I noticed that today we did not get even a single robocall, though on any given day they usually number around 10. I also noticed that today is both Good Friday and Passover and I was wondering if it was more than a coincidence and that the callers declared a truce on this religious holiday. I cannot imagine that they have such sensitivities given that they are willing to annoy the hell out of people. And also, many of the places where these calls originate are overseas and thus may not have many Christian or Jewish employees who take today off.

On the other hand, today I got a sudden influx of spam comments on the blog, something that occurs very rarely.

I was curious if any readers also noted an absence of robocalls today.

The lack of posting today is due to the fact that I have not been feeling well. It is nothing serious but it struck me that there few ways to describe how one feels when one does not have a full-blown flu or cough or cold but have just mild symptoms of one or more, which was my case. The word ‘blah’ is close in spirit but not very elegant.

The old-fashioned phrase ‘under the weather’ sort of captures the feeling but not quite since it can be used to denote having the flu as well. While thinking about this while trying to sleep, suddenly the phrase ‘one degree under’ popped into my mind. I think I heard it when I was a boy in England and it was used in TV ads to promote the use of ‘tonics’ which I think must have been some kind of energy drink to deal with this low feeling. These tonics were quite popular in those days but one does not see them advertised as much in the US. Maybe they are still popular in the UK.

‘One degree under’ captures the idea of not feeling quite normal but nothing serious. Maybe a scale could be developed of varying degrees under to signify the level of seriousness. One puzzle is why it is ‘under’ since mild flu symptoms would lead to a small rise in temperature. I don’t know if the phrase ‘one degree over’ could be made popular.

There is a heartwarming story of people working on an oil rig 220 km from the coast of Thailand who spotted an exhausted looking dog paddling in the water. They rescued the dog, washed off the salt water, nursed him back to health, and then sent him back on a tanker that was heading to shore, where the dog was taken to a vet’s and is reportedly doing well. They suspect that the dog was swept overboard from a fishing trawler.

There are plenty of nice photographs at the link.

And since I am thinking about dogs, here’s a comic strip involving dogs.

I have mentioned before my surprise that spectators at golf tournaments will line up at places where an errant shot could cause a serious injury. The relative scarcity of such injuries is a testament to the expertise of top golfers who rarely hit wild shots, though it can happen even with world class golfers.

But in the video below, a golfer is seen hitting two consecutive shots off the tee into almost the same spot in the crowd, injuring people. It looks almost deliberate, a suspicion accentuated by the fact that she did not go over to the first person she hit to make sure she was ok. But surely no one would do such a thing deliberately?

Anyone who has worked in any fairly large organization will sooner or later be confronted with metrics to measure performance. The idea of metrics, setting out measures to see if one is meeting one’s goals, is not in itself bad. What is problematic is when metrics are created whose purpose is not to provide valuable feedback but are used almost exclusively to determine rewards and punishments. Then one frequently finds that metrics distort performance as people game the system to meet the requirements of the metrics even if the actual results of doing so are deleterious. Badly designed metrics also focus on the things that can be measured easily rather than on the things worth measuring.
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In this video Sasaki Fumio, who has been described as Japan’s most famous minimalist, describes why he reduced the number of things he has to just 150 and what made him change to a life of minimalism. Although we may think that minimalists have to be highly organized to live as they do, paradoxically he thinks that most people who are minimalists are like him, people who are unorganized and untidy and if they have a lot of things, they are just surrounded by mess. Minimalism is their way of getting control over their immediate environment by not having a lot of stuff to deal with.

I am a pretty organized person who puts things away and keeps track of things and that is maybe why I have not felt the urge to adopt minimalism in this extreme form, though I do try to minimize the number of things that I buy and own. I do share with Fumio being quite content to eat the same or almost the same food day after day. The same with clothes. That simplifies life considerably.

Some people like to get vanity license plates for their cars to send some message. I have never quite seen the appeal of this nor of putting bumper stickers but it is a harmless enough practice. But states that issue these plates have to be constantly on their guard to ensure that people are not slipping past them some plates that have an underlying message that violates the state’s requirements that the plates be in good taste and not offensive. This is not an easy task since people are quite imaginative.
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Like pretty much everyone in the US (is this a problem in other countries too?) I am so plagued with robocalls that I have stopped answering the phone and wait to see if I know the person who is leaving a message before picking up. But very often, the phone rings, the answering message picks up, but then the call is immediately cut with no message left. That puzzled me because I assumed that these calls were entirely automated and a computer would leave a recorded message. Was the computer able to distinguish between an answering machine message and a real person in a matter of a second or two? That seemed pretty sophisticated. Sometimes I do get a recorded message but that is rare.
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The U.K. brexiting pic.twitter.com/9MYXSjLGMo

— Rupert Myers (@RupertMyers) March 16, 2019

This same video can serve as a metaphor for any action that is initiated because it seems like a quick and easy solution to a problem that turns into a mess because the person did not really think things through about the possible consequences.