Newsie for life...

Starting in June 2025, I became a part of the "Journalism Focus Group" of the Intuit RPO Onsite Team.  Although I'm sure issues of "Beyond The Desk" may be retrievable, at least theoretically, but I'll track my contributions here for posterity.  Evidently, because of my choice of feature article for this first issue, I am now on the "Milwaukee Spots" beat for the rest of my run here... 

July 1, 2025

Hello, I’m Joel! I began working with the Intuit team about a year ago, but my connection with Manpower Group goes back a bit longer. I was placed in a temporary position by Manpower in 2007, and ended up spending over a decade with the boutique private staffing firm in downtown Milwaukee. I’m originally from a small town in Southern Wisconsin, and have lived mainly around the Midwest since then: Minneapolis, Omaha, Chicago, and now here! I’m a fan of horror genre everything (especially zombies!), games of all sorts, and Nottingham Forest. I’ll cover Team Building Efforts for the newsletter.

The Team Building Focus Group is organizing a PrideLuck Potluck on July 3rd at noon in the Connection Point to celebrate the culmination of Pride Month and the Fourth of July holiday! Sign-ups for dishes were distributed via email, and everyone is encouraged to to wear either your favorite (work appropriate) All-American or Pride Colors gear for the day. In other news, Roselyn Colon has taken over running the Intuit Movie Club. For July, they are currently taking suggestions for a “Summer Themed Movie”, so feel free to send your suggestions in for their meet up later in July.

Sanger House Gardens

Just a short eleven minute walk out the front door of MPG HQ sits Sanger House Gardens, a delightful summer afternoon walk break destination for anyone seeking a new spot to spend some time amongst beautifully curated flower and plant gardens. Across the Schlitz Park lot, and a block north of the Lonchera El Tapatio Taco Truck, at 1823 N. Palmer Street, the Sanger House Gardens are open to the public every day between 8:30am until 6:00pm, except when they are hosting a special event (which is rare on weekdays!). The gardens were designed and built by Steve Bialk and Angela Duckert over the past 25 years, and the property itself has a rich Milwaukee history, as the former home of a Milwaukee County Sheriff and a Milwaukee Mayor! In recent years, Sanger Gardens has also offered up their Carriage House as a unique airBnB, so if you are hosting out of town guests, they’ll be close to work! I highly recommend a visit - well worth the walk up Brewer’s Hill (besides, it’s downhill on the way back to HQ!)

reply to ninguem

 I was delighted to find a post from the past few years that had started thinking in the direction I was going.  Here was my "original"* comment:

I have been thinking of this since reading Adam Becker's What is Real?

My thought is this: What if it is the exact same specific flaw (or oddity) in Human Consciousness that doesn't allow us to perceive time as 'just another dimension' (as the math of General Relativity demands) as a very similar [or related] flaw in Human Consciousness that doesn't allow us to perceive the multiverse as a similar [fifth] dimension?

what if human consciousness is limited by sense of time (NOW) one spot on the timeline, always moving steadily in one direction (the fourth dimension)

same with (HERE) in multiverse (not to be confused with (here) in our regular space, which is just where you are now) where it's one point on a line, but we are perpetually stuck in place (unlike time, where we are perpetually moving)

(that's the end of the comment... i was going to cut & paste it here and continue expanding it... but then i realized i'd LOST IT!!!! @*#&^@*&#^%*& when I cut & paste my own blog address into the comment questionnaire and tried to recreate it above with I think moderate success... ((@#%(&@%*(#^&)

Lesson Learned: "Don't Be Greedy!  Share your Thoughts"

[some more thoughts SOME MORE THOUGHTS some more thoughts]

- one directional) 

a smattering

 

soooooo..... this is is short list of some ideas I had been working on from the last post (in March 2025) until around late May 2025.

It is now just the end of June 2025, and I KNOW that I will not be coming back to this post and "gettin' UR done" as it were, so i think i'll just let it fly as is.  (as a bonus, for regular readers, if you'd like me to actually expand on any of the ideas here, I'll accept as poll voting any comments to this post and let me know what you want to hear about, and I'll do a full post about it in July 2025!)
also - keep an eye out for ANOTHER BIGGER POLL!!! coming to Roman Numeral J in July, upon which may hang the fate of the very universe itself...

abundance - the need for government to seed progress in areas that are inherently non-capitalist / anti-capitalist at a certain moment in time (Moon Shot / Operation Warp Speed / penicillin)

grit v. 80/20 - smart & hardworking vs. smart & lazy... 

Bill Maher's White House visit - radical grace (plus acknowledgement of performative politics)

Incomplete Completionist

We watched Despicable Me 3 last week - picking up the series after several months hiatus - but I'm glad... I think it's possible that I would never have seen any of this entire series if the first one hadn't been released in 2010 - my summer in Miami - when I saw pretty well every single movie released that summer and before... It's not a great movie series, but it's better than good,,, really quite good

Daredevil was for many years the comic book character who I declared as "my favorite!"  I think it's true, too, but even if not, I've loved the filmic variations of the characters.  I think my favorite characteristic of Daredevil's that I never, perhaps, identified as the reason why I loved him - weirdly - is his religiosity.  

This may sound somewhat counterintuitive as I am a generally irreligious person myself - but I think that's why I gravitated toward him when I was young and still full in the midst of full blown indoctrination... to find a hero who was struggling with his faith - often questioning it, but still allowing himself to be guided by it.  I remember when Daredevil showed up on a made-for-tv-movie of The Incredible Hulk and I just about blew a gasket!

It was almost exactly 10 years ago now that the Daredevil series premiered, and - by my calculations - I finished the first season in about a month*, give or take.  The second season, otoh, I didn't finish until March of 2018 - a full two years after its debut, and in the midst of my trying to catch up on the entirety of the The Extended Marvel Universe Chronology.  

I'm pretty sure I started that second season of Daredevil right away, but faded away, losing interest in the whole The Hand sub-plot (though when I did finally go back to it, the development of a new Elektra portrayal made the season worth it on the whole - if still not great).

Once Charlie Cox started showing up in officially sanctioned MCU stuff I still didn't go back and watch Season 3 until now, with the premier of Daredevil: Born Again coming along now.  Season 3 is GREAT, and I'm on the verge of finishing it.  I am starting to suspect that I may not ever finish TV... (let alone movies!), but to have left 'my favorite' behind for so long I feel like I've missed out.

I've got quite a lot of catching up to do with Marvel Netflix Universe (let alone finishing TV), but glad to be starting down the road with some new Daredevil stories.

* I am not a huge binger, especially with material that I have never seen before.  Even if it's not new, if it's "new to me", I like to parse it out, watching a single episode or maybe two and then moving on to something else for a few days.  (It is for this reason that I almost never watch anything wholly with my wife - she generally leaves me behind in a series - gets all the way through it, and then if I'm watching it again later, she'll dip in for a re-watch)

dark matter indeed

{Warning: Spoilers ahead!}

I 'just' finished Dark Matter, Season 1 on Apple TV+* and I think it might be my strongest television recommendation possibly since Lost (!?).  I will say that this show is not for the faint of heart.  It's not scary, precisely, but the philosophical implications of this particular theory of multiverse are somewhat harrowing.  

The show (and evidently Blake Crouch's novel from which it was adapted) seems largely based upon^ my own personal theory of the multiverse, which was initially a bit surprising, but as the season progressed, made it comforting.  The wrinkle I hadn't anticipated (and what I found most disturbing about the show) was the extent to which navigation of the multiverse is dependent upon Mind.  

I'm not sure I find the science too compelling (a bit too human-centric {self-centric} for my taste), but for the sake of storytelling, the plot mechanic is inspired.  Jason Dessen (the protagonist, played by a very good Joel - Joel Edgerton) is a physicist in Chicago who has invented The Box, a giant version of a box several versions of him have invented that allows particles to exist in superposition (in this case existing within multiple iterations of the multiverse simultaneously).

The big Box allows not just a particle to exist in superposition but a whole thing - a person, say or even a couple of people - to enter the box and navigate through the multiverse.  The tricky bit is that the way that you determine which of the infinite realities you are going to emerge into when you once again open the box is based on your mind - not just your conscious thoughts, but your unconscious and subconscious state of mind when you open it (plus all of the same of those who you might be traveling with!).

Source: https://tinyurl.com/564drzcz

There's a bunch more plotty bits that happen that make for a really great season of television, but what struck me hardest was the moment when Jason emerges into a Chicago in a world that has been ravaged by plague.  He makes his way back to his house to find his wife, visibly ill, shocked to see him (because this world's him succumbed), and she is wrecked.  It's a very realistic glimpse into what a truly catastrophic outbreak might look like at the street level in America...

I'm most of the way through Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, a sweeping chronicle by Kyle Harper of how all of human history has been shaped by (or guided by) the micro-organisms that have made us sick.  Alternately it's a history of how human civilization has created and caused the uniquely massive variety of tiny little things designed to (and actively getting better at) kill us because we've gotten so good at existing... The book is really a constant questioning of which of those definitive interpretations is more true at any given time in human history, and emphasizes the degree to which our collective Thrownness operates not just on an individual level, but also at a biological level (and also at a cosmic level, naturally).

The version of you that you get to inhabit is inherently arbitrary, but certainly doesn't feel that way to us.  Choice - Action - Self... These are the things from which we build our narrative - our lives, right?  The idea that it is chance and circumstance where we find ourselves runs contrary to our modern American sensibility.  We work harder and harder to get further and further away from The Uncomfortable Truth** by filling our attention with screens and faiths and mantras, but the reason that the uncomfortable truth is truth... well, it's because it is, right?  

But I think it's easy to interpret The Uncomfortable Truth as something akin to Nietzschean nihilism, but the comfort (!!) of Humanism is its clear antidote.  We may not be much, us, here toiling away at living on this small out of the way planet - but our over-arching trend, tending toward progress for more of us - and constructing our grand Civilization, which endures and attempts and evolves - that is the thing that we're all here for.  What is a civilization but a narrative - a collection of all of the little narratives, most forgotten (heck, most of them were side quests to begin with!). 

So I suggest that you enjoy your story - if it's not exactly the version of it you were hoping for, rest easy in the knowledge that there very might well be another one where it's that, but you can soak up what you can here... maybe strive for a bit more of that other preferred one, but as Jason/Joel learns when he gets in the Box, you may like the look of another version, but you were made (or perhaps you made yourself) ready for this one right here, and no other.

Enjoy it (and by it, i also mean Dark Matter... it's really good).

 

* It seems to me that Apple TV+ produces nothing but bangers - like they just aren't interested in getting content out for the sake of content, but everything is really quality.  (That's not to say that I have seen all of it, nor that all if it is necessarily my thing, but I just went through a list of their productions, and everything on it that I've seen some or all of is really quite very good!).  In this era of lapsing quality in all things, that is really quite remarkable, but I'm going to put a pin in it for the moment, and move back to my starting point.

^ keen observers will note that Crouch's novel hails from 2016 whereas my own theory wasn't articulated fully on Roman Numeral J until early 2018.  

** I've been reading around a bit as well in the self-help and satirical self-help genres (it's often hard to tell those apart) in Mark Manson's Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and reading Lead it Like Lasso earlier this year as well as a bit of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits.  Generally these are not my types of books - but I've been on a bit of kick on the concept of "Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable" and working on a project, for now it's just a PowerPoint presentation, and I'm figuring out if it's enough to be even that, or maybe something more - a blog post, perchance a little book (!?)...

it's a ship, it's a star...

 I saw a stream of 6 to 8 pink / firework-looking comet tails streak across the night sky directly above my driveway, flying from West to East (that's the direction of my driveway... unless you're pulling in)

At first, I thought it was a large airplane, flying low above us (as if coming in for a landing), but the path was flying straight East - toward the lake rather than south toward the airport. Also, when I opened my car door and stepped out there was no sound at all coming from the phenomenon.

On further inspection, the lights were not coming from the ends of a vessel (tail and wing tips, etc.), but it was lines, in the shape of a long hull (thus thinking I saw something like a plane - a tube of some sort).  The brightest lights came from the center of the 'vessel', so I thought in the end maybe the shape was just made up of comet trails themselves.

I had stepped out to pull the Hyundai into the driveway (just over an hour ago), and happened to look up through the sunroof.  It appeared, and I tracked it, and stepped out of the car (remembered to put it back in Park!) to get a better look at it through the branches, and then between the treelines in the middle of the road.

*   *   *   *   *   

29 January 2025 - 10:24am

Ok, mystery solved - it was a falling satellite: Starlink-5693

Elon is hacking my night sky now...

a work in progress...

There was once a place on the erstwhile internet called "Seen Reading" (which seems now to have become a book, because, sure, I guess, let's print off the whole internet!).  The premise was a brief observation of a person, usually on public transit, who was reading a book, noticing what page they were on in that book, and then quoting on that page.

This premise of seeing where a person was - both in their reading journey of a particular book and in transit - I suppose it's a bit fanciful, but it feels like we might gain some insight (imperfect and incomplete to be sure into a person who we see where they are in their journey.

When Tim asked me (a bunch of us really) a month or so ago what we were currently reading, I answered him a list of 7 books - a sort of typical number that I'm usually in the middle of.  So I thought a current reckoning - not only of books, but of shows (and perhaps any movies too) that I'm in the midst of completing.

I've been on goodreads quite a bit more in 2025 than ever before, because I'm planning on writing a short review of each book I finish this year, not just cataloging them.  They have a feature of the "currently reading" list called 'tabled', so I'll go through my active reads and watches, and then see if I can complete a catalog of tabled texts as well:

Books (Updated 7/7/25)

[I thought it might be fun to occasionally revisit this list from time to time... and indeed it now seems an opportune moment, half a year later, and having just finished the last of the original five books just this weekend...]

1. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
2. The Final Girl Support Group, by Grady Hendrix
3. American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures, by America Ferrera
4. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
5. The Quest For Tanelorn, by Michael Moorcock
6. Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain
7. Swan Song, by Robert McCammon
8. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, by Lynda Barry

[It may be that I just revisit this list with books going forward... I did manage to finish both How I Met Your Mother & Dark Matter from the previous "tabled" section, and at least a few of the shows & both movies, but I feel like the "tabled" section overall grew, and maybe that it and the books bit is the only relevant part to come back to]

tabled (still or now...)

[I'm not sure if I intend to finish some of these, or most of these or what, but l started them all with that in mind, I'm sure.]

Wallace & Gromit: Murder Most Fowl

Time Bandits

Franklin

What If, Season 3

Northern Exposure

The Sticky

Castle Rock, Season 2

Pop Culture Jeopardy

The Magic Island, by William Seabrook

An Island Away, by Daniel Putkowski

The Journey of Natty Gann

Dune: Prophecy, Season 1
Star Trek: Prodigy, Season 2
No Good Deed, starring Ray Romano & Lisa Kudrow
mr. & mrs. smith, Season 1
The New Yorker Presents, Season 1

Books (Original Posting)

[This feels like a fairly low number of active books for me, but in part, I don't have any of my typical encyclopedic works that I am working through, of which there is usually one or two]

1. Light in August, by William Faulkner
2. Frank Talk: The Inside Stories of Zappa's Other People, by Andrew Greenaway
3. I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger
4. The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley
5. Plagues Upon the Earth: Diseases and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper

Shows 

[of course there are many shows that I am between seasons for - I've watched 3 seasons of Barry, but not the 4th again.  I watched The Bear, Season 1, but not the rest,,, yet]

1. Dune: Prophecy, Season 1
2. Laid, Season 1
3. Fast Friends, hosted by Whitney Cummings
4. Star Trek: Prodigy, Season 2
5. The Decameron, created by Kathleen Jordan
6. No Good Deed, starring Ray Romano & Lisa Kudrow
7. mr. & mrs. smith, Season 1
8. The New Yorker Presents, Season 1

Movies 

[I may actually adjust this list before I hit "Publish", as I'm working my way through one of them now]

1. The Raven, starring John Cusack
2. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the BeeGees!

tabled 

[I'm not sure if I intend to finish some of these, or most of these or what, but l started them all with that in mind, I'm sure.]

Wallace & Gromit: Murder Most Fowl

Time Bandits

Franklin

What If, Season 3

Northern Exposure

Dark Matter

The Sticky

Castle Rock, Season 2

Pop Culture Jeopardy

The Magic Island, by William Seabrook

How I Met Your Mother

An Island Away, by Daniel Putkowski

The Journey of Natty Gann