Punctuality

If you work in food service, especially fast food, you are probably what they call unskilled labor. This means that, after an hour of training, an orangutan could do your job as well as or better than you. Since you can be replaced by any warm body of vaguely anthpropoid configuration, the most importatn thing you can offer an employer is work ethic. One aspect of work ethic that seems to get overlooked is punctuality.

If you are scheduled, show up. Show up on time. On time is at least five minutes early. That's all there is to it. If you slide through the door about a minute late, you are a lazy communist who deserves to be fired.

Lists

Don't ask me why, but I make lists. It doesn't really matter of what. My latest one is characters in superhero comic books with a costumed identity that involves the word Doctor, Captain, or Baron.



Doctors
Dr. Doom (Marvel Villain)
Dr. Strange (Marvel Hero)
Dr. Octopus (Marvel Villain)
Dr. Spectrum (Marvel Hero)
Dr. Druid (Marvel Hero)
Dr. Fate (DC Hero)
Dr. Occult (DC Hero)
Dr. Mist (DC Hero)
Dr. Midnight (DC Hero)
Dr. Thirteen (DC Hero)
Dr. Light (DC Hero)
Dr. Destiny (DC Villain)
Dr. Light (DC Villain)
Dr. Diehard (DC Villain)
Dr. Stratos (DC Villain)
Dr. Sivana (Fawcett/ DC Villain)
Dr. Smashi (Fawcett/ DC Villain)
Dr. Arcane (DC Villain)
Dr. Solar, Man Of The Atom (Gold Key/ Valiant/ Acclaim Hero)
Dr. Eclipse (Valiant/ Acclaim Villain)
Dr. Mirage (Valiant/ Acclaim Hero)
Dr. Strangefate (Amalgym Hero)
Dr. Gade, the Invisible Man (Defunct Golden Age Timely Hero)
Dr. Mystic (Defunct Golden Age Hero)
Doc Noble (Image Hero)
Doc Samson (Marvel Hero)


Dr. Arcane and Dr. Thirteen are both kind of cheats to pad out the list. Dr. Thirteen, the ghost-breaker, is not really a superhero. He was the protagonist of horror book where he went around disproving supposed hauntings. He is legitimately an in-continuity part of the DC Universe of superheros and supervillains, though, having appeared in the original Books of Magic miniseries.

Dr. Arcane is the name used for the Swamp Thing's long-time foe Anton Arcane, a doctor, in the children's cartoon series of Swamp Thing that aired in the 1990s. In the comics, he is mostly referred to as simply Anton Arcane.

Please note that although Robert Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Hank Pym (Ant Man/ Giant Man/ Goliath/ Yellowjacket), and Kurt Connors (The Lizard) have at least one PHD, they are inelligeble because their super-identity does not include the word doctor.




Captains
Captain Marvel (Marvel Hero)
Captain Marvel (Marvel Hero)
Captain America (Marvel Hero)
Captain Britain (Marvel Hero)
Captain Marvel (Fawcett/ DC Hero)
Captain Mary Marvel (Fawcett/ DC Hero)
Captain Marvel Jr. (Fawcett/ DC Hero)
Captain Atom (DC Hero)
Captain Comet (DC Hero)
Captain Speed (DC Hero)
Captain Action (DC Hero)
Captain Action Jr. (DC Hero)
Captain Cold (DC Villain)
Captain Boomerang (DC Villain)
Captain Nazi (Fawcett/ DC Villain)
Captain Truth (Defunct Golden Age Hero)
Captain Combat (Defunct Golden Age Hero)
Captain Fearless (Defunct Golden Age Hero)
Captain Planet (Cartoon Hero)



Barons
Baron Blood (Marvel Villain)
Baron Strucker (Marvel Villain)
Baron Zemo (Marvel Villain)
Baron Winters (DC Hero)
Baron Sunday (DC Villain)

A Disturbing Thought

I work at a fast food place. We serve fake mexican food. Burritos, tacos, etc.

The most common filling for our tacos is ground beef. The ground beef comes to us in plastic bags that are inside cardboard boxes. The outside of those cardboard boxes contains an ingredients list.

Think of it an ingredients list for ground beef taco meat. One of the ingredients is carmel color. Our groundbeef needs help to look like ground beef ought to look like. Tell me that's not a little disturbing.

Another food service rant

Another great truth of life hit me recently. The reason service sucks in the food service industry is because the people working in the food service industry are resentful. What are they resentful of? Being treated as a gopher by anyone who happens to be nearby.

It starts small enough. Somebody requests something that is small and perfectly reasonable on its own. After a while though, there get to be a few too many of these perfectly reasonable requests and the next becomes unreasonable from the food service worker's perspective.

There's an easy way to combat it. Never ask for a favor from anyone working in food service whether you're a customer or a co-worker.

Another Political Rant

I realized something today. I dislike unfairness, injustice, inequality, and inequity. I'm also not a big fan of dishonesty. This may be why I find concepts like anarchism and socialism interesting. They are intended to be a means of making things fair for everyone.


The Democratic Republic with a Capitalist economy is supposed to be the free-est, fairest, best system possible. Yet, unfairness persists. Take the United States of America... please! (rimshot sound effect)


The United States of America is supposed to be founded on the premise that all humanity is created equal, even though it took about a hundred years before the government recognized the created equal status of non-whites and females. Yet certain people within the United states are not equal to others.


Let us assume you have an annoying neighbor. You or I coudln't order a tactical nuclear strike on this annoying neighbor. However, the President of the United States of America, if he found Canada to be an annoynace, could order a tactical nuclear strike against Canada. This is an inequity.


I have never been treated to an expensive dinner by a lobbyist. I hear it happens to congressmen all the time. For me, a fact-finding mission is a trip to the public library using the city's mass transit system, paid for out of my own pocket. For congressmen, fact-finding missions are essentially vacations to five-star resorts on tropical islands, and it's paid for by lobbyists. This is an inequity.


Yeah, I know, we all get a vote to decide who is going to be treated to these privileges. That's a nice idea, but an even nicer idea would be to give them to all of us.

The Anomalist

Okay, the other day I went to the friendly, but not exactly in the neighborhood, used bookstore. Among other things, I found and purchased the first issue of a publication titled The Anomalist. It says it's the summer 1994 issue, and I have no idea if any others have been published or if it's still a going concern. I'm still working my way through it, but the first article that I read was Martin Kottmeyer's "The First Extraordinary Claim", a sort of debunking of certain myths surrounding the round Earth hypothesis.

The short version is, yes the earliest round-Earthers were the ancient Greeks, particularly the Pythagoreans, but the round Earth hypothesis was advanced more from poetic, aesthetic, mystical, and religious reasons than from any scientific observational data. In fact, Democritus, one of the Earliest scientific thinkers in the modern sense, was a flat-Earther when the round Earth hypothesis began to circulate.

The next article to catch my attention was "The Perils of Erasing Astrology From the Past" by Ingo Swann. It's partly a defense of astrology and partly simply points out that up until the middle Renaisance there was no practical difference between astrology and scientific astronomy. When those ancient Greeks, we so admire for getting the ball rolling on the science thing, looked to the skies, their main interest was in predicting things here on Earth.
So basically, this looks like fun reading, and I might have to start scouring ebay for more back issues.