P.C. Shannon

A picture is worth a thousand words:

We went to see The Nutcracker last night. My favorite part is the snowflakes, but for the first time, I was also enamored of the children queuing up to get gifts from Herr Silberhaus. I was thinking about how exciting it would be to have a child on stage (Did I mention that I love ballet?). Ballerinas are adorable, of course, but I also loved Billy Elliot.

Yesterday, you were reading the mad ramblings of a mere graduate student. Today, you are reading the mad ramblings of an official PhD candidate. Woohoo!

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually get any money. Doh!

I’m really quite pleased with this. A lot of my troubles in grad school have come from a lack of a clear plan, but now I have one. And it’s not just my own crazy, hare-brained ideas; it has actual faculty input. I feel like I should have done this a year ago. But then, who knows what my project would be or if that really would have avoided any of the turbulence of the last year. Certainly the genomes that are central to my project weren’t available then.

I’m not sure what to think about this (from AP via IHT):

Employees at the Chinese headquarters of Wal-Mart have set up a Communist Party branch, the company and the party said Monday, as part of a campaign by the party to expand at foreign companies.

The state-sanctioned labor body in China set up unions this year at Wal-Marts in the country.

On the one hand, I think it’s funny (and ironic perhaps) that a stalwart of the American hegemony is playing host to the Communist Party, like they’re somehow going to subvert Sam Walton’s behemoth. On the other hand, it sort of frightens me to think of the largest employer in America, which is frequently accused of mistreating its employees, teaming up with an entity that is often characterized as faceless, conformist, and dehumanizing and is, in a very real sense, guilty of some very serious human rights violations.

I also see it as a triumph of globalization as the rampant comsumerism and profiteering of Wal-Mart has to get along with the managed economy and “new communism” of China. But if the damned Red Chinese can have unionized Wal-Mart employees, why can’t the good ol’ U. S. of A.?

Caroline and I are about halfway through our first pregnancy, and it’s been a very interesting experience. Seeing the heartbeat on the ultrasound and hearing it having both been very powerful, moving experiences. Hopefully, we’ll find out the child’s sex later this week, and that will definitely increase our connection to the baby. At last we’ll be able to narrow our constant wrangling over names.

I’m sure that I will be overwhelmed when the baby is born and that nothing will really prepare me for that. But in the meantime, my sense of duty is already growing. This really came home to me when James Kim and his family were missing in Oregon. It was a strangely personal story as I get CNet videos on my TiVo and was already familiar with James. But when I read about him and his wife fighting for their kids’ survival, it resonated in a way that it wouldn’t have before the baby.

Lorelle posted an article recently called Please Don’t Use Google To Research References, and I agree with most of what she says. I especially like that she sends people to Snopes to debunk e-mail rumors. I’m a fan of replying to forwards about how Bill Gates is going to pay everyone to forward this message with links to that site, which is probably why I don’t get those anymore. Mission accomplished! But I think Lorelle (and her commenters) miss the usefulness of Wikipedia.

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I may have turned 31 this year, but according to an article on CNN.com today, I’m actually getting younger:

On a global scale, three out of five consumers believed the 40’s are the new 30’s.

“Our 40’s are being celebrated as the decade where we can be comfortable and confident in both personal and financial terms. The majority of global consumers really believe life starts at 40,” AC Nielsen Europe President and CEO Frank Martell said.

This should come as good news to my wife, who feels like we’re behind the curve since a lot of our friends are homeowners but we’re not. The only problem is that now matter how you view life, a woman’s biological clock keeps time in a absolute sense—past a certain age, risks for some birth defects start to skyrocket and fertility drops off.

The other interesting fact from the article is that 33% of Irish would consider cosmetic surgery to maintain their looks versus only 25% of Americans.

Forbes.com this week has a special section on corporate citizenship. I was particularly interested in the article about corporate philanthropy entitled “Can Corporations Save The World?” Considering the source, I was expecting it to be all about enlightened self-interest and up-with-capitalism, but it actually resonated with a lot of my own thoughts. I’ll avoid going on about the rise of corporate rule and instead focus on something simpler and a bit more relevant to the Forbes article: how corporations are valued.

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Forbes.com recently ran a list of the biggest private companies in the country, and it was with some pride that I saw my favorite local grocer, HEB, come in at number 11, with 2005 revenues of $12.4 billion. Consider that Hollywood’s domestic box office is projected to pass $9 billion this year. Not too shabby.