THE PAGE TURNS

April 1, 2021May 8, 2024

A is for Accounting

You think accounting is boring? Propaganda! It’s the circulatory system of everything. Follow the money.

If you’re here, get ready to find out the interesting things about accounting. There will be little technical accounting explained, other than to describe it in plain English. Accounting involves a lot more philosophy than you might think. Want proof? Zero comes from the Hindu idea of the void, of the essence of balance, of the Dark Side, if you want to get pop-culturey about it.

Accountants invented writing, money, international commerce, the middle class, and spreadsheets. When Genghis Khan would take over a city, the first people he’d send in would be the accountants. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Tang dynasty–most of the huge empires and great civilizations thrived because of their accountants.

Truly, as Max Bialystock says to Leo Bloom in “The Producers”:

You’re an accountant! You’re in a noble profession! The word “count” is part of your title!

Get ready for 26 topics on the history, sociology, fun facts, and weird stories about Accounting, my noble profession.

March 19, 2021April 1, 2021

Everyone is Green (Not Necessarily Irish)

Celtic knots in the Book of Kells. Photo at Wikipedia.

Ninety percent of Americans are not Irish. Thus, it has always confused me that everyone wants to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. If your heritage is Irish, more power to you, please feel free to immerse yourself in your culture. If you are in Ireland, I have no doubt it was a gay old time. I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble –so much so that I have waited two days, until after the last vestiges of the green beer hangovers are gone, not wanting to interrupt merrymaking. Far be it for me to throw shade at frivolity.

Is Everyone Really Irish in America on St. Patrick’s Day?

But why in the sam heck is March 17 so entrenched as an annual holiday? Every U.S. calendar in the month of March has a giant shamrock symbol on it. Yet, the vast majority of us aren’t Irish, and we don’t all get our own cultural holidays, do we?

It particularly never ceases to amaze me when my diverse Bay Area colleagues, whose English is heavily tinged with accents from the Philippines, Ecuador, Hong Kong, and Mumbai, remind me that we will all need to wear green. What color do I get to wear on Polish heritage day? When is Diwali again? What’s that traditional German dish that we all eat on …. really, there’s no German-American day? That’s particularly surprising when Germans comprise nearly 17% of our ancestry.

Map of U.S. ancestry by county. Photo from Vivid Maps.

March 4, 2021March 18, 2021

Let Me Tell You About the Birds and the Bees

In a marriage ceremony from a 1940s black-and-white comedy, the priest begins by invoking the birds and the bees. He keeps getting interrupted, which is an in-joke because the two at the altar are really supposed to marry other people. However, the real joke is the reference to birds and bees and marriage.

As this is spring, where a young ‘uns fancy turns to thoughts of love, and this is 2021, where some still point to Nature as evidence that heterosexual monogamy and genders are rigid, it’s worth thinking about. Because then they mention the birds and bees. Well, what do we all know about bees?

Research shows queen bees communicate honestly. Photo by Bernardo Ni, Penn State.

If Not Three Genders, then Three of Something

When a mommy bee and daddy bee love each other very much… oh, no. That’s not how it works. Let’s go to sixth grade biology. There are queen bees, worker bees, and drone bees. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we’re taught that the queens and workers are females and the drones are male. All the drones do is help in reproduction. They try to mate with queens. If they’re successful, they die from the experience. If they aren’t able to mate and still hang around the hive when food gets scarce, the workers will kick them out, and they die. Limited functionality, you might say. They do contribute to genetic diversity, which some explanations say counters the idea that the drone is the “most ineffective and unhelpful bee in the hive.” But the genetic diversity comes about because the queen mates with multiple drones, so arguably the queen is providing the diversity.