Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Time for some lazy, random linkage....

:: In major news, certain to push Iraq, SARS, and North Korea off the front pages, Peter Mayhew has been signed to reprise his role as Chewbacca in Star Wars Episode III. Rumors that Chewie will be doing the "Who's On First" routine with Jar Jar Binks are apparently unfounded, although producer Rick McCallum refuses to rule out those two characters performing a version of Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch.

Rumors are also unfounded that Callista Flockhart has been signed to play Han Solo's mother.

:: SDB is wondering just what happens if terrorists find a way to take out a significant number of US Representatives. His solution is to allow Governors to appoint Representatives in the event of their demise, as opposed to holding special elections, which would not really be a tenable solution if enough of them were to be done in at the same time, as SDB envisions. Of course, in the event of, say, the slaying of the entire New York Congessional delegation, I'm not sure I'd want Governor Pataki naming a full slate of Republicans, but extraordinary times would probably call for extraordinary measures.

And besides, if such a catastrophic disaster were to befall the United States, it seems to me the Constitution might end up being set aside for a while.

:: Some writers have chosen the best adventure books of all time. I'm not sure I'd call The Perfect Storm an adventure book, though.

:: Best Boondocks ever.

:: Mike Finley talks a bit about teamwork, probably the most popular management concept in recent years. If you've worked in pretty much any corporate setting at all in the last decade, chances are you've had to attend at least one seminar/meeting/pow-wow related to how wonderful teamwork is and how it can make things better. Of course, that's true, but of all the organizations I worked in, "teamwork" either happened or it didn't based on how the immediate supervisor behaved, and it generally had little to do with the people on the team. I saw the same group of people function as a cohesive unit under one manager, only to become back-stabbing twits under a different one. So I generally thought that maybe the corporate trainers' time would be better spent getting the managers together and teaching them about how to foster teamwork, instead of gathering the employees and lecturing them about it.

The funniest thing was that in the organization where I worked where teamwork was always bad, one of upper management's attempts to change this was to change management titles. So we no longer had "Managers", but "Coaches". That's right. Our "District Manager" became our "District Coach"; the "Training Manager" was now the "Training Coach", et cetera. As if by changing the person's title, you somehow change the person. Uh-huh.

:: Invoking Senator Santorum's logic, I suppose I could claim that I have no problem at all with murderers, as long as they don't actually kill anybody. (No link, since links to the whole Santorum affair can pretty much be found by randomly clicking just about any of the people on my blogroll.)

:: According to the Ecosystem, I am currently a "Crawly Amphibian". I'd sure love to move up the evolutionary ladder, people....hint, hint....(William Burton is a "Large Mammal" -- four levels above me -- and he hasn't written a single post in over two months! Ach, the pain....)

:: And finally, in other major news, I'm taking a breather from blogging for the rest of today and tomorrow. I'll probably return with even more stunning content on Sunday.