Tools and Intentions

We drop our pocket knives in our pockets and sometimes forget how these tools can be used. I try to remember what Mas Ayoob told us about knife attacks every time I gear up. To paraphrase: “Imagine the smallest, most gentle woman you know standing with a 6-inch kitchen knife in her hand. Now imagine that person with a wild, distorted grimace on her face and swinging that blade like she was a Waring blender. Now, who wants to take it away from her?”

Recently Deputy Clay Grant Jr. was doing a little off-duty shopping at Target (the name suggests what’s going to happen) in West Hollywood, California and ran into a woman wielding a knife in each hand. http://www.kxxv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12419226
Fortunately it ended up okay. If by okay you mean injuries are acceptable but nobody died.

That wasn’t the case in the Big Apple, AKA New York City. The Akron Beacon Journal reported in the May 3 issue that Hugo Tale Yax from Guatemala attempted to assist a woman in the Big Apple. I don’t have the details, I don’t know who the woman was or why she was attacked, but in the end someone knifed Hugo. Hugo was a homeless man, but he felt the need to risk all he had, his life, to help this woman. The Beacon reports that security tapes show New Yorkers walking past his still bleeding body without any attempt to help him, much less call the police. I don’t have any real comment. The story says it all.

On the whole, neither New York nor West Hollywood has any really attraction to me as a destination.

I was looking in the employment ads (What! Don’t you ever wonder if there isn’t a better job waiting for you?) from last Sunday. Tucked in among the rest of the ads I found a little something of interest. A private bank, (that’s the way they described it) is looking for a financial officer with the usual and at least one very unusual criterion. They want someone with an underground degree in finance.

Did they want a deep rock miner? Or can you get a covert degree, one that no one will confirm or deny? Is this the handiwork of some secret financial task group working on the edge of international legality?

You tell me - IMF: International Monetary Fund or Impossible Mission Force?

This blog will self destruct when you are done reading it.