Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

I figure Aug. 12 is as good a day as any to declare football season to be in effect. And in that spirit, I present a fine example of the school spirit in Athens, GA.

From The Day Jobs

[editor"s note: For those of you who don"t already know who the hell Cap"n Ken is or what the hell he does for a living, putting together where he is this week and the fact that he saw The Dan Band Monday night may help you compile some info. If you"re somewhat smart ...]

Those of you who are fans of the movie Old School may know about The Dan Band. They were the wedding band playing a very inappropriate version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and later a rendition of Kenny Rogers” “Lady”.

And, it seems, “Dan” has decided he should try to parlay his movie success into a career as a novelty live act.

When I saw Old School, I was left wishing they”d included the entire Total Eclipse performance in the movie. And after seeing The Dan Band in person, I was left wishing Old School had included the entire Total Eclipse performance in the movie.

Simply put, The Dan Band is like the world”s most honed and prepared karaoke act. Stupid renditions of “Mickey”, “Nasty Boys”, etc., made me think that if I got TYB and TCL together and worked out a karaoke act, we could pull in some decent change as a value-add to local bar karaoke nights. Yes, it was that bad. And pathetic.

So pathetic, in fact, that I stuck around for only about 45 minutes despite free-flowing Jack Daniel”s (which bartenders here think is “bourbon”).

Greetings from San Jose.

Imagine yourself, for a moment, as an automotive engineer. If you were tasked with figuring out where to put the switches to open and close the car”s windows, where might you put them?

See if you can think of ten places you would suggest. Please do not consider whether the potential driver of the vehicle might have just gotten off of an airplane at 2 a.m. his time and would be trying to figure out how to roll up the driver”s window before hitting a freeway when it”s 50 degrees outside. Because, obviously, whoever designed the ones in my rental surely didn”t.

The fact that all the passengers and crew of that Air France plane survived their plane skidding off the runway is not a “miracle”.

No, this isn”t an anti-Jesus rant. This is an anti-media rant. Or, more specifically, an anti-CNN rant.

That network is obsessed with the Air France story, calling it a “miracle flight” and all this nonsense because nobody died.

But here”s the deal: In the grand scheme of things, what happened to the passengers wasn”t all that bad. The runway was really wet, the jet couldn”t stop and it slid off into the woods. Everybody got off the plane (this is where flight attendants earn their keep) and then it “burst into flames”.

It”s that visual - the big plane on fire - that has the media all excited. All those people “escaping the inferno” and all that crap. Nevermind that any fire that was going on while people were still onboard was (obviously) not bad enough to kill anybody.

I didn”t watch any CNN last night because of their obsession with this supposed “miracle”, and I only caught a glimpse of American Morning today [editor"s note: The Cap"n now watches Squawk Box exclusively in the mornings], but they still had their “miracle” graphic up and grabbed interviews with any passenger who would talk to them.

It”s the worst kind of media sensationalism. CNN is trying to make this a bigger story than it is because with video of the flaming plane it looked like a big deal. If there had been no fire after people got off, there would be little or no story.

Want proof? Fine.

Four days ago, an Air India 747 with 333 passengers onboard slid off a rain-soaked runway in Mumbai, India. All the passengers got off safely, and there was no fire.

I did a simple search on CNN.com for Mumbai and got a few Reuters stories about the torrential rains in India, but not a damn word about this incident with the 747.

Of course, the Toronto story is homepage material for CNN.com, and running a search on Toronto shows five stories (three written by CNN) less than 24 hours after the incident.

Now, I know stories about brown people don”t play as well as stories about white people that - except for the accents and b.o. - seem a lot like Americans, but CNN plays itself up as the “international” news organization, and that Air India flight was destined for Chicago, so you have to figure some non-brown people were onboard.

This all smells to me like a hail-Mary play for CNN, desperately trying to create “news” to seem important. I”m sure this kind of thing was going on across the TV news spectrum, but I can”t imagine anything more blatant than CNN”s pimping.

OK, I”m not going to put down on the notion of public schools offering gym classes online. If the point is to get kids working out, it”s probably better to let them do it on their own and make sure their parents vouch for them having sweated.

I would like, however, to bring up some potential pitfalls based upon my own experiences in high-school gym:

1) It”ll be harder to motivate the weak little skinny kid when you can”t force the entire class to repeat the sit-up routine when he fails to complete 10 of them.

2) Kids will have to develop another way to learn how to cope with public b.o. than enduring a 3rd-period gym class in Louisiana - in May.

3) How will tomorrow”s children ever learn how to pole vault?

4) Kids will have to find other ways to release frustrations toward annoying classmates when they can no longer simply aim for their heads during soccer.

5) Many rainy-day discoveries - such as the fact that relatively small classmates will, in fact, fit into the big clothes dryer in the wrestling room - may go unfound.

6) If driver”s ed is no longer taught by the baseball coach in lieu of six weeks of gym class, students may learn more about driving than about proper baseball-field turf maintenance.

Those of you with exposure to the Internet industry are no doubt familiar with the Herman Miller Aeron Chair. Maybe not so much for those of you working in academia or the home mortgage game.

The Aeron was the ultimate dotcom staffer status symbol. Any company worth its IPO price had them at every desk. And after the bust, flameout fire-sales were a great opportunity for folks to pick up the ultra-comfy Aeron at a deep discount.

Back at TWMBIC, of course, they had crappy chairs from Office Depot or somewhere. But at my current place, we”ve got Aerons, which I think may have been acquired during a flameout fire-sale.

And now that the company is paring down some of its operations - far from The Capn”s world, thankfully - some of our Aerons got put up for sale to employees on the cheap. I figured this was a good chance to upgrade the home office from the rock-hard, school-teacher-style wooden desk chair.

So I put in for one. But I was surprised with the question I got back - “What size do you want?”

Size? I had no idea there were different sizes. But there are. After getting no information about sizes - except that there are three - at the Herman Miller site, I turned to the answer-all Wikipedia to figure things out.

The Aeron code, I found out, is revealed in the form of little raised bumps behind the upper lip of the chair”s backside. One bump is the smallest - size “A” - two is “B” and three is the big-boy “C” size.

It was then that I realized my office chair is a “B”, which hadn”t bothered me until I learned of the existence of a larger chair. I ordered me up a “C” for home use, and discovered the difference.

Since that time, I”ve been cruising empty cubes feeling up the Aerons. You”ll all be happy to know The Cap”n found a “C” at an empty desk this morning and made the swap-out.

You, of course, can get your own Aeron, but they don”t come cheap.