Common Ground

Put down your coffee, now!

Even in the middle of war, it is possible to find common ground:

A U.S. Marine squad was marching north of Faluijiah when they came upon an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side of the road was an American Marine in a similar but less serious state. The Marine was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the squad leader asked the injured Marine what had happened.

The Marine reported, “I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent.

We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. “I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein is a miserable, lowlife scumbag, and he yelled back that Ted Kennedy is a good-for-nothing, fat, left wing liberal drunk."

"So I said that Osama Bin Ladin dresses and acts like a frigid, mean-spirited lesbian! He retaliated by yelling, Oh yeah? Well, so does Hillary Clinton!"

"And, there we were, in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when a truck hit us"

Tip o’the hat to Judy R…

Calendars

An old-fashioned paper calendar — the kind with a page for each month — hangs on my office wall. Just now I happened to glance over at it, and … the page that’s showing is for March! Well, at least it’s for this year!

But that got the ponder going, because not so very many years ago I was completely dependent on such calendars (or a daily diary, or other such planner). And now I (obviously) rarely use one. What’s happened?

For me, the first thing that happened was electronic organizers (such as the Palm Pilot). When those gadgets first got really usable, back in the mid '90s or so, I “adopted” one. I used them for years, even though keeping them synchronized (with Outlook’s calendar, a must in the corporate world) and writing with that silly little stylus was a real pain in the butt. The benefits made it worth the trouble, especially the fact that I could easily carry my schedule around and at the same time make it visible to all those I worked with.

But for the past year or so, I’ve stopped using the organizer. I still have one, but I haven’t powered it up for quite a while. I experimented with various other things, all of them complete flops, until my recent discovery of Google Calendar. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and I’ve been more than just pleased — it is, for me, almost a perfect solution. Because’s Google Calendar is web-based, I can share my calendar with anyone I care to. I can keep multiple calendars, for different purposes. I can get to my calendars from anywhere in the world, so long as I have web access. It sends me email reminders when its time to do something (and it will send them to my cell phone, if I want it to). I don’t have to worry about backing it up, or any other kind of maintenance — Google does it all for me. And best of all, it’s absolutely free.

So my Norman Rockwell paper calendar just sits there on my wall. There’s not a note of any kind on it — it’s completely pristine. And maybe in another four or five months, I’ll look at it again. Meanwhile, I’ll click on over to my Google calendar to see what I’m supposed to do today. Oh, yeah — work!