What I’m Blogging

Today is the 400th anniversary of the establishment of Jamestown Colony, the first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States of America. At first, it was a disaster. Their plan was to find gold or silver or a river route to the Pacific Ocean. But they settled in a swampland, the mosquitoes were terrible, and many people caught malaria. The colonists also had trouble growing enough food, and they failed to dig an adequate fresh-water well. There was an epidemic of dysentery and a severe food shortage. More than 400 people starved to death./p>

The colony only began to be a success when they stopped focusing on gold and began to grow tobacco. It was John Rolfe who introduced a new type of tobacco plant from the West Indies. The crop proved enormously profitable, and it inspired more investment and more colonists to join the settlement. Rolfe went on to marry the princess Pocahontas.

By 1619, Jamestown was thriving, and it was that year that the settlers formed a new kind of government with a general assembly, the members of which were elected by the citizens of the colony. It was the first-ever representative government in what became the United States. That very same year, a ship arrived in Jamestown carrying 50 African slaves, 20 of which were purchased for work in the tobacco fields. And so Jamestown became the birthplace of both democracy and slavery.

It’s the birthday of Karl Marx, born in Trier, Prussia (1818). His main theory was that the economic system was a perpetual conflict between those who controlled the capital and those who provided the labor. He believed that the conflict would never be resolved peacefully, because capitalism was too volatile.

Marx wrote about his ideas in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, but after revolution broke out in France, Italy, and Austria, Marx was forced to flee Belgium where he was living. He moved to London, where he worked on his last book, Das Kapital (1867). He slowly sank into poverty, having to avoid creditors, pawn his furniture, and fight off eviction. When one of his children died, Marx was so poor that his wife had to borrow money from a neighbor to buy a coffin. When he died in 1883, only 11 people came to his funeral.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further Marxist reading available at Amazon.com

It’s the birthday of Niccolò Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469). He grew up at an extremely unstable period of Italian history. Italy wasn’t even a country at the time, but just a collection of city-states that were constantly at war with each other. By the time he was 30, Machiavelli became the secretary to Florence’s governing council, which meant he was the most influential bureaucrat in the city.

But at the height of Machiavelli’s career, the influential Medici family took power in Florence, overthrowing the elected city council and purging the government of enemies, including Machiavelli. He lost his government position, and then the authorities arrested him and threw him in a dungeon, where he was tortured for 22 days.

Machiavelli was eventually released from prison and sentenced to house arrest. He decided that the only way to get his life back was to offer some kind of gift to the Medici family, and the thing he had to give was his knowledge of politics. So he holed up in his tiny villa just outside of Florence and set out to write a handbook, incorporating everything he knew about being an effective ruler in a dangerous and volatile world. It took him just a few months to complete his book in 1513, and that was The Prince, the book for which he is remembered today.

Machiavelli’s main point in The Prince is that an effective ruler should use whatever means possible to keep his country secure and peaceful. He wrote, “Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge.”

Despite Machiavelli’s hopes, The Prince didn’t win over the Medicis. A few years later, a new republic was established in Italy, but Machiavelli’s name had already become so associated with evil and violence that he wasn’t able to get another government job for the rest of his life. Today, the word “Machiavellian” has come to mean “marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.”

Niccolò Machiavelli said, “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further machiavellian reading available at Amazon.com

It seems like only yesterday. A moment of glory etched into my young brain via a ten inch black and white TV set. On this day in 1967, Toronto wins best-of-seven series 4-2 defeating the Montreal Canadiens and takes the Stanley Cup. [sigh]

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cubefarm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and
whiny.

SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404: Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm

Received by email. Author unknown

It’s the first of May. A time for Labour marches, Communist nostalgia, and dancing around phallic germanic poles festooned with flowers and ribbons. Those of us with a religious bent will be dusting off our Virgin Mary holy cards, while the rest of us may just listen to the Beatles Let it Be. In the United States, it’s Loyalty Day, but so far as I know, this isn’t obligatory… yet.

Whatever your pleasure, we in the northern hemisphere can all rejoice that the freaking snow is gone, and that, above all, is something to give thanks for.