Gongol.com Archives: January 2022
January 8, 2022
The President's presence at funerals
A Washington Post report makes a great deal out of President Joe Biden's insistence upon attending funerals, and both the care he puts into his eulogies and the political ramifications of his efforts to show up. But what goes unremarked in the article is this very simple point: He's an Irish Catholic. Neither "Irish" nor "Catholic" appears in the article. That's a giant omission, because it's really the whole story. The rituals and the significance of acknowledging death with one's presence remain enormously important in Ireland, and the Irish diaspora carried those things across the Atlantic and kept them alive in the United States. Everything else is just exposition.
Possibly the best business plan in history
A food truck serving nothing but $1 grilled cheese sandwiches. No upgrades. No change.
Location shots that just don't make sense
Clark Griswold may be an American icon, but there are no mountain foothills in the northwest suburbs of Chicago
How to strip erroneous line breaks from PDF-based text
One step to remove them all (after pasting into a fresh text editor). Apparently, those line breaks get saved as "^p" (at least in some editors), so a simple search-and-replace is enough to make them go away. A very helpful tip, indeed.
We often use the phrase "What's in a name?", but the question for some is actually "Where?", as in "Where shall I use this name?" and "Where does the name come from?"
Flexible work is valued at 10% of salary
It may be harder to schedule people's work when more employees choose flexible hours and locations, but it's hard to see any way to reverse course after two years of embedding work-from-home patterns into the economy
The legal resolution won't bring back Ahmaud Arbery's life, but it ought to serve as a deterrent to similarly mindless and cruel behavior
The old news/opinion divide makes news again
Washington Post: "Fox News calls [Sean] Hannity 'an opinion host' and doesn't refer to him as a journalist."
