Spring day, wandering mind
Hidden away in a desk drawer at work are a series of Dilbert posters. Dilbert is the cog in a corporate wheel whose experiences make for hilarious cartoons by Scott Adams.
These posters are parodies of those "positive message" placards you see in so many offices and classrooms. The one I have on my bulletin board right now says "Initiative: What you demonstrate before you discover it never pays."
They don't set a good example for our bright-eyed interns, but they really put me in a good mood.
My favorite Dilbert cartoon ran last year. Catbert, the evil human resources manager/office cat, tells an employee to shred all the job applications they've received and put them in his litter box.
"Shouldn't we be matching these with our openings?" the employee asks.
"That's what we're doing," Catbert responds.
I roared with laughter, which isn't easy to do at 6:30 a.m. It's been awhile since I filled out job applications, but I'm sure I sent some to people who used them exactly the way Catbert does.
Speaking of early mornings, my hat is off to Sierra Scott, morning anchor of KSNW, Channel 3 in Wichita.
Recently they aired a news brief on a museum display that featured items recovered from the debris field of Titanic, the ocean liner that sunk in 1912.
The weather guy said he had never seen the movie. Scott said she "hated it."
Good for her. I saw the movie, loved the special effects, but thought the love story was ridiculous. I remember wishing a U-boat would show up, pump in a couple of torpedoes, and put the thing on the bottom. At least I could have left the theater an hour early.
Unfortunately, "Titanic" fans are legion, and nasty. I hope Scott's hairstylists aren't huge fans. We'll know if she turns up with a shaved head.
I understand many of the same complaints surfaced about "Pearl Harbor." I haven't seen the movie, but the word is that the special effects are spectacular and the love story annoying.
I suspect the movie suffered from comparison to "From Here to Eternity." That's a soap opera set at Pearl Harbor, but it is acclaimed as cinematic greatness. It doesn't have any computer-generated special effects. It does have Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster, and Frank Sinatra, and a host of memorable character actors.
That's the difference.
— MATT NEWHOUSE
