projects and I think I want to keep my external status. I should also mention that most academic positions would represent a step backwards in compensation, which is unacceptable to me at this stage of my life.
All of us have those points where we have to let go of something and head a different way. I feel like I’m at that point with college teaching.
I encourage you all to take advantage of Museum Day on Saturday, 26 September, when museums all over the US have free admission.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was teaching Intro to Political Science to 300 of my favorite students at Prairie University. We knew about both towers because we were on Central Time, but the first collapse happened during class. Of course, I discarded the lecture/topic for the day, and just held an impromptu question/answer/comment session with the students. We discussed the likely culprits, possible US reaction, the unprecedented nature of this act, and so on. One thing I was quite proud of about the students: from the very beginning, there was concern about vigilantes and violence against Muslims, seemingly from both sides of the political aisle; this was in contrast to the 1993 WTC bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. A fairly similar dynamic played out in the Intro to Comparative Politics class I taught later that day to another 300 of my favorite students.
On the next class two days later, I put up a map of Afghanistan. We discussed the strong likelihood that the US would act against the Taliban-controlled Afghan state, other possible military actions on the ground, and the regional security impact. One student said it would probably be a pretty short military effort…to which I responded that I’d bet a paycheck that someone in that class would go on to grad school, write a dissertation on Afghanistan/terrorism, and become a professor before the US role there ended. Most people laughed, they thought I was kidding.
About a year and a half ago, I was in Volatile South Asian Country as an international observer for parliamentary elections. Once we had done the observation thing and returned to Ugly Concrete Capital City, we had time for a little sightseeing (such as it was). A small group of us went to the gigantic mosque — it was beautiful, cool architecture, the grounds had multiple levels, fountains, gardens, an Islamic university, the surrounding hills looked like the ones in MASH, everything. At one point, one of my friends and I wandered into a little gift store just to look around. The proprietor and a clerk were there, and nodded to us as we entered. I wandered around looking at the floor-to-ceiling merchandise, and as I came close to the clerk he hissed/whispered, “Osama bin Laden!” I maintained my composure and didn’t react, because after all the guy was just trying to provoke me, wandered around for another minute, left the store with my friend, and then when I was out of sight started laughing my ass off. My friend’s response was, “You should’ve whispered back, ‘George W. Bush‘!”
* My homage to a classic South Park episode
It is remarkably daunting to deal with something as complex as Afghanistan within the confines of a blog…which is why some blogs have what are essentially articles and have turned into online news sources, a development that I do not have in mind at all for this blog.
Thoughts on Afghanistan:
Election: The results are not final, and they may not be for some time still. Incumbent president Hamid Karzai is in the lead with something approaching 50%, Abdullah Abdullah (a man so nice, they named him twice) has roughly 33%, with the rest split among several candidates (including Ashraf Ghani, the darling of the West, who got maybe 3%, all urban intellectuals). A candidate must get 50% in order to win, otherwise the top two vote-getters go to a run-off election to be held probably in mid-October. Counting is going very slowly for some areas, including those that were likely to support Karzai. I’ve put my name in for election observation if there is a 2nd round.
Fraud/Intimidation: There are some fairly serious allegations of fraud that the electoral complaint commission is investigating, including some that may be enough to invalidate enough of Karzai’s votes to force a run-off. The complaint commission has been sequestered while it does its investigation, and is relatively independent. What isn’t clear is what legal authority it actually has, and what effect it’s findings may have in terms of enforcement. It may be that they invalidate scores of votes that could change the election outcome, but none of the three branches of government pays any attention. There was some serious political violence during the election, but what was more meaningful was intimidation by not only the Taliban, but also by the central government in opposition strongholds, both of which acted to depress voter turnout…oh BTW, there is no reliable registry of voters, so turnout is anyone’s guess.
Conflict: The security situation is not good. Proper implementation of US counter-insurgency strategy requires many more troops than are even being debated for the future, so capable/professional Afghan troops are a necessity. The economy is beyond terrible, including in areas with limited or no conflict at the present. It remains to be seen what impact the Pakistan military’s operations against Taliban/-related elements in FATA and Waziristan will have.
So what: There is something of an ethnic dimension to be concerned about — Karzai is Pashtun, and they are concentrated in the south and all along the border with Pakistan; A2 is part Tajik, and they’re concentrated in the north along the border with the ‘Stans. There are other ethnic groups, of course. The already-weak legitimacy and capabilities of the central government will take a HUGE hit in the event that a Karzai victory is seen as fraudulent. Karzai is not the savior of Afghanistan. He is increasingly viewed as autocratic and corrupt, and his recent rapprochement with such notorius warlords as Rashid Dostum (from the north/Uzbek area) is alarming.
The Vietnam analogy is not really appropriate, nor for that matter are the British colonial and Soviet experiences. So far, there isn’t that sense in the population of occupation, in fact for many the problem is the lack of security presence by ISAF or Afghan troops; drone attacks on civilian populations are quite counter-productive, as they are in Pakistan. To the extent that ISAF troops are perceived to be occupiers and the government is perceived to be illegitimate/corrupt, then the Vietnam analogy fits a bit better. Another difference between now and those thens is the development and reconstruction work that is going on, activities that no foreign military force has ever done.
On Wednesday I will post a discussion about the recent Afghan elections and the potential for future positive developments in Afghanistan.
Rescue this word — PERSNICKETY, as in to be fussy about small details, or to be a snob:
The teacher was very persnickety about sentences that a preposition ended with – “That is something up with which I will not put!”
The oenophile was so persnickety that he only drank the finest wines from Oregon.
“I don’t mean to be persnickety,” said the accountant, “but that should be an 8 in the hundredths column of this DoD budget.”
As always, try to use this word at least once in the coming week.
For all of you parents out there whose children just went off to college, or will next year, I offer up a no-holds-barred discussion of what some of you might expect:
Frank/Brutal Response from Academics
There are a few big thing to keep in mind about college-level instruction. First, training in teaching methods/skills is not a part of graduate education, although on occasion some schools and discipline association will offer limited voluntary classes. Some people are good at teaching, others really suck — a grad student could easily be a better teacher than a world-renowned full professor or could be disaster, while one professor might really enjoy teaching and mentoring or could view classtime as an unwelcome break from research/writing. I’ve had good and bad teachers in under/grad who were not native English-speakers, BTW.* Second, academia is the last refuge of social incompetence; the overwhelming majority of people who have good sales/marketing/social skills went into professions other than academia. If you come across an instructor in college with a pleasant/stable personality, you win! Third, big-name universities, whether of the large state university variety or snooty/selective private variety, will use graduate students or adjuncts for most of the teaching, often tapping professors for niche-topic seminars or graduate courses. Caveat emptor.
* My favorite story about this from grad school was when a fellow student got complaints that he was hard to understand — he was from India, but spoke English natively and had lived in England, and I never had any problems talking with him. One student had apparently said something about learning to speak like Americans, because there were more Americans than Brits. His response was that where he came from, a lot more people spoke English the way he did than Americans, so perhaps the students should all speak his way?
In case anyone missed this, in July the Congressional Research Service released a report analyzing various recommendations for foreign assistance reform:
Foreign Aid Reform: Studies and Recommendations, 28 July 2009, Epstein/Weed
The kids go back to school in a week and a half. I can hardly wait, the reduced productivity of the summertime has been problematic, and I will have my own office in time for next year. The situation this season has been completely untenable.
There is a downside, however: other time demands will increase, and there will inevitably be scheduling conflicts because I need to synchronize separate professional and personal schedules closely. I do not control scheduling in my personal life, I long ago handed over social scheduling responsibilities to my then-girlfriend, now-wife.
There was a little incident that resulted in this surrender of authority. While the facts of the incident are still in some dispute, the outcome is not. Here’s what happened — one Saturday afternoon, a buddy called and suggested we go to a Cubs game. What a fabulous idea, I thought, we’ll just walk to Wrigley Field, maybe have an adult beverage or two, enjoy some grilled brats at a nearby restaurant at some point, and just have wonderful time. That is exactly what we did, and I returned home at 8pm or so a little worse for wear…to find my incredibly angry girlfriend, who, by the way, was incredibly angry with me. In her version of the incident, we were supposed to have had a nice dinner in her apartment with a couple of her friends. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. It was at that point that I made the smartest move of our relationship: I abdicated social scheduling responsibilities to her for the rest of my life.
Greetings from vacation in Los Angeles!
One of the blogs I have listed off on the right had a nice post about evidence-based policy and how it is a mixture of data and craft. The context is education outcomes, but it applies equally well elsewhere.
