Monday, January 15, 2018

Sunday scorecard (finished early Monday morning)

I'm sitting here on an early Sunday morning pondering the upcoming exhaustion.  The 3rd week of the first month of tax season is not a week where I should or normally would be working on six of the seven days; yet that's the schedule.  Fortunately, two of those days are mercifully short days of less than four hours.

Is this due to the changes in the tax laws?  No.  Merely trying to accommodate the needs of my clients and the fact that I have clients out of two different offices.  But it's going to be a very busy week when it wouldn't normally be this bad.  Harbinger of things to come?  Probably.  Time to power through.

* * *

The kerfuffle over the disparity in pay between Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams looks to be resolved by his announcement that he will donate the $1.5 million he received in the name of Michelle Williams to the Times Up movement.

The question in my mind is to what degree he was or wasn't involved in the negotiations over the fee for the reshoots.  I suspect his involvement was minimal.  His "people" probably saw an opportunity to leverage some money for their client and they took advantage of it.

In any event, his donation was a smart move.

* * *

Hawaiians got a nasty surprise yesterday.  They received a warning that there was a ballistic missile heading toward their island.  That was at 8:07 a.m.  At 8:20 a.m., the Emergency Management Agency (EMA) tweeted out a message that this was a false alarm.  But it took until 8:45 that EMA again sent out a notification to mobile devices that this had been a false alarm.

So how did it happen?  Someone pushed the wrong button.  And then confirmed their error?

That's the part I don't get.  That one person can send out the warning makes sense.  Sometimes we have only one person in a position to put out the message that there is something dire about to transpire.  But how do you push the wrong button twice?

How do you not have a protocol in place to deal with a false alarm is also a question that needs an answer.

* * *

Once again someone is saying that their unacceptable comments were "taken completely out of context.  This time it is a 25 year old British model named Jo Marney.  She was dating the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Henry Bolton.  She made a number of offensive remarks regarding Meghan Markle.  You can see the context for yourself.


Out of context?  Hardly.