Still life

The following video by Oren Lavie for the song 'Her Morning Elegance' (from the album The Opposite Side of the Sea) was made using thousands of still photographs that were taken over the course of two days by Israeli photographer Eyal Landesman. I think the visuals match the tone of the lyrics incredibly well.



From Oren's MySpace page blog: "Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets."

It's a relentless deluge!

It has been raining since yesterday afternoon. The weather is downright depressing, and I would so rather be lying in bed with a good book. Speaking of which - hooray for Neil Gaiman winning the Newbury award for The Graveyard Book! I plan on going out and buying the book to share with my son, since he recently picked out a couple of titles in R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series, and swears that spooky stuff doesn't phase him. I think I'll remember that for the first time he watches Poltergeist, and hides all of his stuffed animals in his closet like I did when I was little. A five foot tall polar bear is no different than a demon-posessed clown doll when you're seven.

I'm having some serious issues with the local news station coverage of the Superbowl. I'm very underwhelmed by football, as a general rule, but I can understand people getting excited for the "big game" - I often get this way during the Stanley Cup championship. (And don't get me wrong - I'm obviously rooting for the Steelers, cause yinz know that's how I roll.) But the amount of pandering and the levels of tabloid "journalism" that the news stations here are achieving is almost mind boggling. I lost track of how much time one of the news channels spent on both of their evening broadcasts last night highlighting the "celebrities" sighted around town in advance of this weekend. One female features reporter spent several minutes gushing over and attached to the arm of the lead singer of Lifehouse. She looked positively star struck and it was the most awkward and unprofessional piece of television news I had witnessed in a while (outside of everything and anything aired on the Today show in recent memory - that program is the proverbial televised trainwreck). Not to mention the poor singer looked mortified. He ket pulling away as if to flee in terror as she stared at him in rapt (and disturbingly transparent and creepy) infatuation and kept talking about how amazing their performance was. Lady, c'mon, I mean...it's Lifehouse. If that's one of the best shows you've ever been to you really need to get out more.

My project list keeps expanding. Every time I get a little bit ahead, someone comes by and dumps something else in my lap. I got called into a meeting with the head of my new (but not quite official) department, only to be sent on my merry way with a mousepad and apron emblazoned with the company logo when he realized that I had already seen the presentation he was about to give to the new team member (she gave me chocolates this morning...already attempting to buy my complicity). What am I going to do with a company apron? Use it as a hankie to wipe away the tears when the next budget cut comes, as I'm watching my chances for any salary increase fade into oblivion while my workload increases to inhumane levels that could prompt protests by human rights organizations?

What can solve this funk? Perhapse kittens scooting around on a Roomba?

Oh look, shiny...

This morning during yet another parent/teacher conference regarding my son's apparent problems with following directions and focusing, the teacher roused the dreaded spectre of the possibility of ADHD. I am a firm believer that this "syndrome" is over diagnosed (there are obvious cases, and those children who need pharmeceutical intervention, but there are also those parents who just want a way to make their children easier to deal with), and it's probable that there are many children who are chronically over medicated as a result. But - this lack of ability to pay attention and focus and tendancy to "space out" is frustrating, and causing continued problems at school, and nothing that has been done in the classroom or at home has served to turn it around as of yet. In fact, if anything, we think it's getting worse. My son fits part of the profile of a child afflicted with the "AD" part of the diagnosis: male, under the age of seven, progressive issues with inattention and inability to stay on task which causes problems at school/home. I'm making an appointment with the pediatrician for next week, so that he can be evaluated. I think that we can work on some more issues of routine and expectation at home which might help there, but right now we're at a loss as to how to help him at school. The teacher has moved him out of group work to minimize those distractions, but now he's dawdling and being inattentive to work assignments - something that should take him a few minutes may take him the better part of an hour and usually ends up taking time away from other activities that he generally likes (like computer lab). He's had trouble with writing, mostly because he doesn't seem to enjoy it, but he can read a couple of grade levels ahead and is making improvements in math, as well, so he's definitely a smart cookie in the academic sense and the teacher thinks that he could be quite an accelerated learner if he was able to focus more. I want to insist that he just needs to be more disciplined about his work habits, but a part of me deep down agrees with the teacher, in that some of this may be out of his control. I just want to be sure that we're taking the right steps and not going to do any lasting harm.

SILENCE!

Some puppet language may not be safe for work - also not safe for the culturally sensitive:

How to take over the world

With Janitor's taxidermied legions:



Or with the help of a little genetic manipulation:

The door is ajar...the door is ajar...the door is ajar...

I hate petty and pointless dramatics. Seriously. Everyone up here is all angsty about this secured door problem. I've already talked to the manager of the department I'm having to share space with about this once. I get the need for the secure access, and that the door shouldn't be left unlocked. So thanks to my boss and my new coworker for unlatching it and leaving it unlocked all damn day yesterday while they wandered in and out, causing the HR manager to bellow "Maus, the door's unlocked" in the afternoon. When I wasn't even up here (I had to hear about it from someone else...)! Because you know - everything that happens is automatically my fault. So eff this. I'll use the front door, and they'll look up every time to see if I'm a customer in need of assistance, and it'll get to the point of ridiculousness - in fact I think I'll take a few extra trips downstairs for good measure - and they'll eventually ask me to use the back door again.

Torches & pitchforks are not cumpulsory

I just found out that the new "team member", my new coworker who started yesterday, makes almost double what I make. And apparently that was the offer to the previous candidate, too. Only I never had time to find out the offered salary before she opted out.

Murphy's Law

Since my husband and I had yesterday off (long holiday weekends are what I live for), we'd originally planned to go fishing, but we thought it was going to be kind of chilly so we decided to run some errands instead. I returned a couple of books I'd bought over the weekend at Borders (one I'd already read and forgotten and the other was part of a series and I hadn't read the previous book), and my husband decided that he wanted to see if B&N carried a book he was looking for, so we went across the street. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, I could tell that something was wrong. The transmission wouldn't stay in gear - it was stuck in neutral. My husband spent the next few minutes frantically placing calls to our mechanic and the shop's towing company, and trying to track down anyone we knew who could drop him back at the house to pick up his truck. My sister-in-law was able to help before she went into work, thank goodness. I rode to the shop with the tow truck, and it took a few minutes for the mechanic to temporarily fix the transmission linkage that had snapped. He ordered the parts, and offered to keep the car overnight to do the full repair instead of trying to schedule a time later in the week (we had just had the car there on Saturday for an oil change and to repair an a/c vent). We expect the repair to cost at least $300. Money we really don't have since my husband's part-time radio job was put on hold by management. We even cancelled our vacation this summer because we don't know how our finances will fare through this year, and we've started to cut back on a lot of non-essentials. Not to mention that our couch broke again last night - we'd already fixed it once, so we're probably going to have to bite the bullet and just get a new couch. Which, of course, we don't have the money for right now.

So today, as I'd mentioned last week, I am babysitting an office other than my own. How this agreement transpired, I'm still not entirely sure, but I'm even less happy about it today than I was when my boss told me about it last week. When I got here, I forgot that the new restaurant that just opened last week in our cafeteria already decided to change their hours so that they aren't open until 10:00 am. I really wanted coffee first thing, and that annoyed me. Then, I walked over to the office I was assigend to cover, right at 8:00 am on the dot, and the door was locked. The department is considered "secure", meaning that the doors have to be unlokced by card key access. I couldn't get in the building until one of the regular staff members opened up the building. Which, you'd think, they'd be timely about considering someone was taking time away from their work to be here to provide office support. So I walked over to my building, on a mission to find coffee, where I saw that the old boss's assistant wasn't at her post, which meant that there would be no coffee there, and met up with my boss at the elevator. She told me to ignore the email she'd just sent about wanting me to shepherd the new member of the budgets team around on her first day, because she *forgot* that she'd agreed to have me work in the other department today. I went up to the CEO's suite in my continued search for coffee, only to discover a full pot that had been left to sit the whole extended weekend. I was now 0 for 3 on the caffeine front, so I went over to my office to check my email, then at about ten after I wandered back downstairs to see if the doors were unlocked at the CCC. Nope. So I decided that I needed to heed the commands of my stomach, and opted for junk food from the vending machines in the break area (I wonder why I have a hard time losing weight :eyeroll:). When I walked back over and tried the door again, it was a quarter after, and it was still locked. I had started to walk away when the new supervisor opened the door for me. I'm pretty sure she saw me wave my arms in frustration a second before in the universal sign for "WTF is the deal here, people?!". Good. I was in a pretty sour mood by this point, and I was only fifteen minutes into my day. I'm just here so that someone is fielding phone calls, so the phone has been quiet (except for a call from the regular receptionist, and a personal call for the regular receptionist), and I'm watching the inaugural festivities that the company is streaming on the network from the CNN broadcast (holy crap - look at the teeming masses just packed into the capitol) while I play catch-up on a huge accounts receivable database. My life is so action packed and exciting, I know...

I don't have access to my email today, because I'm logged into another workstation down here, so I just checked my messages during my "break". Boy am I sorry I bothered. Talk about cluster - let me lay the scene for you: two months ago, during a recruitment drive, our PR and Marketing department offered iPods as incentives. I was appointed the task of purchasing a silver shuffle for the raffle winner, and Marketing would ship it to the winner. Well, at the time I was in the middle of a huge project with strict deadlines, not to mention the lectures my current boss gave me every time I took on a task that should have been given to another, less busy, member of the staff, so I forwarded the request from Marketing to my supervisor explaining that I needed that job to be assigned to someone else who didn't have giant financial project deadlines looming. I never got a response back, but I got busy and pretty much forgot about it after that. Fast forward to late last week: I got a voicemail from someone in Marketing following up on the status of the raffle prize. I found out today, after receiving three more calls and one email about it, that the boss never reassigned that project (he probably didn't even open the email I sent) and the shuffle was never ordered. Just now the executive assistant grilled me on what needed to be done, saying that Marketing said that I confirmed I had ordered the item. This is patently false - they would have had the shuffle to mail to the raffle winner well before now if I'd ordered it. I'm going to be pretty pissed if this relatively trivial little thing becomes a giant issue. Which, knowing Marketing, it will.

Voicemail: the Devil's tool

I decided to work a half day today (well, in reality, it was actually more like a one-thirds day...), to get some work done so that it's not waiting for me into next week when I'm providing office coverage for another department. When I got here, there were 17 missed calls on my phone! All from the same four people. I fielded five calls in the first hour that I was here this afternoon, and I've been avoiding checking my voicemeil for fear of what depths of stupid await me there. Don't even get me started on the idiotic nature of the emails I've been getting lately - mostly in the vein of "How do I get such and such access set up?". The people asking are either supervisors with their own clerical admin support, or those same support members who've worked here for a while and should know how to navigate a damn website. I mean, my six year old can utilize a search tool, why can't they?

The long awaited return of two of my favorite shows is imminent: Battlestar Galactica premiers the final season tonight, and Lost comes back next Wednesday.

My sister (the one still in high school who is about to get her learner's permit) is coming over tonight. We're going to the mall, and I'll be using a Borders giftcard I got for Christmas to load up on reading material (thanks Mom!). I have to check my Amazon wish list before we go, so I don't simply impulse buy and end up with a bunch of books I end up not wanting to read.

Speaking of reading material...I don't consider myself much of a fan of the burgeoning eBook phenomenon. I think the technology is...interesting, but I'm one of those people who finds the idea of reading abook from a computer monitor, or even worse, a tiny led screen on a cell phone or Amazon's Kindle device, really unappealing. Give me a comfortable spot to read, a cup of peppermint tea, and an interesting book to while away my time on a rainy day, and I'm halfway to heaven. That being said, however, I have found myself really enjoying the heck out of the the wiki Gutenberg Project, which takes countless classic literary works that are currently within the public domain and makes them available for download or in text preview, for free. There are also more contemporary works that are covered by current copyrights and are for sale for download. While I will not download a novel to read - I can't imagine wasting the ink and paper for something like that - this project can be useful for browsing and for finding specific content within the novels and literature available, without having to purchase it published and bound. It's also interesting to look at the 'Top 100' lists and see what other people have downloaded.

Who doesn't like something for nothing?

National retailers will be giving away $175-million in cosmetics for a week, starting Jan. 20th, as part of a class action settlement as a result of a suit alledging price fixing on beauty products that was filed on behalf of consumers five years ago. Shoppers will be able to get one free item per person on a first come, first served basis while supplies last from several national retail stores. The available products will include body lotions, shower gels, night creams and mascara from brand names like Estée Lauder, Clinique, Lancome, Chanel and Christian Dior at Macy’s, Dillard’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Nieman Marcus and Target stores across the nation.

To get the free goods, consumers must sign a registry saying they made a cosmetics purchase between 1994 to 2003. No other proof of purchase is required.

For more information, as well as a more comprehensive list of items that will be part of the give away, see the official website.

The second circle

So I just stood and listened to the assistant to the company CEO air her grievances to me for a good fifteen minutes. I commiserated with her, nodded my head at the appropriate times, and said "Oh, sure, I understand completely" when it seemed like a good response. And I really do have both empathy and sympathy, to a point. But this is the executive assistant to the biggest fish in the pond - she has access to more perks and her title garners her more potential respect than I'll ever see in my time spent here no matter how long that may end up being. Because she chose to allow the previous CEO to skip merrily along wearing blinders and didn't warn her of the various issues ensnaring the administration like a giant ravenous beast from the dark fathoms of corporate politics, her old boss effectively got sh*tcanned, and her new boss is the hand now wielding the axe. Unless she can prove to them she is both capable and willing to do the work (with little complaint), she may not make it through this next wave of budget cuts. As it is, they're shifting her out to reception, which she's slightly insulted about. I think she's learned a lesson about priorities and what little reward comes with certain types of corporate sacrifice, though.

I've been thinking a lot since last week about something my new boss said to me, kind of off hand, about transitioning some of my duties to the staff downstairs. She told me that HR had reminded her that with reorganizations and restructuring, we had to be mindful of people's workloads when assigning them new duties, and to make sure these duties were written into job descriptions. This ticked me off, mainly because for the last two years no one has been bothered to show any "concern" about my workload or the extra duties that were assigned to me with no compensation (and in direct conflict with company financial oversight policies). I was pretty blunt in relating to her the fact that I am doing more to make sure that the staff taking on little pieces of my old duties are trained and have as much information and resources available as possible to do what they are being asked to do than I was ever afforded when I became the business manager. It really irks me to continue feeling like my whole working life centers on the expectation of making things easier for everyone else. I have no official job description...I have not pushed the issue of salary equity...I'm in corporate limbo doing work for two different divisions...and I was "volunteered" by my new boss to work the front desk of another department for part of next week, because it would be cheaper and "more convenient" than having anyone else do it or hiring a temp for two days. Yeah. So other people's feelings are a concern to me, why, exactly?

Ugh. Now my old boss's assistant is bothering me about paperwork that is part of a filing project that I've been kind enough to do even though it was really not my freaking job and kept me (hi - random sentence fragment...I need a proofreader/editor sometimes). The project is not done yet (I was very clear in conveying that another department's filing issues were not a particualr priority of mine), and she seems to have a problem with that. Well, she can just as easily do it as I can, so if she starts to hassle me, I'm hassling her back. Not like the woman has much of anything else to do all damn day.

Sheesh. The more things change, the more they really just don't.

News you can use

Because I love Norse mythology, news of the potential release of a version of the tale of Sigurd written by JRR Tolkien prior to penning the Lord of the Rings trilogy is kind of exiting to me:

"Despondent Tolkien fans forced to wait until at least 2010 for the release of the film version of The Hobbit will be cheered by the news that the author's previously unpublished retelling of a Norse legend also adapted by Wagner to create the Ring cycle is to be published for the first time this May.

Tolkien put the tales of Sigurd the Völsung and the fall of the Niflungs into narrative verse while he was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford during the 1920s and 1930s - before he wrote his most famous works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which have sold 150m copies worldwide."

if you're a lit nerd like me you can read more about it courtesy of The Guardian

Joss Whedon has announced the return of Dr. Horrible! I am so excited by the possibility I can hardly stand it, but the interview I read made it clear that it may not be the same story or format as the trilogy of shorts that were released last year to much acclaim by fanboys (and fangirls). Still waiting for my Firefly season 2, thank you muchly, Mr. Whedon (No, Serenity doesn't count - I can't bring myself to even watch it).

I WILL however watch anything Nathan Fillion does. Any. Thing.





And last - and most certainly least - talk about biting the hand that feeds you:

Sarah Palin is credited with making Tina Fey a world-wide star and boosting Katie Couric's ratings at CBS.
But in a recent interview with conservative John Ziegler, Palin said both "exploited" her twelve-week candidacy — a fact, she said, that "says a great deal about our society.”
Fey's widely-applauded portrayal of the Alaska governor boosted SNL's ratings, while Couric’s audience grew after a series of interviews during which Palin now-famously faltered.
“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen," Palin said in the interview. "I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration — that’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”
The Alaska governor was particularly upset with an SNL skit during which Fey's version of Palin said, "I believe marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers."
The line was a clear reference to Palin's 18-year-old daughter Bristol and her fiancé Levi Johnston. The two announced shortly before the GOP convention that they were expecting a baby and had plans to marry.
"The mama grizzly rises up in me, hearing things like that," she said of a skit. "Here again, cool, fine come attack me. But when you make a suggestion like that that attacks a kid, it kills me."
In the wide-ranging interview, Palin also faulted the McCain campaign for agreeing to a series of sit-downs with Couric after the first one appeared to go so poorly.

“I knew it didn’t go well the first day, and then we gave her a couple of other segments after that," she said. "And my question to the campaign was, after it didn’t go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more…going back for more was not a wise decision either.”
During one of those follow-up interviews, Palin took heat for appearing to be unable to name the newspapers or magazines she reads: "Um of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years," was the Alaska governor's response.
In the interview with Ziegler, Palin called that answer "too flippant" and suggested the question itself offended her.
“To me the question was more along the lines of, ‘Do you read, what do you guys do up there, what is it that you read?’”
"…Katie, you’re not the center of everybody’s universe," Palin added off-handedly.
Palin, who has long criticized media coverage of her campaign performance, also said she is interested to see if reporters are equally tough on Caroline Kennedy as she pursues the appointment to the likely-vacant Senate seat in New York.
“I’ve been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled, and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope,” she said.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here, also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be," she also said.

Awwww. Poor widdle Sarah Palin. She's sooo exploited by those gosh darn MSM elite! You know what lady? Grow up, man up, grow a pair - do whatever is necessary to get over the fact that you allowed yourself to portray to the public a persona that could be so easily - and mercilessly - parodied and mocked. You're going to make this about class?! Yeah. Okay. As if you had any...

(and yes, I'm aware that she's referring to the socioeconomic definition of "class", wich is equally ridiculous, because she likes to play off that she's some symbol of the struggles of the middle class, which couldn't be further from the truth).

Well, to cheer myself up I'm watching a Monty Python's Flying Circus marathon, and I'm craving junk food.

The miracles of modern technology...

I am not IT. I have never been, nor will I ever be a computer expert. But there is one thing I know, and that is the basic concept of a network connection. In my company you can have two email profiles - one for your branch and one for the main corporate entity. Because of server limitations on this campus that inhibit certain types of calendar sharing, most people have shifted to having their branch email refer directly to their corporate email so that Outlook's calendaring functions can be fully utilized. That means that almost everyone's main email accounts are connected to the corporate network, which stores the data from a server located at the headquarters in another city. The server "hiccups" several times a week, which causes Outlook to essentially go offline, sometimes for as little as a couple of minutes although it has in the past been down for days at a time. Even though these events happen quite often - and have since I can remember - the connection problem causes some kind of mass panic every single time. So I just had the following conversation:

*General rabble from the HR warrens about having trouble accessing email and contacting our campus IT to fix it*

Me, stepping out into the hall and addressing the receptionist: "The server is down. Our IT can't fix it - it's not their server".

HR manager, looking confused: "What does that mean?"

Me: "The server for the corporate email is physically located at headquarters. They'll restore the connection once they realize it is down. Our IT can't do it."

HR manager, still obviously confused: "Oh"

No sooner than I step back into my office than the phone rings. When I answer it, I am told - not asked politely, but ordered - by a member of the support staff to open my email. When I politely explain that I cannot because the server is down, I get grilled on why and how and within the span of about five minutes, I have explained twice how the connection to the server glitches and people can call corporate to complain if they want, but our IT here is powerless to do a thing. I'm sure this will not be the last time I have to explain that to someone.

I'm sitting here listen to someone who makes a considerable amount more than I do with a nice sounding title complain to HR about how overworked they are and they don't have time to do this and that...my new boss has already begun giving me work that this person is "too busy" to do. Like faxes to request to set up a new account that would take less than a minute to send. Once it is faxed it gets taken care of by corporate in a matter of days - if the information on the form is correct. It wasn't, which I spotted as soon as I saw it. But because for whatever reason people who get paid to know about these little details don't bother, it took a number of days of me taking the time to make phone calls back and forth to get it straight. There are rumors flying around that people are getting raises. The gossip is being perpetuated by the people supposedly getting said raises, who have supposedly been informed by their bosses. One of them is my former boss's assistant, who is also getting new furniture, chair and computer, and got employee of the month for "answering the phones". I'm being told by my new boss that without a degree, no matter the level of work I'm willing to do, her hands are tied. "The system" won't allow a promotion or a pay increase as compensation. Ooookay. So my motivation to take on more is what exactly, when others are seemingly going to be compensated for basically just bothering to show up every day? And she's baaaack. The boss's old assistant has an appointment scheduled with him this afternoon. I wonder what deals she's got up her sleeve this time around...

The HR manager just announced that she got her email back. Oh thank GOD! I can relax knowing that parties will be planned and meaningless morale initiatives will be organized.

Embrace the chaos

First, resolutions for the new year:

• I will not exhaust myself lamenting the inherent unfairness of the impossible systems and biased policies that dominate my nine to five
• I will not embrace the minset that I have to abandon my values in order to succeed
• I will reevaluate my definitions of success by my own standards and order my priorities accordingly
• I will make more of my time and opportunities presented to me - as long as they fall within my value system and don't disrupt the order of my priorities
• I will be less emotionally reactive and maintain a more tempered persona
• I will strive to be more watchful ("constant vigilence")
• I will take the stairs

Now that that is out of the way...
I'm all moved into my new (smaller) office, and I've started adding my personal touches here and there. I have my Hoops plush and my little Gir doll for moral support. My husband has been teasing me about the "Zombie Emergency Procedures" tacked to the bulletin board behind my desk, but so far no one else has said anything. Honestly, what exactly is offensive about zombie preparedness? It might just save your life!

My new office is at the end of a short hallway in the same suite of offices that HR occupies. I've been trying to be inobtrusive by using the back door and not standing up front gabbing away, since I'm not sure if the HR Manager is that crzy about having a different department once again sharing this space. A couple of the reps have made comments about how I must be lonely back here, and I should come down the hall and visit more. Suuuure. Like I need it getting back to my new boss that I spend my time standing around shooting the breeze with Human Resources. Of course, it's not me anyone has to worry about. The HR staff is notorious for suffering from "loose lips" syndrome. Speaking of which - one of my friends in the unit that I'm now (unofficially) a part of was just recently in the middle of a mess involving the spreading of gossip regarding the rumor of her boss getting fired (which, like 50% of all rumors, turned out not to be true...this time). She didn't start the rumor, but she did pass it on, and a claim that she did in fact start the story got back to one of the other managers who marched up to her boss to throw her under the proverbial bus. It's just a mess, and she's a little anxious about the whole thing. The lesson that can be taken away, I think, is that people who you think are your "friends" won't hesitate to sacrifice your reputation for their own potential gain. Which is part of the reason that right now I am very much in "head down, eyes open, mouth shut" mode. The goal is to maintain a low profile and just mind my own business as the corporate machine plows along...

and sometimes I get nervous/when I see an open door

The Killers have a new album out, and the first single 'Human' is growing on me - to the point that I might buy this one, which I haven't done with the last three releases. This song supposedly references part of a Hunter S. Thompson quote in the lyrics, but I can't find a reference. And the video features a (thankfully) clean shaven Brandon Flowers, so I can overlook the coat with the epaulettes of many feathers that he sports. In the desert. How practical!