the mask of the orange clusterf*ck

i am not far from washington dc, where there are as yet (per lancet/johns hopkins CSSE tracker at 12:13 am) no reported cases. a migraineur whose triggers include breathing fragrances, i have routinely worn a surgical mask (bought in a box from walgreens long before novel coronavirus was a thing) while on public transport or in the workplace, for some years. until recently this has usually caused people to recoil from me, often securing me a seat alone on the train; occasionally another person wearing such a mask can be seen in the same train car. no one ever initiates conversation with me. until last week, when the number of other masked persons started ticking up, and people began approaching me in the office or the street to ask where i got it. on thursday some among management asked me who the manufacturer is, but it is not clear from product info online or packaging (made in taiwan, though). when i provided some market reporting on mask manufacturers, it turned out that those management parties were trying to figure out whose stock to buy, although a few among them were concerned enough to accept masks from the supply i carry with me when i offered (first one's free). on saturday, president horrorshow mentioned encouraging 3M (among top five reported manufacturers) to make a greater supply available during the press conference (where an inordinate amount of time was spent talking about afghanistan).

today nobody else on the train was wearing one. several coworkers -- including identified sources of overweening workplace fragrance -- helpfully told me that the attorney general said i shouldn't be wearing a mask. i think they meant surgeon general, but, this misministration being what it is, attorney general is just as likely. i said "it's not for coronavirus but to mitigate fragrance exposure." (it is information i do not generally share unsolicited with my coworkers because we're a pathalogically-hostile and inconsiderate group of children in adult bodies, as a class.) "no," one replied, "it is for coronavirus." "this mask," i insisted, "i wear so that breathing fragrances doesn't make me sick and unable to work." we all laughed (an attentive interlocutor can see my eyes crinkle when i smile, i'm told): pronouns are imprecise. i figure next time i'll just start coughing rather than try to explain myself. i too have had a runny nose and headache for some weeks. no fever though. i wash my hands frequently, and try not to touch much more than i have to. if nothing else, i figure the mask decreases the likelihood that i'll be the vector by which someone else catches my cold.

the messaging in the u.s. has been abysmal; it is worse with the president involved. i can take an expert epidemiologist explaining that the elderly and immune-compromised are at greatest risk because that is true and a refrain we hear in the context of the flu every year. but not when he's standing next to president horrorshow who's crowing about how everything's okay and our response has been unprecedentedly perfect: it's not ok for those elderly, infirm and immune-compromised; that they may not recover is no goddamn comfort nor an index of everything being fine. it is not okay for their loved ones and communities. stop smiling.

last week, when centers for disease control stated we should prepare for community transmission, i accosted several representatives of the management: "the cdc encourages me, in preparation for community transmission, to ask you about telework opportunities." those management representatives looked thoughtful and replied, "hmm," (before inquiring where i got the mask). some days later an email was received encouraging us to, out of consideration for our coworkers during cold/flu season, cover our sputum-holes while coughing and sneezing, providing instructions as to how to wash our hands, and encouraging us to apply the heavily-scented sanitary wipes to our workplaces. i wrote back: please provide fragrance-free wipes. my very own canister of "fresh scent" wipes were quickly brought to me by a sympathetic staffer who had been given incomplete instructions, and promptly, abashedly, taken away when i pointed to that part of the label.

my best wishes to those closer to known infection clusters, and where no cases are reported. be well, y'all.

resistance is life

the horror

a good friend and sometime-reporter-of-suspicious-activities will be marrying soon.
he diverged from the traditional course for his bachelor party: paintball and steaks.

although i tagged the "do not add me to your promotional mailing list" checkbox on the waiver form tablet, i am nevertheless reminded that that paintball venue is having a wonderful zombie-themed costume paintball maelstrom event for halloween. i clicked "unsubscribe." i would recommend the paintball outlet. not sure there's a whole lot of regional competition. the place was well run, the scenarios diverse and fun.

in the spirit of zombie halloween horror, i have redacted identifying particulars of the members of the bachelor-party party in the creepiest sadako fashion i can short of printing glossy on photostock and having at it obsessively with an old ball-point pen before scanning it to post from the "after" photo below.



it was my first experience with paintball since that time my high-school teacher shot me in the back of the head from twenty paces a lot of years ago (where are you, teacher with photo of younger self-with-bong in your office whose name i can't remember?).

it is much more fun to face those shooting you with paintballs,
and to do it armed with a paintball gun.
it is much more fun to also shoot.

pretty much exactly what "playing guns" always should have been.
some people appear to be very serious about paintball.

apropos, sort of , of the sadako redaction, here's babymetal's head bangya!!!
although maybe gimme chocolate is more seasonally appropriate.

two(more)500ths (... yes, and MC HAMMERSTEIN) ... ( ... (...alas))

dear reader, i do not really have one thousand (formerly) blank white cards, but i have quite a few (and there must be hundreds more lovingly cached in drawers or storage units by those i've played against).  i post these in salute of the marking of another orbit of the sun achieved by that dear distant benefactor or benefactress who sent those blank white cards last month.

hey, i said "shhhhhushhhh!"

After a pleasant day at the Fort Frederick 18th Century Market Fair, up Indian Springs, Big Pool way, gawking at sutlers' wares and costumed French and Indian War reenactors, my father took me to closing night of the Silver Spring Stage production of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, directed by Kevin O'Connell. It was an excellent production marred only by the audience. I don't really want to belabor the faults of the many people around me and recount my several related bon mots, which, while clever, would not show me in any better light than all those bourgeois cretins.

But it bears noting that, in a setting where all already are agreed that making voluntary noises is disruptive and disrespectful of the performers and audience if not downright antisocially rude, and one party in that audience seems to have forgotten this or to have other priorities for a moment, those among the erstwhile silently attentive righteous who would make noises in order to correct the offender's behavior are no help at all. This, though, is standard: Someone will whisper or mutter to the person next to them, and two or three people will shush at that person.

another special welcome

A special welcome to Luca, and congratulations to concerned parties!

long term storage

my friends moved abroad for some period of years a year ago, and have just stopped renting their furnished home to friends in favor of having some local agency rent their unfurnished home to strangers, which change in status occasions their need to store their lovely furnishings. i felt guilty simultaneously about wanting the few items that i wanted, and about being unable to take more, but i am happy with those they passed into my stewardship not least for how neatly they fit my still-somewhat-fluid distribution of - and need for - furnishings.

necrology

It has been too hot to run the computer. I'm not sure it is not too hot now, though the ambient temperature in my apartment is reading down around 90 degrees F for the first time in a couple weeks. I have blown out a lot of laptops, frying them after burning out the poor little fans, running them summers in this apartment, and have been hoping to have this one a bit longer. Which is just as well, as I have been busy.

Several people have died. Expecting some of them to, and wanting to be informed of obituarial particulars without troubling the deceased's nearer bereaved, I considered subscribing to the RSS feed of the obituary section of the local newspaper, but felt a little ghoulish and did not. Until, later, when an old dear friend informed me via email (which email I forwarded) of the surprising and sudden demise of a mutual friend from school, which he, in turn, had learned from the deceased's facebook page. I did not join facebook, but I subscribed to the newspaper's obit feed, or tried. It did not work: I received about 200 death notices in the first day (and, if it seems callous and morbid to scan obituaries looking for people you know, how much worse it is to just idly scroll past one after another dismissing it at [the] glance [that reveals an unfamiliar name]!), and not another one since. Saving me, so far, the trouble of unsubscribing. And I found out later, through personal channels, that the two other people had passed.

pay to play from your dumb terminal

i wander (market-rationalized as information stored on theCloud) and wonder how they did it:

used to be, a user bought a thing and a thing was a discrete tangible item which, at the moment of the transaction, passed physically from the seller to the user and remained within the user's physical control whether idle or in use.

i am thinking of my (encoded and compressed audio recordings of musicians using musical instruments alone or with other users to perform specific sequences of sounds within the convention of) music.

used to be the listener bought an object encoding such recordings (i think one can actually still do this in some cases) and, when combined with the appropriate actuating instrument, reproducing them audibly on command, which, at the moment of the transaction, passed physically from the seller to the user and remained within the user's physical control whether idle or actuated by the appropriate instrument. (the listener bought an actuating instrument separately, which, likewise, remained in the user's physical control).

then recording and encoding and actuating technology developed, growing together according to the law of the superposition of the computer, which turns out to describe a sort of universal actuating instrument.

oh, it does not actuate the grooves in wax or magnetic signatures of a ribbon of cassette tape, although those objects -- and a great variety of their actuating instruments -- remain. it actuates a digitally encoded information object that exists as a sequence of digits abstracted within the physical structure of some object: it could be such physical object as a compact disc, but finds frequent expression as part of the physical memory structure of the same universal actuating instrument that will actuate it, when called to do so, or of another universal actuating instrument connected to that one in a network of such instruments.

ignorance is strength

Have you also seen the "Recession 101" series of propaganda in advertising space?

Perhaps you have felt comforted -- or, maybe, discomfited -- by their anonymous sponsorship, or their chillingly condescending messaging and brusque, move along, citizen tone.


Theinspirationroom.com calls the propaganda "an inspirational advertising campaign providing an optimistic take on the global financial crisis," overseen by the outdoor advertising association of america on behalf of an anonymous sponsor described as an "East Coast donor who was depressed about how the country was reacting to the economy’s tailspin" (and developed by Charchin Creative). Designer Charlie Robb is reported to have said that the sponsor, "wants to remain anonymous out of a belief that you don’t do public service for recognition."

They have irritated me and I have wanted to doodle in the margins and variously argue with the proponents on the rest of that mock page it pretends to offer me, but that illustration of a page of good, old-fashioned school paper with its grotesque, 'nuff said, simplistic, misleading and dismissive text remains hermetically sealed up in the side of the fancy new bus shelter.

So, from the roving lens who brought you McDonald's fantastically-successful Anusburger promotion, the featured photos of another critical viewer's response to the campaign, rendered in marker on paper. The home-made sign reads:

"We all have the fortitude to endure the suffering of other people." - La Rochefoucauld

- U.S. Unemployment Rate [Ave. 2011] approx 9.0%,

- Black and Latino Unemployment Rate approx 14% - 16%

(or higher; check the Labor Dep't for details)

I suppose it would be easy for one who can afford to buy up advertising space to be hopeful. Nous avons tous assez de force en nous pour supporter le malheur des autres, indeed!

You go on, unknown critic - this instance of the target demographic digs what you are doing.

on control, abstract and personal

A few interesting things:

1. New Scientist article, "Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world," provides a synopsis of Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston's forthcoming article, "The network of global corporate control," (to be published in PLoS ONE) presenting their rigorous economics-and-systems'-theory analysis of the structure of the ownership and control network existing among 43,060 incestuously-related trasnsnational corporations.

I'm reading the paper itself, but it is dense and filled with befuddling algorithms, abbreviations, tables and footnotes optimized for bound print publication but difficult to cross-reference in the hand-held .pdf app through which I'm reading, so I am not finished and unready, Dear Reader, and anyway probably wouldn't dare try, to summarize it or pick out pithy passages: Struggle with the algorithms yourself -- goggle at the figures; slog through the prose -- like I am, and make up your own mind. From New Scientist:

From . . . a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled . . . 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them[,] [t]hen . . . constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work . . . revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each . . . had ties to two or more other companies, and on average . . . were connected to 20. [A]lthough they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own . . . the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing . . . 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions.

From the study itself:

This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector . . . and many . . . are well-known global players. [T]his ranking . . . shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but . . . are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected. Finally, it should be noted that governments and natural persons are only featured further down in the list.

2. Susie Madrak's recent blog post over at "Crooks and Liars," Who Really Owns the NYPD? Turns Out It's Not Such A Rhetorical Question, highlights Pam Martens' October 10 piece in Counterpunch about whose interests the New York Metropolitan Police actually "protect and serve": Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll

[T]he Paid Detail Unit . . . allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye . . . pay[ing] an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master.

3. Pamela Meyer's recent TED talk: "How to spot a liar":

new mourning: neoretro pomo bobos boo-hoo

In a recent feature in UK Prospect magazine, Edward Docx heralds the end of postmodernism, "Postmodernism Is Dead," (as evidenced by the Victoria and Albert Museum's September 2011 - January 2012 retrospective, "Postmodernism--Style and Subversion 1970-1990") presenting, along the way, a fair overview of recent trends in art history, ruminations on the significance of certain postmodern works, a stab at an explanation of what postmodernism was all about, to suggest finally that appeals to some sort of "authenticity," or the appearance thereof, are a likely feature of whatever is to follow.

Choice verbiage:

There are two important points. First, that postmodernism is really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse. All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political. And the epistemic confrontation of postmodernism, this idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore lead to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice. And from here it is possible to see how postmodernism has helped western society understand the politics of difference and so redress the miserable injustices which we have hitherto either ignored or taken for granted as in some way acceptable. You would have to be from the depressingly religious right or an otherwise peculiarly recondite and inhuman school of thought not to believe, for example, that the politics of gender, race and sexuality have been immeasurably affected for the better by the assertion of their separate discourses. The transformation from an endemically and casually sexist, racist and homophobic society to one that legislates for and promotes equality is a resonantly good thing. No question.

The second point is deeper still. Postmodernism aimed further than merely calling for a re-evaluation of power structures: it said that we are all in our very selves nothing more than the breathing aggregate of those structures. It contends that we cannot stand apart from the demands and identities that these structures and discourses confer upon us. Adios the Enlightenment. See you later Romanticism. Instead, it holds that we move through a series of co-ordinates on various maps—class, gender, religious, sexual, ethnic, situational—and that those co-ordinates are actually our only identity. We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else. And this, in an over-simplified nutshell, is the main challenge that postmodernism brought to the great banquet of human ideas because it changed the game from one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination. I am constructed, therefore I am.

Unrelated (or, perhaps, tangentially related, depending mostly, Dear Reader, on your flexibility), two other thought-provoking writings-on-the-Internet-that-imply-more-thorough-scholarship-by-their-authors/subjects-elsewhere, which I have been meaning to remember, and track down, and post, are Loïc Wacquant's "Deadly Symbiosis" -- a beautifully-written examination of "four peculiar institutions" in an effort to comprehend "black hyperimprisonment" in the contemporary U.S. (see also "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration") -- and a Salon.com review cum interview-with-the-author-of "The History of White People," which summarizes author Nell Irvin Painter's thesis that "whiteness," as a racial identity, is merely the malleable amalgam of the social constructions of certain developing elites of European ethnicities.

your message here!

hellmark welcomes guest author, Badgun

The S&P Downgrade?

The country was a-shock, aghast, and agog this month, with the S&P “downgrade” of the US and its capability to discharge its debts – i.e., pay its creditors.

WOW! First time in history!

How could they do that??? It’s unconscionable! It’s un-American! And it’s untrue that there is any probability that the U.S. can’t honor (pay) its debts.

S&P is supposed to be looking at risk – risk of non–payment - so how could they possibly have reached the conclusion that there is any risk of non-payment of U. S. Government-owed debt? Did they make a multi-billion dollar error in their computations, as the White House and the Treasury Dept. hastily (and loudly) trumpeted?[1] There is little risk that we might ever be unable to pay our debts was the message. And that may well be (probably is, at least forseeably) true.

So! How could S&P possibly reach its conclusion?

Could it be because we told them so?

giggin'

litigation mentality blues

THINGS AS THEY ARE: LITIGATION MENTALITY BLUES AND THE CULTIVATION OF MINDFUL RESOLUTION IN A CULTURE OF CONFLICT *

* * *
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."[fn.1]
* * *

OVERTURE:

Lawyers, popularly conceived as gunslingers in the wild west of the justice system, inhabit a precarious position: Required to conform to a strict code of ethics while zealously advocating their clients’ goals within the bounds of the law, they are celebrated and rewarded particularly for victory in the ritualized battle of the courtroom. Yet there is evidence of elevated stress and distress among individual advocates, and across the profession.[2] The victory-oriented warrior role is hard to shed, yet, under the burden of increasing caseloads, courts are encouraging dispute resolution before trial through negotiation, mediation and arbitration.

In this time of crisis for lawyers and their profession,[3] two currents are working against the depressing and litigious tide—increasing use of alternative dispute resolution[4] and nascent recourse to mindfulness meditation[5] by lawyers in firms and law schools—both promising greater clarity and resolution within the profession, among people who have chosen this vocation, and among disputants who appeal to the law.

On March 8, 2002, University of Missouri – Columbia School of Law Professor Leonard Riskin presented his recent article on “The Contemplative Lawyer”[6] at a Harvard Law School symposium[7] featuring an introduction to mindfulness exercises and discussion of the promise of meditation in the legal profession. This essay will review Riskin’s thesis and briefly explore concerns with meditative practice in the legal profession highlighted by his co-panelists at the symposium.

COMPETITION AND CHAOS: A CANON IN TWO VOICES

My father, a former litigator, used to tell a joke:

A Doctor, an Engineer and a Lawyer, sipping bourbon and branch, argued over the historical primacy of their professions. The Doctor opined that medicine was the oldest, citing the surgical extraction of Adam’s rib and creation of Eve as told in Genesis. The Engineer replied, “Yet, one chapter earlier it describes the primordial act of creation as one of engineering: God formed the heavens and the earth from chaos—”

“Aha!” broke in the lawyer, triumphantly, “but who created chaos?”[8]

Stewart Levine, also a former litigator, is not joking when he attributes “the high degree of unhappiness, substance abuse, suicide and the steady stream of people leaving” legal practice to a “businesslike and bottom-line oriented” legal culture as a result of which “[b]oth lawyers and clients see winning at any cost as the goal.”[9] Meanwhile, he notes “lawyer jokes and disdain”[10] prevalent in public attitudes toward lawyers.

Yet similar themes run in both men’s words, highlighting two key aspects of the state of the profession and its constituent individual humans.

The first is the stereotypical lawyer’s drive to win “at any cost,” illustrated in the joke: The lawyer accepts his adversaries’ precedent—the authority of the Bible—for the sake of argument, yet rejects its authority in asserting not God but lawyers created chaos.

The second aspect is chaos. It is not because he blasphemes that the lawyer “wins” (although this may raise the question of the lawyer’s relation to God), but because the implicit assertion as to the source of primordial chaos is irrefutable to the pious contenders, who led with their trump, as it were, and moreover are not situated to appreciate the relation between law and chaos. And there is chaos which lawyers are uniquely situated to appreciate: Studies show law students and lawyers subject to stress at higher rates than other professionals or the balance of the population, exhibiting elevated incidence of depression, suicide, and substance abuse.[11]

Levine suspected a “fundamental flaw” in the judicial system. But on reflection “the foundational principles of the adversary system . . . came up sound.”

Lawyers . . . advocating their position and allowing themselves to be educated by looking at the situation as advocated from a different perspective. The judge or jury making decisions. The concept of reliance on precedent.[12]

The foundations are sound, and lawyers continue to “serve the people”[13] through zealous advocacy of their clients’ interests, but nevertheless, legal dispute is widely conceived as “a battle played out in an arena, a clash of modern day gladiators in which wealth buys access, might makes right, and victory is measured by the magnitude of the recovery rather than the realization of the truth.”[14]

Levine concluded so many lawyers “are unhappy . . . because we . . . have not used the tools for which we’ve always been respected: understanding cause and effect, and bringing wisdom to the facilitation of societal action.”[15] In this view, he is among a rising chorus of voices calling for a broader approach to justice than the adversarial model alone, advocating a deeper understanding of the concerns and goals of parties to, and the mechanisms of, conflict. These voices are particularly strong in the field of “alternative” dispute resolution.[16]

“We have conflict because of how deals are set up at the front end,”[17] Levine notes, “they only become cases when disputes go unresolved.” By this rationale litigation would be the “alternative” to the norm of negotiation and collaboration.[18]

talk about pedantic

Metrical Feet
lesson for a boy

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long--
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride--
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.
If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these meters to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet--
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his Father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge.

a special welcome

A special welcome to Fiona Jeanne, and concomitant congratulations to certain involved parties!

Cry1Ab contamination made them grapes sour!

from Dinesh C. Sharma, over at India Today (a little bit cut up):

Till now, [proponents of] GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut[; its] presence . . . in human blood shows that this does not happen.

Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant [and] non-pregnant women, [as well as] in fetal blood. . . .

The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology[:] The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke in Quebec. None . . . had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides. They were all consuming [a] typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes.

Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.

Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively[,] and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women. . . .

Author, Sharma, offers a pretty generic quote from two "researchers" (Aziz Aris and Samuel Leblanc) who may be authors of the described study; look out for the Aris, Leblanc, et al., in a forthcoming issue of Reproductive Toxicology.

with recommendations like these . . .

[circa 2003]

Dear [Director of Admissions] –

The following letter of recommendation, in support of Kaye Sarahson’s candidacy for admission to L'Université des Arts Culinaires, comes from an admittedly strange perspective. I have been her friend for about 12 years and also her coworker for about 2.5 of those. I will try to depict some aspects of this long relationship that I, as a writer and law student, imagine relevant to your appraisal of candidates, including her longstanding interest in and passion for cooking and feeding her friends and her ability to manage a staff striving to accomplish complex tasks in chaotic circumstances. In brief, Kaye is smart, a good manager, effective and reliable under pressure; she is also avidly and actively cultivating her knowledge, skill, repertoire and apparent talent for culinary arts. I hope you will bear with my somewhat rambling review, and thank you in advance for reading this letter and considering my friend’s application.