How'd I Do?

It is the end of November and so also the end of the posting sprint.  The month was 30 days, so there should have been 30 posts.  This makes 28.  In my defense I sort of missed the starting bell.  Things here in Pittsburgh were pretty tumultuous at the end of October and somehow I just missed the fact that it had become November.  If you deduct what I missed at the top of the month I think I only missed one day out of thirty.  So 28/30, or 28/29 if you get all litigious.  All things being equal I think 27 is swell.

Of course 27 posts includes at least four "Worth a Look" posts, which arguably shouldn't count full credit.  There were at least four "Ellipses..."  Those have been a staple post on this blog going way, way back.  Maybe those should count.  I remember a long time back trying to do a whole week of Ellipses... posts and that was almost as hard as doing more conventional posts.  There was at least one day where I just posted a picture, and then there was yesterday, where the whole post was a copy & paste of an email I'd received.

The photo thing seems legit.  I think I could up my normal posting tempo if one day/week became a weekly photo dump.  I shoot a fair number of photos in the day to day course of things: "Photo Friday" might have legs.  I'm also a real fan of the "Couple of Things" post format - like the one I used on Thanksgiving.  There's almost a format bubbling up here:

Monday: Ellipses
Thursday: A Couple of Things
Friday: Photo Friday
Sunday: Worth a Look

That's sustainable without ever actually writing anything.  There should probably be at least one day a week as an open day anyway - Saturday feels right in that tempo.  Although that leaves Tuesday and Wednesday as consecutive writing days.  That feels more demanding than it needs to be.

I'm going to need all that structure.  The actual writing part has become really difficult.  Going back and looking at the content of the site shows a whole lot of political posts and that has become difficult.  In these polarized times, and in a world where anything published online can go viral at the drop of a hat the downside of being outspoken online about politics just feels too extensive.  There's still plenty of my politics on Facebook, where there's a little control of the distribution.  One of the next biggest buckets was work.  For one reason or another I am way more aware of the chance that someone at work would be rubbed the wrong way by a post on this site.  I think there's still room for some work posting, but I have to say that much of what I am grappling with these days are differences in teaching now as compared with 15 years ago and that stuff has a real "get off of my lawn" dimension to it that might not make for the best posts.

I've never really posted much about family.  I don't know why I would start putting those things here.  And I've never really blogged about health issues.  If you make a list of possible things to talk about and scratch off all the posts rooted in politics, work, family, and health the list becomes really really short.  There are no Bad Ideas could rapidly become "David Blogs About the Weather."

We wouldn't want that.

As it turns out I had a fairly long list of topics to write about at the top of the month.  Curiously out of a list of maybe 20 I think I really only used maybe 4.  I was going to write about semester reviews, tech week, weight loss, Thanksgiving, green scenic fabrication, my work web publishing; there was a long list.  Just because the sprint is over doesn't mean I can't follow through on some of those.  Guess we'll see on Tuesday.

So Now This Happened

Dear Members of the Pittsburgh Campus Community:

Today we learned that a book defaced with anti-Semitic language and symbols was discovered in Hunt Library. I am distressed and saddened by yet another act of hate in our community.

We must be clear: We condemn this evil. We reject bigotry in all its forms — it has no place in society. To members of the Jewish faith who are feeling especially vulnerable right now, please know that we are committed to providing a safe environment for our entire community and, especially in the wake of the violence at Tree of Life Synagogue, we are maintaining the highest level of vigilance.
Both CMU Police and the Division of Student Affairs are taking appropriate measures to investigate. I urge any member of this community with knowledge of this incident to please contact Detective Bernarding of the CMU Police Department at 412-268-4185 or jdz@andrew.cmu.edu.

This is an important time to reaffirm that inclusion and respect have a singular place among the values of this university. I ask all of you to join me in living out our commitment to those values and speaking out against any acts of hatred that undermine the strength and resiliency of our diverse community. 

Sincerely,
Farnam Jahanian
President
Henry L. Hillman President’s Chair
Carnegie Mellon University

Why Do We Work So Hard?

I have an idea for a grad TD thesis.  I think I would like to have someone look at the amount of physical exertion required of stage technicians.  The point would be to determine what it would take to make our workplace less physical.  Maybe the title of the thesis could be "team lift."

The foundation of the thing would be an analysis of why a workplace requiring significant physical effort could be problematic.  It would seem fairly clear that a workplace like this would be an environment that fostered more injuries, both acute injury, but also likely long term, chronic injury; perhaps ultimately shortening careers.  I also think there's likely an element of this that leads to the perpetuation of misogyny in the workplace.  Those are the issues I can think of off the top of my head, the investigation would look for more.

The next phase would be to determine some kind of standard for acceptable exertion.  The student would have to look at comparable workplaces: likely construction and manufacturing and ascertain what kind of heavy lifting is allowed in those environments.  The 70# team lift idea plays prominently here.  In addition to coming up with a standard, this research might uncover practices which would come into play later.

Once a standard is composed, the next step would be to do an "effort audit" of each fabrication phase for scenery.  The movement and processing of raw materials and of scenery in various stages of fabrication would need to be examined to identify those procedures requiring effort beyond the proposed standard.  The inquiry would also have to look at transportation, installation, strike, restocking, and disposal.  Each of those processes would have to be broken into component tasks, and the required effort for those tasks evaluated against the standard.

At this point there would be an inventory of tasks requiring excessive effort.  Once again looking to industry, for each of these tasks the student would need to propose a work around: some change to procedure or some new piece of equipment that would reduce the necessary physical effort - taking the entire procedure under the proposed threshold.  It is possible this phase could also indicate necessary changes to the physical layout of the shops, trucks, and performance spaces.

Finally, the new processes and equipment would be subject to a budget pass.  With the costs of proposed changes identified, a quantitative analysis of what it would take to get from where we are as a company to where we ought to be could be assembled.

I guess the questions isn't really "why do we work so hard?" but rather "what would it take to arrange things such that workers don't have to rely on physical strength?"  That is a really long title though.

October 27th, 2018

It's been a month, I guess I should say something.  Saturday, October 27th, 2018 there was a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, PA.  Although I have been told there aren't, it seems like there are more and more of these incidents.  This one was quite literally too close to home.

At like 10am Marisa had returned home from a trip out for groceries.  The boy was playing with my sister, who had come in to celebrate my 50th.  I was in our room watching the news when I heard what sounded like a lot of sirens out in the street.

I checked out the window and saw quite a bit of emergency traffic, as well as officers in SWAT gear.  I also saw a very harried individual walking up and down the street talking on his cell.  I eavesdropped a little bit and heard him say there was an active shooter at Tree Of Life.  That congregation is a block and a half up our street.  It is likely Marisa was arriving home just as the shooter was entering the building.

I found all the folks in our house, checking to make sure nobody was outside.  I spent the next hour or so on and off the porch trying to see anything.  I ran a very boring Facebook Live video from our porch, but there wasn't much to see.

I texted a couple of friends.  The reality of Squirrel Hill congregations is that anyone could really be at any service on any weekend.  The week before there had been a Bar Mitzvah at Tree of Life and many of our friends and their children were there.  This week that turned out to not be the case and everyone I messaged was either at home or (about to be) locked into another facility.

I got a text from work putting all of campus on lockdown and cancelling all of Homecoming which happened to be that day.  There was a flurry of group texts trying to decide what to do with a scheduled opera, scenery strike, and mainstage install.  Somewhere in the middle of that conversation campus lifted the lockdown and so the decision was made that we would lose the opera - there wasn't time to put it together again - but go on with the other calls as scheduled.  That lasted maybe 20 minutes while the students involved made it clear they were not in a place to be able to move on and in short order everything for Saturday and Sunday was cancelled.

Somewhere in there Marisa got a call from the balloon vendor saying they couldn't get to our house.  That night was supposed to be my 50th birthday party and we were now wondering whether we should go on with that or not.  In either case we would be doing it without balloons.  That seemed like a reasonable decision.  Our street was blocked well into the afternoon.

We couldn't have gotten out of our driveway if we had wanted to.  There were people coming to the party from out of town and so we decided that spending the night with friends would be better for everyone anyway.  We messaged the whole cohort that we would be going ahead with a more subdued gathering.  People seemed to agree that was a reasonable decision.

The street opened up another block by 6pm and our guests arrived for our gathering.  We held off on any decorations and just kept each other company.  For most of the group I think it was a pleasant diversion.  Some of the guests came a little late so that they could attend a vigil that had been set up at Forbes & Murray that evening.  For a few that were closer to the community I don't think it was much fun.  Mostly they huddled together texting with others as the details started to leak out.

Sunday afternoon we went with some friends to the interfaith service at Soldiers and Sailors in Oakland.

It was a pretty big gathering. There were many public officials and many religious leaders from Pittsburgh.  The thing I probably remember most was the leader of the Pittsburgh Islamic community offering all kinds of assistance, and reminding us that this was the same assistance that community had been offered by Pittsburgh Jews after 9/11.

Monday things started to wind back to normal, except it really wasn't.  Wilkins was still closed from Murray to Shady.  Informal shrines started to appear at each spot where the road was closed.  There was one right up the street from us.

The funerals started soon after that.  We went to Irv Younger's service at Rodef Shalom.  There had been widely attended services the day before.  This one had a lot of people there, but not as many luminaries as the day before.  One of the folks the first day had some connection to the Steelers.  Ben Rothlesberger was there, and dozens of TV cameras, and many, many police officers.  Marisa knew Irv a little from around services, so it seemed appropriate to go to that service.  Toward the end of the memorial Irv's son announced that Jesus would save all of us, and that his father knew that and would have wanted us to know.  So there's that.

The next day the President came to town.  I went to work.  For me it felt better to stand my post as it were.  For some of our friends it was decidedly different.  I saw many of them on MSNBC as protests.  There was still an enormous media presence and more than what you would be used to seeing in terms of law enforcement.  Some guy flipped out on a bus I was on - nothing related to this, just b-flat wigging out - and when he got off the bus there was a TV camera on him within 30 seconds and within 2 minutes there must have been a half dozen Police.

The following Saturday morning we attended a joint Shabbat Saturday service at Beth Shalom.  There were more people there than one would typically see at a high holiday service.  I don't remember much beyond the regular service mechanics.  There was one speech that talked about gun control, but mostly I just remember community building.

It took about another week to finish processing the scene and open the street up to traffic.  The shrine at Wilkins and Shady was even bigger than the one closer to our house.

A couple of days later they moved most of this into the lobby at Tree of Life.  That was the lobby where a few years ago at a Yom Kippur service I passed out and needed to be taken away in an ambulance.  This was way, way closer to home than I have really discussed here.  There's probably a lot more to say, but I don't really have the words.  Thanks to everyone that reached out.

Ellipses...

I used to be a lot better at this...  The Chief of Staff asked POTUS what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs gets paid.  He said $5 million.  He gets $200,000...  The people who determine how we handle digital photos seemed to have decided that we should pay extra to keep them in the cloud...  Today I paid a large amount of money to have the valve stem on one of my car tires replaced.  You'd think it wouldn't be too steep a repair.  You'd be wrong.  At some point that particular component acquired a sensor, wiring, programming...  Did you see a whole bunch of sea turtles died in Massachusetts?  Turns out that's further North than they know how to navigate or some such thing...  I am really, really hungry as a rule on Monday evenings...  Deleting things is my new way of publishing.  I type something, then I delete it, and then I publish about how I deleted it.  I should change the title of the blog...  There are two weeks left in the semester, but I am more than ready for it to be over.  I think many of the students are too...  I spent $40 today to save $10.  It is possible my shopping privileges should be revoked...  I don't understand why the suggested tips on Uber rides are not always the same even when the amount I am paying for the ride is.  That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me...  The Steelers lost this week but remained in first place.  That actually isn't as neat a trick as when they had a bye and managed to vault into first place to begin with...  That climate report is terrifying...  The boy demanded coffee cake and veggie sausage for breakfast this morning, and he got it.  Didn't mean he ate it...  I've got an idea for a thesis project for a grad TD: "Why Are We Working So Hard?"  Looking at the places physical strength is required in scenery fabrication, and how to reduce the required exertion...  Pretty sure there are people Manafort has people he's more concerned with than the special prosecutor...  Kevin and I are agreed that the descriptions we hear every day concerning production at work are really bizarre...  Master Tanbi has outgrown his Steelers jersey.  I was going to replace it the other day, but all they had in his size were Bell jerseys.  Somehow that didn't seem to be the best idea...  For reasons that I can not really be sure of, I appear to be interested in the World Chess Championships.  It's all tied up after 12 games...

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Who Designs and Directs in LORT Theatres by Gender

HowlRound Theatre Commons: I first published this study in 2015, hoping to provide a baseline on gender of designers in League of Resident Theatre (LORT) Theatres. This article and the accompanying charts are the result of the last five years of collecting, confirming whenever possible, and analyzing the data. The chart in the original study looked at the 2009-2010 through 2013-2014 seasons, whereas these represent 2012-2013 through 2016-2017.

Posted by David at 11/20/2018 12:20:00 PM

Can Music Artists Stop Stealing from Choreographers Already?

Dance Magazine: What makes big-time music artists and their collaborators think they can directly plagiarize the work of concert dance choreographers?
And, no, this time we're not talking about Beyoncé.

Posted by David at 11/20/2018 12:17:00 PM

Fighting theatre's anti-fatness problem

Exeunt Magazine: I’ve never been one to shy away from who I am or how I am perceived. Granted I haven’t always been so loud or owned my identity in the way I do now, but I wear my ‘stuff’ with pride – I am a working class, femme, uneducated, dyslexic, queer, poly, fatty.

Posted by David at 11/20/2018 12:15:00 PM

Acrobats Uncomfortable with Upcoming Saudi Performance

www.cirquefascination.com: Cirque du Soleil’s decision to go ahead with more performances in Saudi Arabia next month despite international outrage over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is creating a malaise within circus ranks, The Canadian Press has learned. Following stops in Italy, Germany and Croatia, the Quebec-based troupe will pitch its tent in Riyadh from Dec. 17-29 in a visit that has been in the works for about a year.

Posted by David at 11/23/2018 11:08:00 AM

Reevaluating the 'Romantic' Hit Songs of Pop Music's Patriarchy

KQED Arts: In the last week of September, while viewers around the country were glued to the three-ring circus of sexism and institutional power that was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, San Francisco singer-songwriter Kendra McKinley was jetlagged in Iceland. Holed up with former Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, she fought through the fog as she rearranged Doris Day’s 1952 hit single “A Guy Is a Guy.”

Posted by David at 11/20/2018 12:16:00 PM

Daily Posting is Hard

Here is a picture of a boy on a slide:

OK, OK So I'm Full of It

I have to admit it, after taking time out yesterday to talk about how out of control Black Friday has become I waltzed right out and bought myself some Black Friday deals.  Truth be told I wasn't the only one, Mrs. Tanbi made at least one purchase too.  Master Tanbi didn't buy anything, but he doesn't have any money, no cards, and doesn't drive.

I will say I locked at a whole lot more ads than I made purchases.  In the last hour I've had at least a half dozen things up on my screen thinking "that's a good price."  But discretion was the better part of valor and I managed to avoid hitting "buy with one click" in nearly every instance.

When I am in a brick and mortar shop I would refer to that last instance as "winning."  Whenever you go into a store without a list, select something for purchase, maybe take it off the shelf and walk it around a little.  Then take the item and put it down as you walk out of the store with nothing: that's winning.  The final hour of my Black Friday shopping was full of wins.

There's a little consolation in the thought that I didn't buy anything today that I wasn't going to buy anyway, and all of those things were part of limited time sales - so I saved a little money.  I think part of the idea behind Black Friday is to get you to impulse buy.  I managed to avoid that in every case.  I'm not so naive to think that's a total win for me, but I do think it isn't a total win for the vendors.

Speaking of vendors, this series of purchases did have one very interesting dimension.  Not one of the buys came from Amazon.  These days nearly all of my online buying is from Amazon.  Making a series of purchases all on a single day and not having one of them coming from my standard outlet is downright strange.  I guess it is also a feather in the cap for the marketing departments of the other vendors.  If you are keeping track, each of the purchases I made was the result of an email, no TV advertising, no direct mail circulars, nothing in my feeds (although all of that last group of items I ultimately didn't buy came from feeds).  So I guess if you want me to actually buy something send me a direct email with a deep discount on something I already want to buy.  That is a pretty tough needle to thread I think.

The other thing: Black Friday is supposed to be the kickoff of the holiday gift buying season.  None of these buys were for gifts.  I'm not sure the people making the sales really care if you are buying for yourself or for a gift, but it does seem like it ought to matter - at least to me.

Some Thanksgiving Thoughts

I've been abandoned.  Mrs. TANBI and Master TANBI are both clocked out for the day already.  We'd already pushed off from the family celebration when the youngest of all of us went down for the evening and our boy's normal volume level or perhaps the very real possibility he'd knock over a china cabinet would commit the reasonably unforgivable sin of waking the baby.  We decamped for the hotel and things proceeded apace from there.  Leaving me with two sleeping roommates, sitting in the dark watching football with the sound turned down, and doing this.

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What am I thankful for?  Top of my list these days is, well, still being around.  So there's that.  I'm thankful for a wonderful wife and a great son.  I'm thankful for all the family in my life, both on my side of things and my wife's side of things.  I'm thankful for the friends we have around us in our lives; great family friends - really framily, great work friends, and now friends we're making through the boy, and for the friends I rarely get to see and don't talk to as much as I should but that I always know are there.  I'm thankful there are people in the world who get up every day and do the right thing.

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Sometimes I wonder if we really need this holiday.  I love the sentiment, and I have memories that I treasure, but there have been stretches where it has seemed fairly inconvenient.  I think largely that stems from being an academic in a semester system.  Thanksgiving really jams up the tempo.  Things are getting into the endgame for the semester and then we go through this big productivity drop.  Then we come back for another flurry of activity and then we're done.  I guess it might feel different if the Thanksgiving intermission was restorative, but it always seems to be stressful in and of itself, with people coming back more harried as opposed to refreshed.  Given the choice I think many people would rather power through and finish a week earlier - getting a week longer break.  I know I would have wanted that when I was a student.

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The Black Friday thing seems out of control.  Some of the ads I saw showed stored opening at 2:00 PM on Thursday.  At that rate it seems more thoughtful for both employees and customers to open at 6:00 AM on Thursday and close at noon.  When we were changing locations tonight we drove by a Target and a Best Buy and the lots were packed solid at 7:30 PM Thursday.  I guess I must not be paying attention, or doing it wrong (you know, the same way I feel watching "extreme couponing") but there's never been anything that seemed like it would be worth the trouble.  I almost do see the appeal from an activity standpoint. The meal is over and you want something to do.  You don't want to go to the movies and pretty much everything is closed: let's check out the sales!  I tend to be more of a Cyber Monday shopper I guess.

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Growing up Thanksgiving was my great aunt Millie's holiday.  People would trickle in beginning around 4:30 for a dinnertime meal.  My dad was never there.  He had an annual convention that always overlapped with Thanksgiving - student government or something.  So my mom and my sister would go to the family event.  People in our family had their own signature dishes.  My mother was always the salad maker.  Millie did the turkey, but she also did Swedish meatballs as an appetizer.  That was always the first thing I had to eat.  She served buffet style, although that makes it sound more refined than it was.  After we ate the kids would all wind up in the master bedroom on the third floor of the townhouse piled on the bed watching TV: The Sound of Music or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Wizard of OZ.  I've probably confused the titles.  My parents generation would watch football and talk, their parents would play cards and deal with the kitchen.  The ride home would be pretty late at night for a kid.  I didn't know how special it was at the time.

Three Thousandths

It seems like every meeting I go to these days includes a conversation concerning the spelling out of a standard operating procedure into a published policy, or the formalization of an informal procedure into a codified process.  Everywhere there has historically been latitude there is now a drive to narrow the range and make it substantively more predictable.

- I deleted a bunch of stuff here -

When I was a student one of my instructors told us that when you set out to design a machine for scenery that you have two choices: you can design to a mechanical tolerance of three thousandths of an inch or you can work to a much larger tolerance and build in adjustability.  If done properly the machine will work regardless of which design approach one chooses.  The difficulty is that a theatrical shop will have significant difficulty fabricating to a +/- 3/1000" tolerance.  The tolling we have and the materials we work in don't make that kind of precision easy.  The result being that the fabrication probably won't be done properly and a precisely designed machine will likely fail. Alternatively if you take the tooling and materials in to account ahead of time and assume that the high precision is optimistic in our shop and set out from the start to include adjustability you stand a much higher chance of success.

I think about this a lot when we set out to standardize and codify things at work.  So much of what we do is specific: specific to a production, specific to a design, specific to a class, specific to a person.  We can design processes that are highly codified or we can design processes with built in adjustability. 

Don't get me wrong.  If I'm asked to codify processes I will codify them and if asked to spell out what I assume to be a known standard procedure I will spell it out.  I like creating policy documents.  I am really good at it.  Is it the best approach?  Only time will tell.