Diversions

A Diversion: Famous For the Wrong Reason

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We read this with much amusement earlier in the week in the Daily Mail the lamentations of one Brett Alder, a California sales exec who moved his family to Austin apparently in haste and with minimal to non-existent prior research on his new home, who repented at leisure after a brief year and afterwards (upon moving back to California) expanded on woes and the general shortcomings of Texas in an editorial in Business Insider. The original column is behind a paywall, so unavailable to me, but the Daily Mail posted the list of his lamentations. This brought about considerable hilarity in the comments on the various articles which repeated the story, among Texans. The Daughter Unit and I found the article most particularly amusing especially me; California born and bred, lived there without interruption (save two trips to Europe) until I joined the military, where for twenty years I moved frequently to new communities and wasted little time or heartburn on making a new home. I’ve lived in Texas since 1995 now, with occasional trips to the formerly-Golden State, the last one in 2010 when Dad passed away and I spent a couple of weeks helping Mom sort out things.

To continue with a fisking of Brett-the-male-Karen’s lamentations on life in Austin:

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Big Brother Watches Dilbert

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Chicagoboyz are excellent managers – and have opinions. I’m curious how effective you see:
TECH THAT AIMS TO IMPROVE MEETINGS.

If you aren’t sufficiently paranoid about 25,000 National Guards brought in for a nonexistent “coup” sleeping on the freezing floor of a parking garage and hearing they will be there until March (I don’t know how Abbott’s order to bring his men home is going – at least the Texas contingent should leave sooner), then consider Big Brother recording your blood pressure and eye contact at your next business meeting. (Does this seem a breakthrough in efficiency or something akin the Stasi in The Lives of Others?)

It gives useful information; it might encourage quieter members and rein in talkative ones. Could interest be faked for the camera? But a leader who doesn’t sense the mood of the room and who doesn’t encourage contributions and differing approaches tactfully would probably not use AI information well either.

Neither as employee or employer did I find these necessary (probably incorrectly). Forced into biannual meetings, I fell asleep or went off on diversions. This technology would quickly cull me (“Doesn’t play well with others”). But I’m not sure that makes it, well, bad. Invasive, yes. Nonetheless, I suspect it fosters conformity and forces consensus: in short, is UnAmerican. But maybe that’s just me.

The Princess Who Went Her Own Way (Finale)

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(Continued from History Friday: as Paul Harvey used to say, This is the rest of the story!)

The Dowager Tsarina Marie, Olga Kulikovsky, her sister Xenia and her husband and family all traveled to the Crimea, where they lived for a time at the estate near Yalta owned by Xenia’s husband with other members of the Imperial family. While there in the Crimea, Olga gave birth to her first child, a son named Tihon. They all were under house arrest and eventually tried by a revolutionary court and sentenced to death. Quarrels between rival groups of local Bolsheviks and developments in the war the war with Germany and the internal war between Red and White Russian factions prevented enactment of that sentence and allowed for the escape of the surviving Romanovs from Russia. Olga’s mother and the remainder of the Imperial family, their friends and loyal retainers were evacuated on a British warship. Olga and Colonel Kulikovsky and their baby son did not want to leave Russia, and with the help of a Cossack former Imperial bodyguard, sought safety in the that bodyguard’s home village in the Crimea. They were safe there for a time, as the area was held by the White Russian faction. There, she gave birth to a second son, Guri, but the White faction was already losing control of the territory they held, and at the end of 1919, the Kulikovskys had to leave Russia for good. With the assistance of the Danish consul in Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Olga’s family traveled to Denmark, by way of a refugee camp in Turkey, and Belgrade in Yugoslavia, where they rejoined the Dowager Tsarina Marie.

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History Friday: The Princess Who Went Her Own Way

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(History Friday is back – this is part one, of two.)

She wasn’t actually a princess, through it is the usual understanding that the sons and daughters of a ruling monarch are princes and princesses. But they did things differently in Russia; up until the Russian Revolution, the legitimate offspring of the Tsar were grand dukes or grand duchesses, born to the purple and far outranking mere princes and princesses, who seem to have been, in the Russian scheme of things, merely mid-ranked nobility.

This grand duchess was named Olga; the youngest of five children of Tsar Alexander III and his wife, the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, originally Princess Dagmar, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. (Her older sister Alix was married to Albert, Prince of Wales.) Born in June, 1882, the infant Olga was not in the most robust of health. Her father as the Tsar of all Russians, and her mother being a veritable whirlwind when it came to duties social and administrative, Olga and her next-oldest brother Michael were raised day to day by governesses and tutors, as was customary for the upper classes. They had a comfortable, but rather Spartan lifestyle at Gatchina, the country palace of the Romanovs. She and her brother slept on plain cots, ate porridge for breakfast, bathed in cold water, rarely saw other children and had daily lessons and private time for walks in the nearby woods with their formidable father. Olga excelled at painting and sketching and in fact, for the remainder of her life, most always had a paintbrush in her hand, and as an adult earned a modest living from her watercolors. (a selection of her watercolors is here)

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Dancing

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Chicagoboyz enjoy the occasional turn around the dance floor, but can only dream of cutting the rug with the panache of this young couple.