Intelligence, Please…

If my last post bored you, there is no hope for you. I dare say that you should be voting Democrat as you will be living off welfare checks for the rest of your life by ignoring my advice.

If my last post intrigued you, and you said “hey, why don’t I learn a little programming, as a hobby of sorts” – this post is for you.

Let me again sell the merits of VBA, from a coding perspective.

1. You can “program” with no code at all, or use the Macro Recorder as a testing tool. If you want to do something but don’t know how to code it, use the Macro Recorder to do it first. Or, if you just don’t want to take the time to code, you can use the Macro Recorder for that.
2. VBA was designed as a teaching language. It’s called “BASIC” for a reason. It’s so easy a caveman can do it, metaphorically speaking.
3. The same syntax is used for every Office application. Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Visio, etc., etc. all use VBA in its standard form. Obviously, certain programming “objects” are different depending on the program (Excel deals with cells while Word uses paragraphs), but the style remains consistent.
4. Intellisense. Like predictive text for your phone, the VB Editor attempts to divine what you’re trying to do. You don’t have to remember a specific object or property – the Editor will attempt to help you through that. Crucial for those who don’t want to have print-outs of programming vocabulary.
5. VBA scripts can be automated or called on demand. Say, for instance, that I want a specific format to be applied to a word. Let’s say that every time I type “government,” I want it highlighted in red and black with devil ears on the side. I can have the program do that formatting every time it sees “government,” or I can have that program called at the press of a button. Your call.

If you’re looking to start with VBA for Word, look here for more.

If you’re looking to start with VBA for Excel, look here for more.

If you’re looking to start with VBA for Outlook, look here for more.

If you’re looking to start with PowerPoint or Access, don’t. While they work just the same, PPT and Access are not as easy to code given their nature. Word, Excel or Outlook would be better for first attempts.

Enjoy…

From time to time, it amuses me to extend my prophecies from the general “state of affairs” sort of postings to a style that might be known as “wisdom from the mountains.” I find myself in such an evening tonight.

Below, in referencing the sage analysis of Mr. Rajan, I mused that education will continue to have a disproportionate effect on the job prospects of many Americans as we continue to drift toward a service economy.  I believe that many service workers will benefit from having programming knowledge of any sort. My reasons are as follows:

1. We are increasingly a computer-based economy. Few (to no) offices are computer-less, and most tasks that were done manually are now keyed into a computer. You know all this, so let’s move on.
2. Programming demonstrates a control over a computer far beyond that of the average employee. If you and I have equal communication skills, are equally well-liked by our co-workers, have comparable intelligence but I can control my work tool better, who has a stronger set of skills? It’s the difference between using a hammer or using a nail gun, if we have an equal knowledge of architecture.
3. Programming might just get you out of having to go into the office. Let us say that you demonstrate epic productivity in the office, via well-executed programming skills. Who is better positioned to apply to work from home – you, or your co-worker who always looks like he’s struggling to stay afloat? You, of course. Which leads me to my next point..
4. Programming can help you eliminate stress. Let us say that you periodically receive an email with invoices from a supplier. And let us say that you always have to save these invoices to a certain folder before processing. What if you could program your email application to just pull the attachments out and save them without you having to deal with it? Wouldn’t that save you, say, 15 seconds an email? If you’re getting 40 of those a week, every week – that’s a lot of seconds saved. Clearly, you can come up with your own ideas here.

The typical stigma is that someone who knows how to program must be a special kind of computer geek who prefers to sit in a lab and not talk to anyone all day. Yet, everyone respects said computer geek because he churns out a fine product and makes all the stuff work around the office. THEREFORE, if you could combine his skill-set with your innate ability to win friends and influence people – well then, you have won yourself a promotion.

“But Prophet!” say thee. “How would I learn to program? I cannot go back to school right now and I don’t have time after work to learn this myself.”

“FEAR NOT,” say I. “Learn VBA instead.”

VBA is a programming language built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook – the entire Office suite. This language can only be fully utilized by individuals running Windows and MS Office – which I imagine is most of your corporate lives. For the rest of you, sorry. You can learn something else.

VBA stands for “Visual BASIC for Applications.” It was initially designed as a training language for new programmers, but has since been fully integrated into Office as a customization tool. Allow me to get you started..

1. Open Word or Excel. Type a phrase for some dummy text. Then find your “Macro Editor,” which will be in a different place if you’re using Office 2003 or 2007.
2. Click Record Macro. Then, do something to the text. Highlight it, bold it, delete it. Go crazy. Then Stop Recording.
3. Make some more dummy text. Then go to Macros, and run your Macro. BAM. It will repeat the exact same stuff you just recorded, automatically. “HOLY CRAP,” you say. “I JUST PROGRAMMED.”
4. Then you say “wait, Prophet. I thought programming was all codes and variables and suchlike.” Well, you see, it is. Microsoft just created the code for you.
5. Hit Alt+F11 on your keyboard, and the VBA Editor will pop up. Then you shall see your mystical “code.” Voila. You have programme.

Granted, these are only the most basic (pun?) examples. Office allows you to create those little automated fragments of code, but you can get into much greater detail if you learn the language. This is an area where I, being a generous man, will gladly start you off on the path. If you wish for further direction in these matters, say it in the comments.

Who knows? Maybe one day, your job will depend on it.

Raghuram Rajan, the former chief economist of the IMF and a Chicago professor, has a completely different take on the U.S. recession. There are different reasons for the global recession – not all of them tied to the fact that the U.S. economy is just freaking huge – but his explanation is fantastic.

I’ll summarize Mr. Rajan’s article:

1. Wages have been growing much faster for workers in the 90th percentile of the wage distribution than those in the 50th percentile. Technology has changed rapidly since then, and growth reached fever pitch in the ’90s. Those who had the necessary skills – or the education necessary to learn those skills – could advance. If all you had to offer the American economy was the strength of your back, your job got outsourced. Just look at the chart here. If you’ve got a professional degree, you only have a 2.3% chance of being unemployed. If you only have a high school degree, that’s 9.7%.
2. Rajan: “The everyday consequence for the middle class is a stagnant paycheck and growing job insecurity. Politicians feel their constituents’ pain, but it is hard to improve the quality of education, for improvement requires real and effective policy change in an area where too many vested interests favor the status quo. Moreover, any change will require years to take effect, and therefore will not address the electorate’s current anxiety.”
3. Thus, politicians opted instead to make credit easy to come by. Rather than the middle class utilizing the new credit facilities to go back to school, they bought houses. And keep in mind that the ease of credit was aided by Fannie and Freddie, but it can’t be blamed totally on them – Glass-Steagall had to be repealed as well.
4. Rajan: “The problem, as often is the case with government policies, was not intent. It rarely is. But when lots of easy money pushed by a deep-pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, competitive, and amoral financial sector, matters get taken far beyond the government’s intent.”

Before all is said and done, we will witness the U.S. in decline in a global economy that knows how to educate its populace. Unless, of course, the government takes the steps to improve the long-term educational capabilities of our fine nation. And for all that Mr. Obama has done wrong, he at least has not wholesale supported the teachers’ union as I expected. Union-busting will help, but America had better be emotionally ready to stop “blaming the teacher” for everything that has gone wrong. The baby boomer generation supported lower expectations of their children at school and grade inflation – something that will need to go away as well.

Oh, and if you’re in the workforce now, you’d better start educating yourself on something you don’t know how to do. Chances are, your job will depend on it one day.

Author’s Note: Because George is a far superior citizen of the web than I, he tweeted about this story shortly after 10 o’clock this morning. In my defense against accusations that I am aping him, I read the article at about 7 o’clock this morning. Unfortunately, I have no good answers for those who may ask why it took me almost twelve more hours to finish a blog about it. <Insert obligatory early-bird-gets-worm/Elmer-Fudd-Daffy-Duck reference here>

I usually respond to my daily Slatest email with a quick once over; rarely do I actually click through to the full summary or to the original story. But item eleven on today’s list of twelve caught my eye with its headline More Educators Suggest Skipping College. Now that is a compelling headline. It’s one that I had to reread just to make sure it said what I thought it said. Read more…

Mr. Oliver:

I respect what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to help kids be healthy so that they don’t die of diabetes or heart attacks or something like that when they’re old. It’s an admirable goal, to be sure.

What I don’t understand, however, is your dog in the fight. You aren’t a U.S. citizen. You’re a British citizen who’s conveniently making a lot of money off this campaign. A quick look at Amazon reveals 22 books that stand to jump in sales with all of this nifty publicity. It appears that you also have a magazine, which I’m sure would do quite well in America. On my most cynical of levels, I’d say you’re just doing this for the advertising value, but let’s say I give you the benefit of the doubt and say you’re doing this with good intentions.

Even if you have good intentions, you’re still a British citizen trying to change American food policy. I can understand if a Brit was concerned about American foreign policy, but not domestic. If American habits of eating are to be changed, it needs to be an American effort. Right now, this “revolution” of yours is a Brit telling us what to do, and that’s just going to piss us off. You may be able to rally the existing troops behind you, but I assure you that you aren’t converting additional members to your cause. If you’re trying to change the habits of people who are resistant to change (conservative states are more likely to be fatter states) then you’re going to have to try something other than being a snooty, skinny Brit with a TV show.

So, Mr. Oliver, as I hail from the fattest state in the Union, allow me to give some advice for how to fix our problems.

• Go viral. You are a public figure, sir, and subject to being publicly flogged every time you screw something up. Your message is being tarnished with every single time you have failed it. Why not instead promote your “Ministry of Food” idea on a small scale? Provide free resources for people trying to be healthier. Applaud those with good ideas, even if they are your competitors. Let people take your ideas and run with them, instead of you leading the charge via petitions.
• Go local. We are fat partially because people around us are fat. Why not promote small, local communities of healthy living? Set up accountability groups that can share resources. Better yet – they could support CSAs. I would run a test group where you learn what foods will be coming in a CSA box, then you personally create a set of menus with recipes tailored for what comes in the box. If you could have cooks in each group making it quick and easy for people to start to think differently about food, you’ve done a lot already.
• Get off of the federal kick. You’ve already got half the people in this country ignoring you because you suggested to spend more money. But if you had local communities campaigning for changes in habits for just their school district – how powerful would that be?

These are merely a few suggestions. Others may provide more. I understand your concern, Mr. Oliver, but you are approaching it exactly the wrong way if you wish to produce real change. Let’s stop trying to pass new laws that would only change eating habits for schoolchildren five meals a week and move instead to slowly changing an entire food culture.

NOTE: If you’re looking for the usual pithy political punditry in this post, you won’t find it. Not this time. This is purely a self-indulgent post. You have been warned.

At the first of the year, I wrote a piece about 10 goals I have for the year 2010 – yes, you read that correctly. “Goals.” I have a personal aversion to “resolutions.” Sue me. The post was titled “10 Things I Need Your Help Doing,” so this post is just a way for me to stay accountable – it’s a good practice. If you’ll notice, my friend Codey Holland is doing it too. It’s amazing what happens to a person’s life when he knows someone out there is listening. But enough of the set-up; let’s see how I’m doing:

10. Finish the first year of graduate school

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE
• Well, it’s still April, and the spring semester is still in full swing (fuller than I’d like, actually). But my Science & Technology course went really well, and was capped off by a presentation I gave about some of the problems I think stakeholders are facing in trying to develop national standards for the smart grid. I’m pretty sure that course – and my course on the politics of public policy – will be A’s. Second semester statistics is really the elephant in the room at this point, but a project on marijuana usage based on the 2007 National Drug Use Survey data is nearing the finish line.
• NOTES: I can’t really envision this one ending badly, but just to be sure, I’ll come back and update this in a month or so when finals have passed and grades are in.

9. Travel abroad

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE
• I haven’t traveled period this year, save for a day trip by car with Emily up to Delaware to visit my brother (and parents, who had flown up from Nashville to visit him). I have, however, looked longingly at vacation packages on the Internet that I probably can’t afford, and my friend Severan (currently on the ground doing economic development work in Jinja, Uganda) have talked about a Christmastime trip to either Zanzibar or the Seychelles. Maybe it’ll happen. Yeah. Maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot (hat tip to Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi).
• NOTES: There are so many x-factors out of my control on this one (the economy, my work and class schedules, etc.) that I have to think that I’d be willing to let myself off the hook if this one isn’t realized. I think I said as much in the original post.

8. Start and finish two books by two really smart liberals

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE
• I’m totally playing the school card here. Those of you who’ve been to grad school while working full time, back me up.
• NOTES: Yeah, I know. I’m lazy.

7. Begin learning CSS

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE…sort of
• On this one, I’ve certainly spent time looking at CSS – but I’m trying to self-teach like I self-taught HTML. It isn’t going so well, and I meant to go about it differently (like, maybe buy a book and self-teach that way – see #8).
• NOTES: Does anyone in the DC area (or anywhere) want to help me learn some of this, or can you point me in the right direction? Comment below!

6. See the Nashville Predators win a 2010 playoff game at the Sommet Center in Nashville

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE…but that’s kind of okay
• I’m not ashamed to play a game of semantics, so let me say that this technically can’t ever be completed, because the Sommet Center is no more. That said, there were plenty of qualifiers baked into this particular goal, the biggest of which was the Predators making the playoffs. That has now happened, so that’ll help…I’m traveling to Nashville at the end of April/beginning of May for a few days, and it’s theoretically possible for this goal to be met then, but again, lots of things have to happen. The Predators will likely have to get out of the first round of the playoffs (which they have never done) and they’ll have to be playing in Nashville the one Saturday night I’m home. I wish my circumstances were different, but I don’t think I’ll be able to afford a return trip home if they don’t play on Saturday, May 1.
• NOTES: Like the travel goal, the x-factors involved here might just leave me with watching the 2010 playoffs unfold on television. I can think of worse fates, to be sure.

5. Do something that terrifies me, and blog about it

• STATUS: COMPLETE
• Like I said in the original post, there are a number of things that could satisfy this. But I’ll tell you that, as a huge opponent of many of the Obama Administration’s policy initiatives, I was quite terrified about going to the White House to talk transparency and open government with some senior administration officials. It’s kind of like when you’re the small kid in class, and you’re talking smack to the big bad bully in class, and when he finally turns around to hit you, you wince a little (no, I’m not speaking from personal experience, thankyouverymuch). Anyway I did it, and if you missed it, I blogged about it.
• I also started blogging for another site that I’ve been reading for a couple years, and I had my inaugural post promoted to the front page. It’s one thing to idly ramble and lob bombs from the sidelines at a rinky-dink site like this one without ever really having to care who reads it or when, but it’s quite a scary prospect to put ideas out there in a forum where you know there’ll be high readership, particularly when the ideas you’re floating out there aren’t exactly popular among a majority of the target audience.
• NOTES: I’m sure I’ll be afraid of lots more stuff this year – check back for more!

4. Spend more time with my best friend and his wife

• STATUS: COMPLETE…I think
• Let’s face it, I’m so busy in life right now that I can’t tell what day tomorrow will be some days, so I’m not exactly an accurate assessor of progress on this front. But Emily moved to town at the beginning of March (score one for yours truly!), and she lives less than a mile from Scott and Jennie. It at least feels like I’ve seen them more than I did in the fall after just having moved to Washington.
• NOTES: Even if I’m right on this one, there’s always room for improvement in being a better friend to my best friend. We talked today about taking a trip to Atlantic City this summer, or seeing Phish play a two-night engagement in Columbia, MD. Either would be epic in scope, not only for the awesomeness of activity but for the company of a friend for life.

3. Have something to celebrate on April 30

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE
• It’s not April 30 yet, so I can’t really be faulted for this one. This goal has a lot of personal meaning for me that I’m not really comfortable sharing in the public sphere, so suffice it to say that nothing has happened that would preclude me from celebrating something on April 30.
• NOTES: None, really. Of myself I am nothing. The Father doeth the works.

2. Get involved in a political campaign or issue campaign

• STATUS: COMPLETE
• I’ve gotten in touch with both the Campaign for Liberty and the Libertarian Party about volunteering for some events. Seems I missed the CPAC boatload of opportunities to volunteer, and I’m not sure what else the two organizations have planned for the year. Hopefully something will come down the pike, but for now I’ve done all I can do.
• I’m also going to make a shameless plug here for my girlfriend Emily. She is currently raising money to help the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society fight blood cancer, and is competing in a swath of athletic events in 2010 in memory of a childhood friend of hers who died of cancer and in honor of a former colleague of hers who has been in remission for almost 5 years, thanks to a revolutionary treatment developed with funding from LLS. As of this writing, Emily still has $800 to go in her fundraising drive, so if you owe me a favor for anything please follow this link and make a 100% tax-deductible, secure online donation of your choosing. She has worked very hard and has raised almost $10,000 in 12 months for LLS – doing my best Barack Obama impression, “I need your help to bring this across the finish line.”
• NOTES: Please donate to Emily’s fundraising campaign, even if it’s only $10. Fighting deadly blood cancer is a great cause, and LLS has had great success with the research they have funded with generous contributions like yours.

1. Shed 20 lbs. by July 19

• STATUS: INCOMPLETE
• It’s actually taken an embarrassingly long time for me to get off my duff and start attacking this one. I tried unsuccessfully at the beginning of the year to change my diet some, but I wasn’t exercising. I’ll say that now that it’s warm out and Emily has finally moved here and can train with me, I’ve been on the bike a couple times a week for about a month now, and much to my chagrin, I’ve been tricked into distance running again. This initiative is just sort of getting off the ground, but if I’m extra-vigilant I can probably pull it off (I hope).
• NOTES: We’ll have to check back on this one. I started out at nearly 210 lbs, which is not a bad weight for my height…if I was a professional hockey player, which clearly I am not. If I can get down to 190-195 lbs range, I’ll be pretty happy with that, even if it isn’t 20+ lbs.

Thanks for reading and for following my journey to becoming a more useful and productive citizen – I’ll have another review after June!

I return from The Dutch Campaign quite surprised. While I thought I was capturing new lands for Americana, I find that Lady Gaga conquered them before me and Katy Perry is now acting as viceroy. Drake, apparently, is the court jester. I toasted their victory in the name of the Good King Obama and went on my merry way, off to plot the next campaign.

But on a more serious note, the trip was quite enlightening. I shall try to capture its essence here, in bullet form.

• I read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food during the flight over. If you haven’t read that book and are concerned about your long-term health, I highly recommend grabbing a copy. It’s only about 200 pages of honest reading (then copious footnotes and acknowledgements), so you can knock it out quickly. Pollan goes over quite a few concerns, but his argument is focused around the idea that we have replaced “food” with “products derived from food” and that this may be responsible for many of the health problems Americans face today.
• The Amsterdammers have a good thing going with this whole “biking” thing. It’s made the city extremely accessible to any tourist, has cut down on the need for ugly apparatus in the form of gas stations, and makes the whole place much more pleasant to be around. In true Pigovian form, the government has not restricted vehicle access to the city but merely made it unpleasant to do so. Parking is 5 euro for one hour, so if you’re going to park you’d better be willing to pony up. There are no stoplights in the center of the city, but merely on the middle-outer areas. Pedestrians and bikes always have the right-of-way. Plenty of Dutch have cars, but it’s hard to take them into the city. I am pro-this.
• Marijuana, mushrooms and various other hallucinogens were evident, but not blatant or in your face. If you didn’t know “coffee shop” meant “pot is sold here,” you’d probably only be able to identify marijuana outlets by the smell of smoke. And the Dutch are not just walking around smoking pot everywhere. It’s restricted to the coffee shops, where most of the crowd is the same people that smoke pot in America: young college kids or artists. The “smart shops” where mushrooms and other herbal substances are sold felt like strange Godiva Chocolate stores. No lie.
• Prostitution is a bit more obvious, but you’d still have to be really looking for it. De Wallen (the Red Light District) is only about two blocks wide, and you know pretty quickly when you’re there. All glass windows and doors with prostitutes “advertising.” For the curious among you, the standard rate is 100 euro for one hour. We asked. It’s a business trip, so we had an excuse to be curious.
• The Dutch are a little extreme with their labor laws, but it does not seem to be impacting business. For starters, the law is written such that it is extremely difficult to fire an individual. However, there is nothing prohibiting an employer from hiring employees on a one year temporary basis to try out new hires. The ones who are go-getters rise to the top. The ones who aren’t don’t make it past grunt work. We talked to a few bosses about that, and it didn’t seem like the labor force was very different than America (i.e. they aren’t the French). It just seemed like a different process.
• Their health care is slightly more solved than ours, but not by much. They’re rocking some good ideas over there, but the underlying conditions are much better for the Dutch. They aren’t fat. They’re active. They move and walk a lot. They really love sports, preferably of the football, skating or field hockey varieties. They’re in good shape. Their eating habits suck by our dietitians’ standards, but they just burn it all off and maintain great metabolisms. I don’t know if we could replicate their health care system here without the same conditions. That being said, it made me more supportive of the First Lady’s anti-obesity initiative, which I hope works much more than her husband’s current health care bill.
• The Dutch seem to work hard. They cut their workweek off at 40 hours, but they go hard for that 40 hours.
• Culture generally believes that most people are too stupid (i.e. they don’t care enough and think they should play with fire) to own and manage their own stock portfolios. This excited me to no end, as it is (full disclosure) what I believe. All their investors in publicly traded companies are activist investors, and you don’t piss off your activist investors.
• Tolerance, pragmatism, mutual understanding – these are more than buzzwords for the Dutch. I spoke to a seminary student there who would be considered very conservative, even by American standards. Among other things, he did not believe women should be heads of churches. But his tone was vastly different. It is difficult to convey how different in a blog post. I will attempt to condense it thus: at no point did he indicate by words or actions that he had been granted authority to speak for God. He talked a lot about how he interpreted Scripture, and what he thought God was saying, but he did not try to place ultimate faith in his own words. In a word: the man was humble. This culture of tolerance extended to the marijuana use and prostitution – yes, we’ll let you do it, provided that you allow it to be contained in these areas so that it isn’t a problem for those who don’t want to be around it. It works.
• The Dutch, however, seem to be struggling with Islam. From our guide’s description, the Netherlands picked up a fair amount of Arabic/Islamic immigrants a decade or two ago and is beginning to have some problems. A Dutch filmmaker was killed in the street by a Muslim man who felt his films were offensive to Islam, provoking a right-wing politician to go on a tirade against Muslim immigration. The Dutch feel that first generation Muslim immigrants are not assimilating into the culture (not learning Dutch or English), even though the second and third generation immigrants are almost fully assimilated. It seems they are struggling between maintaining a neighborly and inviting culture, despite the consequences – or putting their foot down and requiring more of immigrants, which would solve the current problems but might cause them to lose something in the long run.
• They like us. The Dutch generally like the Americans, though they think we can be a little silly at times. They really like our global warming politicians (Gore and the like), mainly because the Netherlands is already flooding and would be the first to go if global warming theories are correct. They like Obama, and were neutral toward Bush. They did have the highest per capita military contributions of all Europe to Afghanistan and Iraq, doing it mainly because we asked. They joked with us and wanted to learn from us just as much as we wanted to learn from them.

So there it is: my trip to the Netherlands, in 2000 words or less. Among all the things I learned in a quick week, the top was this: I am not listening hard enough. People are talking. It is wise to learn from them for the production of “epic wins” in the future.

The Dutch are a strange people, strange in the sense that their actions seem to be performed in the name of logic, pragmatism, and the idea that their neighbor is worthy of respect. Just this fine day I learned a chunk of Dutch religious history that told me a lot about their overall culture. After the Protestants swept into royal power, the Catholics decided their heads were best served by going into hiding. Rather than try to exterminate the minority, the Protestants literally said “whatevs,” and just let them keep practicing their not-so-secret religion. This seem to result in considerably less stress, and the country appears none the worse for having both Catholics and Protestants.

Among the other curiosities I have noted:

The Catholic unmarried women have their own apartment complex, complete with church. Not a nunnery, as men can come and go as they please.

The types of people you see in coffee shops are the types of people who enjoy the herb in America – generally young, college-looking, artsy-looking, and the sort. Also, tourists. And Bill Clinton, but he doesn’t inhale.

Their version of the magical bean is not the drip coffee, but rather an americano. It is served in small cups, and I have spent many a euro on it.

Things are strangely cheap here, both in euro and dollar terms. Shirts at department stores are advertised for €10, roughly what you might pay in the U.S. China likes them more, I suppose.

More to come, but the Dutch seem worthy of assimilation when I return to conquer with my army of followers.

The “E” section at the Atlanta must stand for Eeenternational, for flights from all manner of foreign cities arrive here.

I see a gentleman in front of me apparently of Middle Eastern descent carrying a USPS express mail package. This raises serious questions in my mind regarding the efficiency of the Postal Service, if they have resorted to hand carrying mail like a 2010 Pony Express, without the horses. (or maybe with the horses, who knows)

I also see a trendy cashmere-scarf-wearing European individual with a look of ennui on his face so potent even I feel bored. Be grateful you aren’t in Jersey, sir, and have instead landed in one of God’s territories in Georgia.

Also punctuating my amusement is the look on the face of all international travelers upon visiting the “Mickey D’s,” now a piece of world culture and far more familiar than what we call Chinese food. These travelers, expecting the puny portions of their home country’s Golden Arches, seem astonished when the triple layer burger and large fries come out to rock their faces. In that moment of cognizance, the first time traveler realizes why Americans have waistlines the size of Greece’s deficit (sans austerity).

Now, I must return to the digestion of my Qdoba Queso Burrito, which will require both my conscious and subconscious mind to be assimilated.

Tomorrow morning at some ungawdly hour, I will be leaving for the tropical clime of Amsterdam. I will be clad in cowboy boots and Springsteen shirts, mostly because I hear that Europeans are totally excited when an American comes around being super-American. I might even bring a Captain America shield. What of it?

All that being said, I have a bone to pick with the executives at Staples and Universal Pictures there, as well as the U.S./European trade economist based at the embassy. See, they roll out the red carpet for me when I am coming to town, like when Jay-Z goes to Washington. The casino is also prepared for me, as I intend to finance most of my trip and the rest of my college education by leveraging my existing student loans. Only good decisions and humility occur when I head to Europe, and you may see me on the news preaching my wisdom to throngs of citizens a la Reagan or The Obama Himself.

Among the things that interest me about the fair city of Amsterdam are the supremely efficient sea containment system, which apparently works so well that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to consult them when needing to rebuild the New Orleans levees. I am equally inquisitive about their health care system, which is privatized like the American system but (apparently) with much less complaining. I intend to investigate the complaining as well. I will also be intrigued by the beverage of choice (gin), which they apparently like to age and then drink neat. I intend to study this “jenever” while also studying the local “futbol” culture. I am an academic in all things, see.

I would like to say that I will be able to contribute to this fine website whilst abroad, but I have no intention of letting blogging interrupt my business or cultural studies. I hope to read much of the fine writings of Mr. Scoville and Ms. Krintz upon return, and I hope they keep you entertained while I am away. Until then, keep rocking in the free world.