At my old job, my boss was a Scottish lady who had a bit of a temper. When she was pissed about something, or more often, someone on the project, she would write up a good scathing email about the issue. Before sending it, she would always give it to me first with the instruction to "make it diplomatic". I did this and did it well for two and half years.

During this same period of time I began dating Mrs. Haff. She being a much more observant observer of human nature than I am, informed me that I am passive aggressive. Once I figured out what that was, I wasn't really in any position to argue. The evidence was pretty damning.

Fast forward to present day. We were down at the local bar, introducing the kid to all our friends down there. We went during lunch hour when the bar is more family friendly and much less smoky, and thus the TV's were turned to news instead of sports, and the discussion was on possible diplomatic solutions to the current Mid East crisis.

It got me to thinking, as beer often does, about what personality types make good diplomats. A few quick web searches turned up very little connecting diplomats with passive aggressive type. About the best I could do was a link on Wonkette ascribing that to foreign diplomats who don't pay their parking tickets.

Looking at this list of passive aggressive personality traits seems to show a great deal of the same skills (good and bad) needed for diplomacy.

*Fear of Dependency - Diplomats are usually working in the interest of their country, and it is never advantageous to be in a dependent position.

*Fear of Intimacy - While diplomats usually have to get along well with others, they also have to be wary on not getting too comfortable and tipping their hand.

*Fear of Competition - I don't have a good connection for this one.

*Obstructionism - Blocking progress of another by offering vague promises in the affirmative and not following through on them could be the very definition of diplomacy.

*Fostering Chaos - Seems much like Obstructionism with multiple parties involved.

*Feeling Victimized - How many times have you seen diplomats play the victim card at UN speeches? Countries are always the victims of another's military action or trade policy.

*Making Excuses & Lying - See Obstructionism note above.

*Procrastination/Chronic Lateness - See Obstructionism.

*ambiguity - This came the closest to my work experience. When I was asked to make something diplomatic, what I was doing was making the same points without being specific. In other words, giving my boss plausible deniability if someone came back to challenger her on an email.

I would love to see a study of UN diplomats' personalities, to see if there are any common factors that stretch across nation/race/religion. But I suppose if my hunch turned out to be correct, calling diplomats passive aggressive would probably not be very diplomatic.

I went to a concert tonight. It's been a while since I went to one, so I was freshly reminded of my concert pet peeves.

• the guy who sings along at the top of his lungs, but only to the words he knows, so it's like there's an echo effect on the chorus.
• the guy who shouts "Freebird."
• the girl who laughs at this witticism.
• the guy who thinks what every concert needs is a mosh pit.
  
• the girl who thinks carrying four full beers is compatible with dancing.
• the people who try to have regular conversations (especially on cell phones), and either don't realize or don't care that everyone has to listen to them scream over the music.
  
• the couple who brings their little kid, sits in the sixth row, and then seem surprised when the kid starts crying and covering his ears and is barely able to stay awake.
• the girl who whacks me in the head with her elbow, then rubs my head and messes up my hair to show me she didn't mean it, and then whacks me again ten minutes later.
• the folks who spark up the instant the lights go down.
• the people who stand where they're not supposed to, like down front in the middle of the aisle, then try to wheedle the security guards, because the security guards really ought to be cool about that kind of thing.
  
• the guy who talks/yells at the singer, like they're going to have a chat.
  
• pretty much all the other people, now that I think about it.

Despite all this, the concert was totally AWESOME, so I'm mostly just griping for the fun of it. Still, it would have been a lot better without all the other dorks. Anyway, what peeves am I forgetting?

Say goodbye to productivity. I thoroughly enjoyed this list of the top 50 music videos of the '80s. The list includes links for watching the videos, too! Get your Duran Duran fix. (Or, relax, don't do it.) Overall, it's a good list, although I could quibble here and there. For example, I would rank "Sledgehammer" and "Take on Me" above "Thriller." As huge as "Thriller" was, it was really only original and innovative in that it set old '50s horror movie tropes to pop music. It was significant and influential because it showed that music videos could be mini-movies. But there wasn't really anything in it that one never thought could be done; it was amazing for its audacity, but not its artistry. "Sledgehammer" and "Take on Me," however, were paradigm-changers. No one had ever seen anything like that before, as opposed to an updated version of a Vincent Price B-movie. To make a movie analogy, I would compare "Thriller" to Citizen Kane and "Sledgehammer" and "Take on Me" to, say, The Jazz Singer (the first "talkie") and maybe The Wizard of Oz. But lists like this are perfect for such debates. Have at it.

...I got nothin'.

UPDATE: Well, I guess that's not strictly true. 1. I composed a longish email to some friends about recent political events. I won't get into it all here, but here's a hint: the subjects' names rhyme with Moe Lieberman and Ted Lamont. 2. I spent about a half hour just rearranging the bookmarks on my Firefox at home. The ones I visit most often were at the top, followed by a bunch I never go to anymore, and then I had to scroll forever to reach some newly-bookmarked sites. So I tried to get those in order. I should be a more efficient surfer from now on. 3. I did some work on my other blog, but I'm not going to tell you about that yet, either.

4. Also, I was amused by this story about Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner denying he's in poor health after rumors of a stroke. It's not that I'm amused by thoughts of an ill Hef; rather, it reminds me of all the rumor and confusion and Castrology coming out of Havana these days. Think about it: the similarities are errie. They both started revolutions in the 1950s (Castro's Cuban communist revolution; Hefner's pornographic revolution), they've both hung on much longer than anyone expected, they both seem almost quaintly out of date, they're both very rich, they both rarely appear in public out of "uniform" (Castro's fatigues; Hef's smoking jacket/robe), no one knows how healthy they really are, they still have mythic stamina (Castro's seven-hour speeches, Hef's seven girlfriends), no one knows who is going to take over the empire when they're gone, and no one knows whether the empire will survive after that. Spooky. I'll go ahead and make a bet, though, that people will be buying magazines with pictures of naked women long after Cuba is no longer a communist state. So there you go -- Hugh Hefner: more significant than Fidel Castro. Discuss.

As foreshadowed, I took the plunge and bought a satellite radio this weekend. I went with XM for content-based reasons. I went whole hog. I got the radio receiver itself, the home kit, the car kit, and a boombox for the office. I had them install the car kit, and as expensive as that was, I'm glad they did, because I never could have done it, and certainly not as cleanly as they did. Of course, I'll probably have a big leak as soon as it rains, but for now, it seems fine. If you only wanted the radio for one location and/or wanted to do the installation yourself, you could probably get by on half of what I spent.

But I'm mostly happy with it. I ran in to two minor snags that they didn't warn me about. First, maybe it's obvious, but I did not realize that I would need southern exposure for the antenna. I had to semaphore myself about like a moron trying to find a good signal because my home office is on the north side of my apartment. Currently, the antenna is propped on some books on my bookshelf across the room. The other snag is that I didn't realize I need a certain kind of input into my home stereo to run the satellite radio through it. If you have a modern hi-fi, that shouldn't be a problem. But I have a very old crappy system, and it doesn't really have these "inputs." I know what you're saying -- use the speaker inputs. Well, I can't do that, because the geniuses who designed the stereo made it so you have to feed spliced wires into the inputs for the speakers. And the satellite connector isn't spliced. So, what I figured I would have to do is get another satellite boombox, which I wasn't thrilled about. I thought I would be fine just listening online at home, but then I discovered, as CR noted later, that not all the content is available online. Eventually, I had a brainstorm and realized I could use the tape-deck adapter from the car kit in my home stereo! (In the car, the radio runs through an FM station.) It's not a perfect solution, but it'll do.

Anyway, I've been pleased with it. I'm still trying to get the hang of all the bells and whistles and figuring out the lineups and channels and such. I'm especially looking forward to college football and college basketball season. Overall, I like it so far. Thanks to everyone who helped out with suggestions and advice.
________
"Well, we drilled it out so that it would fit,
And with a little bit of help from an adapter kit,
We had that engine runnin' just like a song!"

So Barbaro's chances of pulling through are slim, even though Seabuiscuit proved that a horse can come back and win after a bad injury. What I am wondering is what this has done to the price of Barbaro's, um, seed. We all know that every sperm is sacred, but part of the big money with race horses is the stud fees a winner collects after they retire. Does an injury like Barbaro's cause prospective buyers to think his genetics are deficient, or would it just be considered a fluke?

Given the advanced in artificial insemination, even if a live mounting is preferred, means a horse not able to perform his stud duties manually could still sire an extensive line. If the injury did not effectively alter the demand for the sperm, you have to figure his owners have been milking him like a rented cow.