With All Due Respect

There’s a bug going around town.   The wife is a school teacher and has been fighting a bad cough and low-grade fever for the past week.   I’ve opted to sleep on the couch, to try to hold it off.   That and a lot of Lysol seems to be doing the trick so far.   Some on the office staff had kids home from school this week due to similar symptoms.   While we haven’t had the dramatic weather fluctuations that a lot of the rest of the country has seen in the past few months – with extremes of warm and colder days – we have seen some unusually cooler days later into April and a very active allergy season.   The air in an old building and no ability to open a window (on those rare days when it’s cool enough to do so) doesn’t help in knowing if it’s a cold, a virus or allergies.   By 3pm today, I found myself as literally the last person standing in the office.   The rest had succumbed to the bug.   Either that or found this a good excuse for an early start to the weekend.   With the

I posted the above image on LinkedIn earlier this week.   We’re all familiar with the famous image of the three seated monkeys.     The source of this popular pictorial maxim is a 17th-century carving over a door of the famous Toshogu shrine in Nikko, Japan. The carvings at Toshogu Shrine were attributed to Hidari Jingoro and believed to have incorporated Confucius’s Code of Conduct.   Together they embody the proverbial principle to ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. The three monkeys are Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil; Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil. Sometimes there is a fourth monkey depicted with the three others; the last one, Shizaru, symbolizes the principle of ‘do no evil’. He may be shown crossing his arms or covering his genitals.   It’s said they represent the Japanese expression mi-zaru, kika-zaru, iwa-zaru, or ‘not seeing, not hearing, not speaking,’ in which the Japanese word