Month: March 2008

Who wants to own WaMu?

Carl Setzer

Who wants to own WaMu?

 

A rather relevant question for me. I’ve had a WaMu account for decades, and my credit cards have become part of the WaMu family over the years through acquisition. And, as a passionate Washingtonian, I also care since they’re a local institution, at least in some semblance of the word. If nothing else, they originated here and are headquartered nearby. As they’ve gone from huge to mammoth, they’ve managed to maintain a local bank feel, at least in the branch I frequent most. Now, I’m a pretty low-demand customer. I LIKE banking online and via ATM. Heck, I hardly ever carry cash. But, when I do need to head into a branch, I’ve always felt welcome and speedily dealt with.

 

Anyway, so I have two core reasons to be concerned with the organization and structure of the Co. Certainly, I want the company to stay solvent. However, I don’t want it to become part of a megalith that’s so huge that the customers don’t even lightly blip their radar. Or, perhaps more properly stated, I don’t want to become part of Bank of America, er, part of a bank that supersized. I guess I’ll just need to wait and see what happens. If the Mu tanks, or gets absorbed into some amorphous corpoblob, I’ll need to decide how dissatisfied I am to vote with my feet. Gotta overcome that personal inertia, sad to say.

Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy (perhaps)

Carl Setzer6 Comments
I don’t know about the veracity of this, but it’s still cute.
 

Deep Thoughts

            by Jack Handy

 

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is “God is crying.” And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is “Probably because of something you did.”

Just one more thing

Carl Setzer

I always feel a need to do just one more thing. Whether it's zipping of one more email before a meeting, or trying to clean one more space before bed. It just seems that there is always one more thing to do, no matter how many things I've already done. Endless, maddening, and, actually, peace inducing, for it really speaks to the infinite, to continuity. Well, the peace comes when I accept that there will always be something undone, and that's not only fine but good.
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Immortality

Carl Setzer

One of the biggest pieces of BS I was feed as a youth was this notion of youth having an "immortality complex". Immediately noticed for what it was, I had this picture of a young guy, confronted with drugs foir the first time, saying "aw, what the heck, it's not like I can die or anything, I'm immortal". It's not an immortality complex that hampers youth, it's the inability to look into the future. More simply put, we didn't consider the longer term, we couldn't look farther than the window of action. And current research seems to add to that idea, that the adolecent mind is not, generally, capable of looking to the future.
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Neologism Du Jour

Carl Setzer2 Comments

Try this one for size: egolarity, a combination of "ego" and "singularity". This would be that person with so dense an ego that nothing can escape, nor penetrate, the event horizon. I'm thinking of the person so absorbed by their cell-phone conversation that they're oblivious to the rest of humanity that surrounds them, especially other traffic.
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Facts

Carl Setzer6 Comments

My friend Aaron put me up to this.

Here’s how you play: Once you’ve been tagged you have to write a blog with 10 weird, random, facts, habits or goals about yourself.

1. I detest rodents.

2. I spent my childhood drifting around the country. Thus, I was born in Rhode Island, though I haven’t been there since I was 3.

3. I am a graduate of the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, and trained on the same prototype as my father.

4. I started school in Chantilly, VA.

5. I lived for several years on the Subic Bay Naval base as a kid. What I remember most from there are the beaches, and the monkeys. We had a troupe of monkeys who would perch in the trees out of our backyard.

6. I hate guns. When I was in 8th grade, my best friend’s father murdered his mother then committed suicide. He (Bill, my friend Adam’s father) taught me hunter safety and made all kinds of NRA noise about how to keep your house gun-safe. Repeat: I hate guns. (This did make some trouble for me in the Navy.)

7. Before 6, I did some competitive shooting.

8. I have a certificate in information processing from the Tongue Point Job Corps Center (Astoria, OR). Astoria is one of my most favorite towns, and I love the Oregon Coast.

9. I have formally studied the following subjects (declared as majors at various institutions): music, electronics technology, mechanical engineering, computer science, business, political science, sociology, and English/creative writing. To date, I’ve completed a degree in exactly zero disciplines.

10. I realized that I was a bit different from my classmates in Junior High, when I first read Euclid and Plato, and was reading Asimov for light reading. Most of my cohort was reading Steven King.