Big Red Rules — 2017 I Edition — Debutantes and Values

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Debutantes and values? Huh?

Big Red Car here on another glorious ATX, on Earth as it is in Texas, morning. Little late getting to the computer this morning.

Back in the day, I used to send y’all some Big Red Rules — rules for regulating your life and view of the world. When we blew through Big Red Rules X (twice as I recall), we shelved the project. Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of heat for some new rules and a redux of the old ones. So, here goes.

Today we review Values and Debutantes. An oldie and a new goodie. Enjoy.

Values

Values aren’t values until they have a price tag and an invoice marked “paid.” Until then, they’re just talking points and there is an epidemic of talking points out there.

Don’t tell me about your values, show me. Live your values.

With this generation, you have to check, double check, re-check everything. Twenty-somethings in World War II stormed Fortress Europe and kicked the shit out of the Nazis. This bunch gets upset if someone chalks a sidewalk with a word. Grow the fuck up.

Twenty-somethings in World War turned Nazi Europe into a safe place. It took some effort and they weren’t afraid to fight for their values. You see where this is going?

If you’re running a company and don’t enforce your values, you’ve just lowered the standards. Get the standards low enough and, pretty soon, you don’t have a company.

Culture is the outgrowth of values, not the other way around.

Values will require pain to enforce, but the pain, like childbirth, will be worth it in the future. Don’t believe me? Ask a Marine.

Debutantes

Yes, they still have deb balls in the South and while they may seem archaic and out of touch with the times, they are a lot of fun and very expensive. The South is different. Love the differences. You are not going to change Southern women—and why would  anyone want to?

In Texas, Austin in particular, the girls do the deep Texas swan bow—has a Nascar like effect seeing who is going to crash and burn. It is like performing yoga when inebriated. Very inebriated.

Texas debs

Did y’all figure out these debs are from Texas? How did you do it? You’re sharp.

Do not ever say to a deb or her Mom that their big white dress can do double duty as their wedding dress. Trust me on this one. This is a pro tip.

Never, ever, ever, ever let a deb or her Mom drive themselves anywhere. You will regret this forever and it is very difficult to find where they have abandoned the car. They will both be drinking.

Don’t worry about the escorts getting fresh with the debs. Once they have been around the debs and their Moms, most of them are going to give serious consideration to taking a vow of chastity and leading a life of committed celibacy.

Understand that the women who put on deb balls could run General Motors or the Marine Corps—they are well organized, ruthless and take no prisoners. GM would not have failed if the deb Moms had been running it. Never cross any woman who even hints she is involved with a deb ball.

And, there you have it. Enjoy.

But, hey, what the Hell do I really know anyway? I’m just a Big Red Car.cropped-LTFD-illust_300.png

15 thoughts on “Big Red Rules — 2017 I Edition — Debutantes and Values”

  2. Right, the blond, first row, second from the left!

    Prefer her sober!

    Ah, I don’t know: Maybe once I encountered a “deb mom”: Yup, like encountering a Marine, I lost.

    The encounter was college, and there was a girl I’d seen on campus. She had a nice smile. Her weight/height ratio was a little large, but she had a nice smile.

    So, I asked her to a movie. I had to wait for an answer: The next day she asked me to come to her house. We both lived in town.

    Right, even though she was in college, her weight/height was little large, and the date was just to a movie, still I had to come to her house! So, in my old car, I drove over and arrived at the appointed time.

    The neighborhood was nice, a little nicer than mine but not some estate with 12 foot high stone walls topped with heads of lions, a big, double sided, swinging iron gate, a serpentine drive of nice paving stones around a lake with swans, not the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien, davor der Maria-Theresien-Platz mit dem Maria-Theresien-Denkmal as in the J. Strauss Morgenblätter as at

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8K3tnzcF0Q

    with also some nice dresses, but the house was, IIRC, more of a Tudor thing on maybe a 1/4 acre lot! Inside there was a full harp, as in an orchestra.

    The girl met me with a smile and introduced me to her mom. The mom looked like she’d had been a deb not so long ago. She sat with a smile of confidence and did not stand. Her legs were crossed in a style the Fox Babes could learn from, still tight at the knees but maybe extra distance between the feet, She was not dressed in a deb ball gown but was dressed much too nicely for usual housewife chores. Her hair was carefully put up, much more carefully than any of the debs in the picture.

    At the beginning of the inspection, interview, investigation, inquisition, she cracked a smile, her last. Then we talked a little about my family — nothing about hers. At times, in reaction to something I said or just my expression, there were subtle changes in her face, a little like small ripples on a pond, that indicated that I was not doing nearly as well as I did on the Math SAT or in college math and physics. The daughter was sitting away from both her mom and me.

    Soon I sensed that the situation was hopeless and took an attitude of Your daughter is not a gold digger, right? I may not look like a good target for a gold digger yet, but I’ve got some good qualities and victories, am on the way to more, and in time you’ll likely see that I was making your daughter a good offer.

    After a little of that attitude, with just a glance from the mother to the daughter, the interview was over.

    With a nice smile, the daughter walked me to the hall in front of the front door and asked me to wait. In less than a minute the daughter was back from her mom with the verdict, and with a slightly apologetic look confirmed that the answer was “No”.

    I gave a half smile, a fast, small nod of acknowledgment of message received, turned, walked out, didn’t look back.

    Ah, to see a really nice house, watch the video! Yes, the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, Roman, or an empire, but they put up some nice buildings! Notice the round hole in the floor with the view of the floor below! Ah, some of the glories of the Internet and even civilization!

    Gee, now I could tell the daughter: I was at Fedex, and twice I saved the company from going out of business, once in software to schedule the fleet, please the BoD, and enable crucial funding and once with some revenue projections that got our representatives from BoD Member General Dynamics to stay after all and not leave (they already had their plane tickets back to Texas). I could tell her that K. Arrow won a Nobel Prize in economics. So did L. Hurwicz. AFAIK, H. Uzawa has not. But in their famous paper, they asked but did not answer a question about the famous Kuhn-Tucker conditions (Kuhn and Tucker, both long at Princeton). Well, as a grad student, I answered the question, in two weeks, and later published it. Since the paper was publishable, strictly speaking it met the requirement for a Ph.D. dissertation — fast work for a dissertation. But I used some other work for my dissertation, in stochastic optimal control. Some of math prerequisites were from a course from a student of another Princeton prof, E. Cinlar, and the work was passed for the university by a committee with Chair a Tucker student. But I couldn’t take you to a movie?

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