inkbluesky

volcano and morning fog 

Cheat’s guide to Joyce’s Ulysses

CHAPTERS 1-3

The first three chapters introduce would-be writer Stephen Dedalus, familiar to Joyce readers from his earlier novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

On the morning of 16 June 1904, Stephen leaves the disused watchtower he shares with “stately, plump Buck Mulligan”, vowing never to return.

After teaching at a nearby school he talks to an ageing master who gives him a letter to deliver to the offices of a Dublin newspaper.

He then goes for a long walk on the beach that gives him plenty of time to ponder his literary aspirations and dead mother fixation.

CHAPTERS 4-5

Jewish advertising salesman Leopold Bloom buys a kidney, then returns home to 7 Eccles Street and has it for breakfast. He then defecates. Upstairs Molly, his unfaithful opera singer wife, waits for him to leave so she can entertain her lover.

Ulysses might be the most famous book that hardly anyone has read, at least all the way through. One comment on this story at the link said that it was a shame that students would probably just rewrite the short takes and use that as homework. That wouldn’t be advisable for a few obvious reasons, but even though they’re funny they would be a good starting point in thinking about those aspects of the book.

home sweet home 

Haunted Mansion: A study proves that the bigger his house, the worse the CEO 

Using property records, public databases, and search engines, Yermack and Liu were able to identify the primary residences of 488 of the 500 CEOs of the S&P 500. These guys—and they’re almost all guys—are living large. The mean residence of a CEO was anything but mean: 6,145 square feet, 12 rooms, 5.37 acres of land, and a market value of $3.1 million. For the 164 in the sample who bought new houses after being named CEO, the mean house was even less mean: 6,635 square feet, 13.1 rooms, 6.13 acres, and a market value of $3.9 million. “Aerial photographs indicate that outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, boathouses, formal gardens, and detached guest houses or servants’ quarters are common features of CEOs’ homesteads,” Yermak and Liu write. CEOs are also engaging in the same sort of financing that the home-buying masses do.

Then the professors examined the returns of the CEOs’ stocks, and discovered that the bigger the home, the worse the stock performed.

It is interesting that in many ways the business hasn’t moved past the old world model of the kings and princes at the top and the wage earning minions at the bottom - a literal pyramid of authority. While some have asked why CEO wages are not tied to earnings, I wonder why employee compensation isn’t tied to profits and why don’t employees have a say in who and how the company is managed. The kingdom, the castle and the worker model still exist we just call it corporate America.

* How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

Adult behavior is inevitably stranger then children’s. Adults are not supposed to avoid facts and make up their own, then send people off to die based on their perverse version of reality.