Three Sisters

Feeling bored? Feeling insufficiently stressed? Need to have a minor mental breakdown? Then here’s the number for you: (787) 521-3434.

“I’m going to go off and bother Marc,” called Lady over her shoulder to Jorge, and it was a good thing she did. Because Marc had stopped being a writer, a cellist, or even a person: Marc was a broken gas main waiting to encounter a match.

Which was getting closer and closer as the mechanical voice assured me repetitively

and Spanishly—su llamada puede ser monitoriada por un supervisor para asegurar la calidad de servicio. Oh, and I can know tell you what to do in the event of (yes, I hate that “in the event of,” too, but that’s what they said: en el caso de un huracán) a hurricane: unplug all your appliances. Oh, and did you know that you’re not supposed to plug in wet or water-damaged appliances? Wow—the stuff you can learn, just by calling (787) 521-3434!

And they must have thought I was a real retard, because did they think I got it on the first several hundred repetitions? Of course not, so they shot for the thousands.

So Lady comes by, and says, “oh, I see you’re busy,” and I tell her, “no, though just now I’ve learned that my call will be answered in the order in which it was received! Wow—isn’t that nice? When you think of all the random events that happen in life—the good looks, the nasty temperaments, the trifles that are social status and race—isn’t it wonderful that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Company has decided to set an example for the universe to follow? Ah, justice! Fair play! A level playing field!”

Unwisely, Lady decides to sit down.

“I see you’re trying to call the power company….”

“No,” I tell her, “this is a physiological experiment in how high my blood pressure can get before I stroke out. I’ve decided to forego Rosetta Stone and practice my Spanish oral comprehension skills free via the government of Puerto Rico. Since my writer’s block has become both chronic and acute…”

Well, today it was the power company but yesterday? It started out with emergency calls to the sisters of Mr. Fernández from one of the sister’s husband who had learned from people high in government circles; these people—with their fingers on every governmental pulse, their stethoscopes auscultating every governmental breath—these people at the pinnacle of power had breathed to Mr. Fernández’s sister’s husband that water rationing was imminent: the announcement would come in an hour.

There is and isn’t a crisis, you see, though it is true that the water in the reservoirs has been dropping precipitously for the last six months. Puerto Rico, however, has decided to join the rest of the world and have a little drought: in fact, the whole Caribbean is droughting. So starting Monday, it’s going to be, as El Nuevo Día Put it: Un Día Si, Un Día No—I’ll insult no one by translating.

So yes, the water is running low, but 60% of the water that the water utility produces? It goes into the ground, not through the pipes. The system is so old, and so broken, that we are two or three times the industry standard for loss of water.

But is there time to contemplate such pedantic details? Of course not, since instantly the question became what to do about Mr. Fernández’s  parents—the one day yes they could manage, but the one day no? Not so easy. So we’re now in pollo decapitado phase, which means that two sisters have to go to Home Depot and scurry around, battling the armies that have gathered inexplicably in the water tank area—no surprise, because everybody, it seems, is powerfully connected to those who sit at the thrones of power—and the sisters can buy nothing, absolutely nothing, without the authority of the third sister, who is at home repining or reclining or both in bed with the monga, the dreaded Puerto Rican disease that descends when even one drop of water falls upon you.

So the solution, as anybody can see, was to take phone photos of various merchandise, slug off the advances of other shoppers who wanted to purchase, not photograph, the putative merchandise, and then wait for the text message of approval.

Why, you ask, Calm and Temperate Reader, do all that? Can’t we just buy a tank, and put it in the patio? No no, because this sister is doing everything for the parents—bringing them cremita with raisins at just the right time of the morning, checking in several times a day, shopping for them and cleaning their apartment. She’s a saint—a saint who will take one look at the water tank and—if unauthorized—find and invent every possible flaw with it. Oh, and will she bring it up? More often than the pope blesses the crowd in St. Peter’s Square…..

So it was a less-than-merry day at Home Depot, since the flash mob? It was invented, patented, and perfected in Puerto Rico, and all of the people still left on the island dropped everything they were doing and went—“one clear call for me,” as the poet sang—to Home Depot! Oh, and the three cell phones of the three sisters were ringing like mad, since there were constant updates on the situation coming in, plus the usual cell / text activity. So yesterday, at Home Depot, which never tends to be anything reminiscent of a day in the country? Well, if Dante were around, he’d have to do serious revision of The Inferno….

So at last the message is received—permission to buy the tank of photo 73. This is done by joining the line that has stretched through three municipalities and has merged with a sister store twenty miles away. See? Excellent choices in payment options! And then the sister are driving home—fortunately, the line turned out to be for the store in which they had started, and photographed—to Old San Juan, and are listening to the car radio, all the better to stay abreast, which is where you want to be in developing emergencies, and that’s when it’s announced, as the sisters drive in to Old San Juan…

…that the rationing will not affect Old San Juan!

Back at the ranch, or rather, the café, we’re having an emergency powwow, since it has dawned on all of us—damn, no wonder the power company thinks I’m such an idiot—that a major component of coffee is…

Right, but that’s not a problem, since Starbucks, which used to run the café, ripped out the cisterns when it decided to unStarbuck, and those cisterns? They’re over at the other store, though one of them may have a hole that could crap things up, since Lord—who is Lady’s brother and anybody can see the sense of that!—got it into his head to drill a hole in it. Sometimes guys get up in the morning and just gotta do things like that.

So we go off and take a look at the tanks—all except Sunshine, who actually knows what to look for and who will install them, if installable they be, but who declines to do so because why? He’s wearing a very nice shirt and very white pants, which he declines to sacrifice to the cause.

So he drifts off, since drifting off is in the air, here at the Poet’s Passage. Because while I am worrying about how to flush the toilets, Lady is kissing Gallego, and telling me that he is famous: everybody at the poetry open mic had been whispering to her, “hey, is that really Gallego? Wow, too cool!”

So Lady is now off talking to Sasha, also a famous poet, and not taking care of the fact that there is no bread, since no one has bothered to look at the bread inventory, which is now zero, absolute zero. And guess what? Bread is to sandwiches as water…

So Lady beckons to me and writes in blue ink on her hand: “IHANBD.” Not familiar with that acronym? Neither was I, but I can now tell you it means: “I’m having a nervous breakdown.

Therapy time, and I appoint Montalvo with the sacred task: don’t let anyone distract Lady. Who, it turns out, is functioning on three hours of sleep and no food. So she goes off to get some food, and comes back with a sandwich, made with the absolute last bread in the café.

“I feel kinda guilty,” she said.

“Eat,” I told her.

So I tell her—focus, concentrate, do what you absolutely need to do, and then go home and take a nap. I then go home to hear the Saga of Home Depot from one of the participating sisters. At the end of which, every auditor’s shoulders had fused anatomically with their ears…

Which may be why I was stressed today because the electricity in the apartment? It’s gotta be connected, since we may be having a tropical storm and a brother of the three sisters and Mr. Fernández will becoming with his young daughter—and how will that child fare in a beach condominium as she suffers through her first tropical torment?

So I have placed a note on the apartment building’s door for the power company to call me at my cell phone, and that hasn’t worked, so when they don’t call you, what do you do? Duh—call them.

“Of course they’re not going to answer, you have to find someone who knows someone in the agency, and then talk to him—after gently reminding him of whatever favor it was that your friend had done for him.” Says Lady.  “Oh, and you could also wander the streets of the old city, looking for the truck….”

And you thought those shoulders could go no higher?

And then she says, “I do have one piece of good news,” and goes on to say…

“…the cistern is now connected, and we’ll have enough water to flush the toilets and operate the kitchen. Oh, and we’ll make café col’ao, which is coffee expressed through an old sock, which everybody loves since it reminds them of abuelita so who needs espresso?”

I can’t believe it….

“Marc, do I drive you crazy?”

“How do you do it,” I asked her, “you kiss everyone and read their poetry and drift off to paint houses when there’s no bread, or order more bread when you should be painting houses, and yet everything falls into place!”

“You haven’t answered my question…”

“Of course you drive me crazy!”

She roars with laughter and tells me, “Yeah, I drive Nico (her husband) crazy, too….”

“What’s your secret?” I ask.  Nico comes by—the two embrace and share a long kiss. Love with Frenchmen!

Hmmm—could that be it? 

              

(Note--readers will be happy to learn that shortly after I wrote this post--a month ago--the storm came, dropped enough water to cause the reservoirs to open the flood gates, causing havoc for the communities below. So all is well!)

You Always Have a Choice

(Note--I know, I know, I promised you Wisconsin, part 2. But as you'll see below, neither the spirit nor the flesh is able….)

Now then, today’s problem is what to do about Diego.

It shouldn’t be, nor should I be here worrying about it, but rather in bed, since I’m still having cold sweats, my wrists have swollen, and—worse—those little bumps old people get on the sides of the hands next to the knuckles, those sort-of-hand-bunions have developed.  So I can move my fingers to type, but any movement of the wrists? Forget it—the guys at the café are now automatically unscrewing the bottles of water for me. Feeding me may come next.

So I presented my swollen wrists to Lady at the café, and she had—she often does—the solution: she air-kissed her hand, and then waved it over both wrists, intoning all the while, “sana, sana, culito de rana! Si no se sana hoy, se samará mañana!”

I had forgotten it, but it’s one of those wonderful, salty Puerto Rican sayings: “Heal, heal, the frog’s little back hole” (this is a respectable blog….) “if you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

You gotta wonder—where does this stuff come from?

Anyway, I can tell you that the frog’s little back hole is definitely holding out for the—possibly—eternal tomorrow, so why am I here? Why aren’t I in bed, where I should be? I did, after all, spend most of the morning in bed, when it occurred to me that we have to do something about the human body.

I know, I know—I shouldn’t think this way, but I do: I am Eurocentric, clasicalmusicocentric, and cerebrocentric. So what does that mean? Well, I’m definitely in the camp of “they made my body to carry around my brain.”

Which it did, until the village whore tumbled me into her unclean lair. Oh, sure, the body occasionally grumbled a bit—there were the flus and the colds—but nothing serious. But now, with almost everything aching, I have to wonder: does it take a six-foot structure to carry around a three-pound organ?  Can’t we do some serious streamlining?

In the first place, the entire digestive system could be eliminated, since we could simply receive complete parenteral nutrition through a subclavian port every night, as we sleep. How else do they keep those guys in deep comas alive? And couldn’t we do essentially the same with the respiratory system? Surely oxygen could be supplied from external tanks—no need for lungs.

So I had had the body completely redesigned, essentially creating a creature looking like the one in the M&M ads: you know, the ones with the M&M (brain) with two little feet and two little hands. Ridiculous, you say? OK—so what would you think about if every joint in your body was being trampled by a stampede of elephants, and your brain was sizzling at 105 degrees? String theory?

At any rate, I was moderately content—in bed, wondering whether Tylenol was an urban legend (have to check Snopes.com), but at least in bed. And then, the boys came.

They’ve planned it out so that the torture will never end—and very clever they’ve been about it, I’ll say that. First, they spent a couple years with roaring generators, shouting workers, hollering bosses destructing and then reconstructing the street with dull blue bricks that resemble our famous adoquines, or iridescent blue bricks. Lovely idea, except that the bricks tend to crack if any weight heavier than a glance is put on them. Oh, and the block up the street—done before my block? Well, the bricks have separated in the middle of the street, creating a half-inch crater running down the street. As well, every time the water main breaks, the water company comes out, blasts through the bricks, fixes the problem, covers it up with the dirt/ broken-tile mixture they have piled on the sidewalk, and goes away. So now we’ll have dirt streets in twenty years, which, in fact is historically correct. Should we add horse-droppings as well?

Anyway, here’s how they do it: they do one block except for the two corners. Doing that block will take a year, and will (for writers) drive you to a nearby café or (for businesses) spell a slow and lingering death. After they’ve decimated the economy and the nerves, they go away for a few months, until you’ve recovered! Hey, it wasn’t that bad, was it? And what does a generator sound like, again?

Whooom! They’re back, doing one of the corners, and that, perhaps due to the unusual geometry of a corner (you know—all those angles…) will take them at least 6 to 9 months. You are, in short, experiencing the big bang—riding it like a surfer from the moment of explosion through all time and place: there is nothing but noise.

You kiss your husband goodbye; he leaves for work; all is tranquil. He turns the corner and BAM! The men, the generators, the shouting are there! They disappear one second before he returns—the street is shimmering with silence!

“It’s indescribable,” you tell him.

Lifted eyebrows!   

So here I am, in the café, with my wrists the size of Schwarzenegger’s thighs, and Lady comes by, and decides to do an immediate craziectomy, since my eyebrow are sprouting those awful, long, and very protruderant (all right, protruding? Sticking out?) single hairs that the ancients get. So she does that, and drops the news that Diego—remember him?—hasn’t been in school since school started, or didn’t start, three weeks ago.

Diego is the son of the sister of the manager of the sister shop next t the café, which means that he is entitled to hang out with his two cousins—the manager’s children—in the back of the store. So they’re there, along with the manager’s sister—who was rushed to the ER this morning to get emergency IV fluids for a condition-which-will-not-be-described. So mother is collapsed in exhaustion on one of the sofas of the sala poética, the three children are collapsed on sofas or chairs, the pregnant-with-twins (to be named Marc and Lady, of course) girlfriend of one of the workers is there (also conked out), and the homeless lady is snoozing in the corner. Did it look like an infirmary, or had the sala poética become a gas chamber?

“So he goes to school every day, and they tell him, ‘sorry, there’s still no teacher today!’ So then he comes here, and plays video games all day. Can you believe that! Well, I put a stop to that! I gave him the complete short stories of García Márquez to read by the end of the week!”

I tell Lady—the child is nine or ten. And García Márquez is sort of like dope: you should have a bit of a grasp on reality before you start messing with it. Is this wise?

“Well, you always have a choice,” says Lady.

“Well, you always have a choice,” says Marc.

“Well, you always have a choice,” says the complete stranger passing us.

“Isn’t it wonderful that that man knew: you always have a choice?” I ask Lady.

“Of course, that why he put it on his tee shirt….”

I get that—if the universe wants to bring us the message, via a tourist’s tee shirt, that we always have a choice, well, we should listen.

But shouldn’t Diego have a teacher?

A Pit of Iniquity in Wisconsin

One of the things about being professionally-concerned-about-nothing-much—and writing about it—is that you wake up in the morning and worry: what have the bastards been up to today? What have I missed? What if, while worrying about John Dehlin and his possible excommunication from the Mormon Church (his “stake president,” by the way, appears still to be prayerfully contemplating the issue, and has been since late June) the Catholic Church exonerates Jozef Wesolowski, the Polish Apostolic Envoy to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, who greatly aided youth unemployment—especially of light-skinned, just-pubescent males—in ways that were both uninventive and illegal? And will they ever get the fuel rods off the roof of Fukushima reactor four?

So today’s absolutely great news is that Google—never being evil—will now keep track of your bastards for you! (Forget your friends—that’s why you do Facebook…) It’s called Google Alerts, it keeps track of your bête noires, and then emails you on their shenanigans. Here’s the link .  Through this service, by the way, I can now tell you that Wesolowski got defrocked, and has until mid-October or something to appeal the ruling.

So now I can add Gogebic Taconite—which very worrisomely the computer finds no need to red-squiggle, or have I written about them before?—if not the Wisconsin Club for Growth, if not R. J. Johnson, and certainly “governor” Scott Walker. Then, of course, I could add a guy named Bill Williams (sounds like an alias to me, but apparently it’s real….) Why so many people / organizations? Because in order to flout what had been a famously open and honest system of government, the junta of Republican reactionaries now controlling the state of Wisconsin requires smoke screens of Mount St. Helen proportions.

Backstory: there is in Upper Wisconsin a water and river system called the Bad River Watershed. Here’s Wikipedia’s dispassionate description:

The Bad River is a river flowing to Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin in the United States. It flows for 119.6 kilometres (74.3 mi)[3] in Ashland County, draining an area of 1,061 square miles (2,750 km²) in portions of Ashland, Bayfield and Iron counties. The Bad River sloughs were designated a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance on February 2, 2012.

Lacking imagination? Check out the photo below, which I lifted from a New York Times article entitled “The Fight for Wisconsin’s Soul,” by Dan Kaufman:

   

Beautiful, hunh? But the genteel readers of this blog will be astonished to learn that some folk are less moved by the sight of clear waters and golden foliage—what matters to them is the very verdant green of the US buck. Oh, and consider the fact that the watershed runs through something called Iron County (emphasis mine). Here, drawn from a mining company’s web site, is an example what some people have planned for the Bad River Watershed:

Think I’m exaggerating? Consider the following quote from The New York Times:

…after the recent passage of a bill that would allow for the construction of what could be the world’s largest open-pit iron ore mine…the $1.5 billion mine would initially be close to four miles long, up to a half-mile wide and nearly 1,000 feet deep, but it could be extended as long as 21 miles.

21 miles? The average adult walks about three to four miles per hour. So leave your home tomorrow, Dear Reader of Unknown Location, at 8 AM. Walk in as much of a straight line as you can until 4 PM (I’m giving you an hour for lunch). That’s what 21 miles is.

Oh, and 1,000 feet deep? OK, get a night’s sleep, and then run out and find a high-rise apartment building. Step into the elevator and punch the 100^th floor. That—inversely—is how deep this pit will be.

  

What effect would all of this have on the environment? Predictably, it depends on whom you ask. The Times cites Tom Fitz—a professor at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin—as saying that one of the samples contains “a highly carcinogenic asbestos-form mineral.” Did it? Well, a blog post entitled “Tom Fitz—Douchebag of the Week” unsurprisingly debunks the notion that there was the “asbestos-form material,” and states that the University of Minnesota at Duluth had found no such thing. Going to a bit more nuanced site, I found this statement:

Bryan Bandli of the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Scanned Electron Microscopy Laboratory said he was asked by Fitz to review a sample of what he found in the Penokee Hills. After studying the sample at the laboratory, Bandli says the rock sample is not grunerite, and he’s not quite sure what it is.

Why doesn’t this inspire confidence?

And why, since the University of Wisconsin-Madison has the ninth-ranked department of geology, hasn’t someone run down some samples to Madison?

Well, it turns out that someone has—and that’s the problem. Here’s the Macvler Institute, which calls itself “The Free Market Voice for Wisconsin” so beware:

Mining supporters question its authenticity because a prominent liberal protester, Jason Huberty, was part of the sample's chain of custody.

The sample was supposedly collected by Phil Fauble, a DNR geologist, during a site visit on May 14th. He took it to the Wisconsin Geological Survey, where Huberty works as a geologist. Huberty then took the sample to the University of Wisconsin Geology Department, where it was found to contain asbestos.

Does Huberty possess the amazing power of breathing asbestos into stone?

Moving aside from the question of asbestos, The New York Times also sites another professor, Marcia Bjornerud from Lawrence University:

Before the passage of the bill, Marcia Bjornerud, a geology professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., testified before the legislature that samples she had taken from the mine site revealed the presence of sulfides both in the target iron formation and in the overlying rock that would have to be removed to get to the iron-bearing rocks. (When exposed to air and water, sulfides oxidize and turn water acidic, which can be devastating to rivers and streams, along with their fish populations.) Sulfide minerals, Professor Bjornerud said, would be an unavoidable byproduct of the iron mining. But the bill does not mandate a process for preventing the harm from the sulfide minerals that mining would unleash.

A cursory glance of two pages of Google under the search “Marcia Bjornerud Sulfides Bad River,” turned up—that I could see—no challenges to her assertions.

So let’s assume—and you know I think this is crazy—that you can dig a 21 mile pit 1000 feet deep in a watershed that feeds Lake Superior and have absolutely no ecological implications, why would you want to? The obvious answer is jobs, and job creation, you do remember, was what Walker’s campaign was all about.   

So how many jobs are we talking about? Well look, guys, if we can’t agree on what a rock sample has or doesn’t have, is it likely that anyone will agree on the putative number of jobs created? But here, from the Sentinel Journal online is one estimate:

Backers are drawn to the economic potential of the mine, which is projected to employ 700 people and spur thousands of jobs in construction and spinoff employment.

 Ii is worth considering that the Bad River falls on what are “ceded lands,” and from whom were they ceded? Right, the sovereign nations who for generations have fished and harvested wild rice there. And here—once again!—from The New York Times….

In the Chippewa tradition, a decision is made based on how it will affect people seven generations forward. By contrast, the company’s optimistic estimate for the life span of the first phase of the mine is 35 years.  

In fact, the Times article I have been quoting was one of two, and I had read it when it came out in late March. And the second article? It was published last Sunday, and was titled “How to Buy a Mine in Wisconsin:” you know what I had to do….

The first of which was to ponder whether the Times was deliberately insulting the intelligence of its readers by asking—as did the subtitle—“Did Gov. Scott Walker Violate Campaign Laws?” Guys—did it snow in Wisconsin last winter?

But here, dear Readers, both words and my body—still plagued with a mosquito-borne virus—fail me. Stay tuned until tomorrow for an interesting look at what big money can do in Wisconsin….

 

Banish the Desks, Bring on the Beds!

It was when I got to bed—for the second time—yesterday afternoon that it hit me: I completely, completely, screwed up.

What I had been skating around, in my post about Robert Louis Stevenson and Florence Nightingale, is nothing more than a completely new, and thoroughly revolutionary concept in business management!

It’s an experience everyone should have—for a few years—working in a major corporation, because it will entirely shred any belief you might cling to about the efficiency or productivity of our current business models.

An example?

Some years ago, the entire Human Resources department—some forty people—was taken off to what was proudly championed as an adult preschool. There were cushions, people sat on the floor, employees meandered about and got sugared snacks, crayons were provided as well as large sheets of paper, to be followed with post-it notes that were pasted on the brightly-colored walls. People were milling about, rearranging the notes, laughing, chatting. And what was the point of it?

I have no idea….

Nor, I’m sure, do any of the people involved. We knew at the time; it made—depending how elastic your credulity was—sense at the time. A plan was generated, meetings were held, committees were formed, reports were generated, progress was measured and observed, goals were met. Finally, at the end of the year, the department “morale” was measured, and guess what? It was little changed from the previous year, and all of the eternal complaints that everybody had about the department—those complaints that were so grave they could never be spoken, only broached anonymously via the survey?

Still there!

There is, in short, an unbelievable level of silliness in corporate America. Consider, for example, another “retreat”—which it was, from sanity—in which a blindfolded woman stood on a platform, behind which her colleagues stood, their arms outstretched, ready to catch her. The coach, however, was urging her: dig deep, feel the fear of rejection, of not being supported, of the fall, of the crash onto the concrete and the splattered flesh and the splintered bones! In the meantime, her colleagues were shouting messages of support.

“We’ll always be there for you, María!”

“We’ve got your back, María!”

“We love you, María!”

María was an out-and-out bitch whom nobody could stand, except for the three members of her micro-division, all of whom formed a sort of cell of nastiness.

Nor was it limited to Human Resources, though we seemed to do this inanity with more panache. There was the Pizza Panic—which started when the Mexican CEO of the company (whose stature was equal to the temperament of Napoleon). This man, called Pancho, had ventured into a Sam’s Club, sampled the pizza, and disliked the sauce.

“Why are we always trying to imitate Costco?” I had asked a group of managers a few weeks previously. “Just because Costco has great pizza, does that mean we have to slavishly copy them? Aren’t we the leader—at least in Puerto Rico—of the industry?”

But no, we had to have pizza, and now it was five PM—rush hour—and Pancho was calling William, the head of the Sam’s division. I was chatting with William when the call arrived. William, of course, had to drop everything to go see about the pizza. First, however, he had to summon the head of the food division, and marshal him to action as well.

‘How far down will it go,’ I wondered, and stepped into the office of the Deli division, who was on the phone saying, “Oh my God, I’ll be there right away!” And so I went from office to office, as the alarm and panic was sounded. Then I head for the door, and waited.

Remember Wilma and Betty shouting, “CHARGE!?”

Also remember—it was now 5:10, which meant that the five miles to the club would now take an hour. During which Pancho was fuming in the club, finding new atrocities, peppering his staff with calls. Taken in total, there must have been a payroll of well over five hundred dollars an hour stalled between the Home Office and the club.

The average manager? He or she is completely harassed by emails, calls, text messages, meetings announced or improvised, reports that have to be done, evaluations that have to be performed…and guess what? At the end of the day, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, because the twenty-year kid that you’re paying 7.60$ an hour to make the pizza? He could give a flying phooey about it….

Now then—consider Miss Nightingale, as I often do. She was sick, sick, deathly sick—so sick was she that it was impossible, utterly impossible to see anybody. Did no one understand that? Was she always to be hectored, to be surrounded by petty people as fruit flies swarm a rotten orange!? It was impossible, utterly impossible for her to do anything—she had to have complete silence and seclusion, since she was busy just at the moment finishing up her 830-page report for Queen Victoria, and pioneering the use of medical statistics!  Couldn’t they see that? Good Lord, and didn’t they realize that soldiers in peacetime die at twice the rate of civilians in the general population! Good God, and these were soldiers, presumably young fit men! Something had to be done, and at once, and she was a lone, frail woman—utterly exhausted, but struggling, struggling to finish her reports, and will someone please, PLEASE, put hay on the streets? The clatter of the hooves is making it completely impossible to work!

Enter the Invalidism Style of Management!

Everybody, absolutely everybody must be sick, pale, ailing, clenching onto life even as the jaws of death gape wider and wider—an asp of Homeric proportions. No cell phones can possibly tolerated, a meeting would be quite out of the question, and email? Can’t you see that whatever spare energy—piffling as it is—has to given to the question of how to increase the efficiency of solar panels so that even in foggy London everybody will be energy-sufficient!? Must I always be hectored?

Tremendous idea, if I do say so myself….