If the picture were true....the lions would be extinct....because if you pushed two male lions (with the hair)...onto the ark.....they wouldn't reproduce.
Not that I really care....it's just a artist rendition, and probably used in several hundred publications.
For the record, male and female lions are among the few animals on Earth.....that you can note from several hundred yards away on their sex.
I had this term thrown at me over the weekend.
So a yacht-girl is some model-gal type (perhaps not that bright) who has found a guy (usually over the age of forty), who owns a yacht. He might park it in the Bahamas, or Greece, or Italy. She goes for weeks or months at a time....to hang out on the yacht....doing everything possible to make the owner happy, and living a dream-lifestyle on the yacht.
Yacht-girls tend to have a limit....by age mid 30's...their career has to lead onto marriage or lifestyle ends.
Just an odd way to present the 'brand'. You start as the new teacher, and emphasize that the class-unit is separate from the family-unit.
So as days/weeks go by.....you use psychological tools to turn a kid away from the family....that they aren't looking out for your best interest.
Then you suggest that the family doesn't understand them.
Some of the families will realize the intent, and yank the kid out of the school. By the time that the administrator or board realizes the impact....it's too late to do much.
Somewhere in the next decade....the public school system in various states will reach a point where they don't have the numbers to keep a 1,500 kid school open, and closures will start up.
I was watching N-TV this AM, and a piece came on....getting into the value/lack of value....for team meetings.
So someone in the German business world sat down and analyzed the cost of these meetings....saying that one such meeting with an average number of a dozen members....wasted around 1,000 Euro (per hour).
For a number of years in my early life....these team meetings (in the American atmosphere) were never more than 10 minutes, Somewhere in the mid-1990s....the trend shifted, and a 45-minute meeting became the norm for at least once a week.
Toward the very end of my work career....if I counted all of the weekly meetings I had to attend....it amounted to four a week and around an hour for each. Value of these? There was always one or two little items in the mix...giving it some value....the rest were a total waste.
My wife (German in nature) whines about team meetings a good bit, and simply sees it as another Covid-spread opportunity.
I had a boss once (for a brief period) who organized his team meetings around the 'smoker's pit'. We'd gather there for the smokers to have a chance for a smoke, standing, and getting a simple 8-minute you-need-to-know-this chat. It was one of the few times that I enjoyed the office meeting business.
Will this German discovery of 1,000 Euro of man-hours bother people? I'm guessing there will be some office meetings where the issue is discussed. But it's not likely to evolve into anything to dismantle office meetings.
1. Bubble in the Sun (Knowlton). If you ever wanted to grasp 1920s capitalism running amok....this goes into great detail about the Florida land boom/bust. Very colorful....rich in history, and explains a lot over the first quarter of the century.
2. A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century (Heying, Weinstein). If it's been 20 years since you went to college...this lays out a lot of cultural development and how the Hunter-crowd died out and got replaced. I will admit....it's a book that you read 10 pages and have to put it down for a day or two....thinking about implications. Lot of science chatter.
3. Hitler's First Hundred Days (Fritzsche). Covers the election period to bring Hitler in, and how laws were modified in that early period.
4. Blue Latitudes (Horwitz). Long historical look at the Pacific region. Been out for 20 years but worth a read.
5. Last Call (Okrent). Discusses at length the American booze era before 1920, and the Prohibition 'failure'. If you knew nothing of the 1920s....this would take you along the historical side of things.
If you'd asked me in 1978 about the fragility of people....I would said that 99-percent of people were remarkably anti-fragile.
If you asked me in 2023 about the fragility of people....I'd say we are at a point where 5-to-8 percent of population are in some form of being fragile. They can't handle bad news...multi-tasking...a bad score on some test....a confrontation with their spouse or co-worker....people who oppose their political view....or the nightly news.
Your 15-year old kid might be fragile enough....that one sign of disrespect from a class-mate....might be enough to set them off....clobbering the friend in the hallway, and getting suspended from school for a week.
Your wife might be fragile enough....to be asking for medication to keep her doped-up most of the day....because she can't handle the stress of normal life.
Your boss might be holding 2-hour team meetings each day because he's awful fragile over the results and work produced.
It's to the point now where you (the non-fragile person) have to contend with the situation and try to protect the fragile person. After a while, you start to notice at least ten folks in this landscape.....all non-fragile....gathered up and acting in some way as a team for the fragile guy/gal to survive.
I would suggest....sooner or later....the teams out there, will wake up and say 'enough', dumping their fragile associate. It'll be like the zombie-movies that we often imagine....just filled with fragile people running amok and asking people to return to their sworn 'duty'.
