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You must not look like a clueless foreigner If people are asking you for directions

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Here is the latest post from our fearless world traveler.

It’s about a bazillion degrees Fahrenheit in my neck of the woods, so here is a photo of the traveler, looking a bit like Kevin Youkilis, jumping into what he calls a “dope waterfall”:

“Dope”, for you old fogeys in the audience, means something like “amazing” or “extraordinary”.  (Comparative “doper,” superlative “dopest.”)  I recall when my kids taught me the word “sick,” with approximately the same meaning.  At some point “sick” wasn’t intense enough, and I was introduced to the word “ill”, meaning “really sick.”  But even old fogeys know these words nowadays.  Thus the language evolves.

The Fourth of July in my little town

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The day began with me and a couple thousand of my friends getting up way too early in to run four miles or so in the rain down Main Street.  I have been doing this for years, so it’s a good way of measuring my physical disintegration. This year, maybe because it was cooler, I was actually a couple of minutes faster than last year.

Here I am close to the finish line, going too fast for the photographer to catch up.  Notice the way my town paints the center line red, white, and blue for the occasion.

Too fast for the photographer

A couple hours after the race people reassemble on Main Street for the parade.  It’s pretty much the same every year.

Here is Uncle Sam, who always leads off the parade:

Here is our world-famous Marching Kazoo Band:

Here’s a tall guy:

Here are guys pretending to be soldiers:

Here are some more guys pretending to be old-time baseball players:

Here are cute kids waiting for people in the parade to throw them candy:

And here is Tom Brady watching some bagpipers.  What’s the Fourth of July without bagpipers?

Don’t you wish you lived in my little town?

Awesome photo of the Venus transit

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Insanely awesome, really — it shows Venus transiting the sun along with the Hubble space telescope.  It’s copyrighted, so I won’t reproduce it, just link to it.

This is the from the same guy who got a photo of the International Space Station crossing the sun during a lunar eclipse.

There should be a Nobel Prize for astrophotography, and Legault should win it.

Dropping the H-Bomb

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The Boston Globe has a funny story today about an underappreciated problem that has caused untold human misery: the difficulty Harvard graduates have in telling people where they went to school. As the article points out, most grads don’t want to use the “H-bomb.”

When confronted with questions about their education, many elect simply for a kind of dodge, the most famous being the Boston method. “I went to school in Boston.’’ Sometimes it’s “near Boston.’’ Or perhaps even “Cambridge.’’

That almost never works.

The problem is that this bit of information about you has a high probability of distorting people’s impressions of you, typically not in a good way. So you try to avoid providing the information if you possibly can.

(My wife, who has the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein, as Henry Higgins would say, has absolutely no sympathy for the plight of the poor Harvard grad, by the way.  Nor does she spend her time worrying about beautiful women who complain that no one takes them seriously because they’re so beautiful and all.)

I’ve been lucky that I’ve lived my life in the Boston area, where graduating from Harvard is less of a big deal.  I’ve also worked at companies that employ people who are typically smarter and better educated than I am.  I recall once having to provide a short bio for a journal paper a group of us wrote about a project we had worked on.  When I read the bios of the other four people, it turned out that I had the least education of any of them, and the second fewest number of Harvard degrees.  The other folks on the project were very nice to me, however, and never brought this up.

There’s something to be said for being a regular schmoe.

If you’re going to lie on your resume, why think small?

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The CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson, has resigned because he overstated his credentials on his résumé. What was the overstatement?  Apparently he claimed he had a degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College, when in fact his degree was only in accounting. Of course, when this first became public, he tried to blame someone else for the error, but apparently that claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny either.  Now he is going to have to find a way to restart his career.

Stonehill is a little Catholic college not far from where I live.  A nephew of mine went there, and I’m sure it’s a very fine college.  But if you’re going to lie on your résumé, why just tweak your degree?  Why not claim a degree from Harvard or a Ph.D. from Oxford?  I look at a ton of résumés at my job, and educational experience is important.  If you don’t have a degree from a top-notch university, that’s fine — there are plenty of reasons why someone might not go to Harvard or Michigan or Middlebury.  But a degree from a prestigious school is a good indicator that you have the intellectual ability we’re looking for.  But I’m pretty sure our HR folks don’t verify a candidate’s educational credentials.   I’m not sure why they don’t — too time-consuming?  too expensive?  The thing is, if you lie, you’re likely to get away with it.  So why not think big?

Possibly Thompson thought a minor adjustment was less likely to be uncovered than a big whopper.  On the other hand, the downside of any kind of lying is so huge that a minor adjustment hardly seems worth the risk.

The strangeness of this guy’s behavior pales in comparison to that of Richard Blumenthal, the new senator from Connecticut, who was in the habit of lying about serving in Vietnam. He wasn’t just exaggerating his college major on a form; he was publicly claiming an accomplishment that was completely untrue:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

Blumenthal is a spectacularly accomplished guy — I presume Thompson is as well.  Why did they need to do this?  I suppose the lies began early, as they started their careers in politics and business, and then they couldn’t find a way to stop.  Maybe they didn’t see the need to stop, since no one ever uncovered the lies.  And in the end, maybe they kinda sorta started believing their lies.  It was all so long ago.

There’s a story here….