Happy New Year

by Hergé

Where am I? #12

Here

Where am I? #11

Here

Annoying Utterances

“Thank you for calling. Your call is very important to us. All of our associates are busy serving other customers. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order received”.

Translation: “We’ve put you on indefinite hold, and won’t tell you where you are in the queue or your expected wait time. We don’t want to spend a lot of money on staff since that cuts into our profits. So you get to listen to prerecorded music with frequent repetitions of this message until you get frustrated and hang up. If you do get through, you’re going to talk to someone sitting in a call center halfway around the world who will spend the first five minutes verifying your identity. We know that we have no competition, so you’re going to have to deal with us on our terms. Sucka!” More at the New York Times

Kindness and change

. . . Rabbi Weisser, who suspected the person threatening him was Mr. Trapp, got his telephone number and started leaving messages on the answering machine. “I would say things like: ‘Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?’ And hang up,” he said. “And, ‘Larry, why do you love the Nazis so much? They’d have killed you first because you’re disabled.’ And hang up. I did it once a week.”

More at the New York Times

More from Santa Fe

The way to Santa Fe

The Line-Up

De Drie Katjes

From Bibliodyssey

Waves 2

Birds

Olivia Beach

Genetics and the Orchid Hypothesis

One morning this past May, Elizabeth Mallott, a researcher working at Suomi’s lab, arrived to start her day at the main rhesus enclosure and found a half-dozen monkeys in her parking spot. They were huddling close together, bedraggled and nervous. As Mallott got out of her car and moved closer, she saw that some had bite wounds and scratches. Most monkeys who jump the enclosure’s double electrified fences (it happens now and then) soon want to get back in. These monkeys did not. Neither did several others that Mallott found between the two fences.

After caging the escapees in an adjacent building, Mallott, now joined by Matthew Novak, another researcher who knew the colony well, entered through the double gates. The colony, numbering about 100-odd monkeys, had been together for about 30 years. Changes in its hierarchy usually came slowly and subtly. But when Novak and Mallott started looking around, they realized that something big had happened.

Autry touchscreens

These are the touchscreen kiosks I just worked on at the Autry National Center.

Model courtesy of Olivia & Associates.

Waves

Cat Coaster

Olivia, Girl Pirate

Advertising graphics from different eras