How come Matty and Sonny never played this sport?

Competitive firefighting. The best event is a combination of drag racing and ladder climbing. A verbal description of it can't be adequately comprehended by anyone who hasn't had at least a few beers. You have to see it done to appreciate it.

This video also has the drag racing, hose laying and hose control event.

You'll have to check out some of the other related videos if you want to see the competitive ladder climbing and bucket brigade event. That's pretty nifty too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ZSSwTsmrY&feature=related

Incidently, I celebrated Earth Day by picking a couple of plastic supermarket bags of broccoli rabe. I steamed it for three minutes and then mixed it with a bulb of chopped garlic and a bunch of olive oil while it was still hot. I sprinkled on salt several times as I gently mixed it. It took a surprising amount of salt. I was careful with the timing of the blanching and gentle with the mixing because I took a lot of flak from Mom and Aunt Mary one time for turning a batch of rabes too mushy.

I saute'd a nice portion for a few minutes in olive oil to take the heat out of the garlic and we had that with dinner. The rest is in four freezer containers that will provide the makings of a lot of sandwiches. I like it with boiled ham on either a seeded hard football roll (which is the best as long as one has teeth strong enough to handle it) or on sliced seeded split loaf from Corropolese. I also like to put a little mayonnaise on that sandwich, which used to make Pop nuts when he saw me do it. Pop had a very negative opinion of mayonnaise.

I wonder if Vince Foster's gun is still in the evidence locker

David Kellerman, the Chief Financial Officer of Freddie Mac, appears to have committed suicide. Here's a quote from a news story about it. The link to the story is below.

"Kellermann, 41, had has been with Freddie Mac for more than 16 years.

He had been named acting chief financial officer in September 2008, taking over after Anthony "Buddy" Piszel resigned. Freddie Mac's CEO David Moffett resigned last month.

Government-controlled Freddie Mac, based in McLean, has been criticized heavily for reckless business practices. Some say those practices contributed to the nation's housing and financial crisis. Freddic Mac owns or guarantees about 13 million home loans.

As CFO, Kellermann was responsible for the company's financial controls, financial reporting and oversight of the company's budget and financial planning."

http://www.wtopnews.com/?sid=1657033&nid=25

It's interesting that this guy's predecessor, Anthony "Buddy" Piszel, suddenly started making political contributions when he became CFO of Freddie Mac in 2006.
http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/anthony-piszel.asp?cycle=08

Maybe, that's not surprising though, because according to his employment agreement that I found on the web (but can't seem to link to) Piszel was given a $7.5 Million signing on bonus for taking that job in 2006. And his employment contract guaranteed him $1.2 Million in severance pay, so that's probably what he got when he resigned last fall after two years there. There's nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that it's a bit more than odd to give a fellow a $7.5 Million signing bonus for a job that pays only $650,000 in salary per year, and it's an interesting coincidence that such a fellow should suddenly become very interested in making big political contributions.

Paul G. George, who signed Piszel's employment contract, made only $7,400 in political contributions in 2008, so I'm guessing he's a relatively little fish at Freddie Mac even though his title is Executive VP of Human Resources. He signed the Piszel contract; but my guess is that it was negotiated by someone else with a whole lot more clout.
http://www.freddiemac.com/bios/exec/george.html
http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/paul-george.asp?cycle=08

Checking around the web I find that David Kellerman doesn't appear to have made many political contributions at all - those I found were just little ones. So he was probably a regular up from the ranks accountant type guy and not a wide awake political hanger on like most of those who have run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past few years while tens of billions have been squandered.

Accounting can apparently be a dangerous profession, just like lawyering, as Vince Foster learned. You want to be very judicious about opening up musty file drawers when you work in a place that serves as a cash machine for the politically powerful. You never know what you're going to find. You might find yourself falling forward onto the floor after a double tap to the back of the head; or you might find that you're being set up to take a fall and get depressed.

People have killed and been killed over a whole lot less money than the amount of loot that was laundered through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past couple of decades.

Three men in a boat and the river upset

Jas just called me to cancel today's scheduled Scrabble and Pinochle games because he and Kathy are driving down to Florida a day early. They'll be down at their house in The Villages for the next couple of weeks. I'm imagining that I feel like Butch did when he drew a problematic Canasta hand.

Little did Butch know in the 1960's; but he almost surely coined a phrase that was new to the English language. When playing Canasta with Rose and Mom and Pop he would say, "Three men in a boat and the river upset." When I publish this post that phrase will appear on the web for the first time.

Sam's outrageous nickname for Rose and Butch was "Pruney and Mumbles;" which still makes me, him and Jas laugh on Saturday mornings when we remember it. It may well be the best nickname combination ever invented. Rose was one of those people who wrinkle up amazingly as they age. She was pruney at least twenty years before she died in the 1990's. And Butch, of course, mumbled. That phrase, "pruney and mumbles," had never appeared on the web until I published it in a post last fall.

At Harry's Potato Market in the 1960's Eddie Fight used to say "Smarty eh! Smarty had a party." That phrase, as I've transcribed it, will appear for the first time on the web after I publish this; but after searching around I think Eddie was parrotting a slight modification of the first line of a racist couplet from his youth. If you're interested in that couplet you can find it (where I did) in an online page from a book named Language, Communication & Education published in 1990.

This brave new internet world where one can skip blithely from learning the derivation of "Smarty had a party" to learning the surprisingly long and complex history of "Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe" is something else, something fantastic. And after I publish this it will be able to provide someone with a bit of a sense of the world of Eddie Fight. But it can't bring back the full flavor of a Dairy Queen banana split enjoyed on a hot summer evening by a 14 year old.

Eddie Fight was an interesting character. His face was wrinkled, pruney, like Rose's; but he also had the most amazing cauliflower ears and an interestingly mis-shapen nose. Pop mentioned years after I knew Eddie that his real last name wasn't "Fight." In his youth he had liked to fight in all venues, especially bars; but he never fought very well and he was a Bantamweight who liked to take on Heavyweights. When I first met Eddie he was living in the back of the potato market shed where Lefty used to sleep on the pile of burlap bags until the time he pulled a knife on Patty. Later Harry put Eddie up in the second floor apartment of a small commercial building he owned about a couple of hundred yards down Ridge Pike from the potato market.

I think Harry used to pay Eddie something as well; but he rarely did any work. He might wait on a customer if Patty and I were both busy with other customers; but mostly Eddie sat on an apple crate under the awning with Harry on the long summer evenings and reminisced about old times. Sometimes Gap B joined them. Gap owned Trooper Banana so, like Harry, he was a produce entrepreneur. Gap liked to gamble, and there were several groups of poker players who really, really liked to have Gap in their games; so his schedule only allowed him to come over every once in a while to discuss commodity prices and logistics and high finance with Harry as Eddie listened respectfully.

Patty, who hadn't learned the obvious lesson from the knife incident with Lefty, used to mock Eddie. And Eddie would respond, "Smarty eh. Smarty had a party." Sometimes his fists would clench up when he said that; but Eddie's prime fighting days were mostly over by that time; and anyway, Patty was the son of his padrone, so it would have been very bad form for Eddie to take a poke at him. Not that Patty didn't often deserve a poke.

Along about 9:30 or so Harry would give us the word to close up the Potato Market and Patty and I would cover up the watermelons and tomatoes and cantaloupes and other stuff with tarps while Harry would go back and get Kingy, and later Major, to set up for guard duty. You didn't want to get within reach of Kingy or Major's chain once they were on post for the night.

John S used to love riding his bike recklessly right along the perimeter of the beaten earth area where Kingy spent his mostly lazy days, just to provide him with a little thrill. John got a big kick out of Kingy's impotent fury when he did that. Until one day when he skidded and fell over the wrong way, into the beaten earth area. It was amazing how many puncture wounds Kingy managed to inflict before John could scramble out of reach.

Often, on especially warm nights, after we closed up the Potato Market, Patty would drive me down to pick up his cousins, Joe A and Butchy D, and we would go over to Saint Gabes home for bad boys to play water basketball. Bold as brass, Patty would walk into the boiler room and turn on the pool lights when we arrived. Mostly the gate to the pool was unlocked so getting in was no problem; but if it wasn't unlocked we would scale the fence. The irony of us sneaking into a detention center completely escaped me at the time. Patty said it was OK as long as we were quiet, so it was OK.

We would play water basketball until one of the brothers noticed the lights or the din we were making and came down to tell us we had to leave. Sometimes the brother would officiously make us line up against the fence and give us a short lecture. Patty was always very respectful of the brothers and very contrite; but sometimes we would wait in the car for a few minutes until the brother had returned to the dormitory if Patty felt the game had been cut too short. Once the coast was clear he would turn on the lights again and we would return to the pool. Even I knew that immediately returning to the scene of the crime was a bad idea, and Joe A used to be terrified; but we never got caught twice on the same evening so Patty evidently had the situation figured right. He later became a lawyer with the Public Defender's office.

After our game, usually about 11:00, our toes hurting and oozing a little blood from pushing off against the rough pool bottom, Patty would take us to Dairy Queen for a banana split which we would eat as we tooled around in Harry's old Chevy before dropping off Butchy D in Bridgeport and Joe A in Jeffersonville.

Those days are long gone and a present day Dairy Queen banana split is merely the palest shadow of what it was then, so Eddie with the cauliflower ears has the last laugh after all and Butch's sentiment says it all.

Smarty eh. Smarty had a party.

Three men in a boat and the river upset.

The sad degeneration of the human race

These three modern age wimps plan to ride from China to the English Channel on horses. They're planning to take three years to cover the 5,000 miles, riding less than 5 miles a day, which takes less than an hour on a walking horse. No doubt they'll spend the other 23 hours in each day luxuriating around the pool of a luxury hotel eating dainty finger foods and giving interviews about their arduous journey.

Back when men were men and horses were horses the Mongols covered fifty or sixty miles a day even though they often had to take time out from covering ground to attend to a bit of rape and pillage.

But the Mongols ate finger foods just like these modern wimps. Before setting out in the morning each Mongol put a nice cut of meat under his saddle blanket. Bouncing along on top of the meat all day tenderized it; and the heat and sweat from the horse cooked and seasoned it. I'll bet that steak was tasty at the end of a long day in the saddle.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.bfe2a5099d50f7a32a3ab49f3447dd0e.671&show_article=1

The party of Joe Sixpack raises the tax on beer to $1.25 a glass

Put the spend like drunken sailors Democrats together with the "tax fairness" Democrats and then splice them with the bend over and let me put this proctoscope up your butt nanny state Democrats and you get a $52 per barrel tax on beer in Oregon. There's change we can believe in. And now they're going to tax Joe Sixpack to cry in his beer about it.

Coming soon to a state near you.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123976316293519743.html

A tip of the hat to Veronique de Rugy, who linked to this post at National Review's blog The Corner

Billions for contributors, a few red cents for the rest

Over the past couple of years Goldman Sachs and other big contributors to the politicians down in Washington have bought up tens of billions of dollars worth of so called "toxic assets" at very large discounts from the banks and other institutions that originally bought them at face value.

It's almost as though Goldman Sachs and George Soros and the other big money political contributors knew something was in the works to make those "toxic assets" smell as sweet as the sea breeze off the Horn of Africa.

Starting in November, just before the election, the politicians and their bagmen conveniently made a plan to buy up those toxic assets at face value with your tax dollars. The architects of that plan were (big surprise!) Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank appointees who spent long careers with Goldman Sachs, and various other speculative companies controlled by George Soros and other big contributors to the politicians. Those bagmen (Rahm Emmanuel almost surely collected and counted the small bills for President Obama; I don't know who picked up the suitcases of loot for President Bush - his bribery collecting mechanism is less obvious) worked closely with Barney Frank, Chairman of the House of Representatives' Banking Committee and Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

The hundreds of billions of tax dollars that are providing windfalls ($13 Billion for the 100 partners who own Goldman Sachs, for instance - $130 Million each) are being laundered through AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The chief guys who set up the laundering program are Ben Bernanke, appointed by President George W. Bush, and Timothy Geithner, appointed by President Barack H. Obama.

Goldman Sachs partners and their employees contributed about $6 Million in officially reported bribes to politicians in 2008 (75% to Democrats, 25% to Republicans). In order of bulging pockets, the following politicians collected the most boodle from Goldman Sachs over the past 20 years: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Jim Himes, Chris Dodd, Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards, Arlen Specter, Rahm Emanuel, John Sununu, Jack Reed, Michael Skelly, Max Baucus, tom Harkin - the list goes on and on and on and on.
See http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000085 for the details.

In return for the $6 Million, the politicians have so far paid back $13 Billion of your tax dollars to Goldman Sachs. That's a one year return of over 200,000 percent.

That's real "investment banking." Somali pirates don't get returns like that and their main expenses are for used rubber boats and boiled peanuts to feed their crews of cutthroats.

George Soros gave about $3.5 million to politicians in 2008; and Soros is probably even smarter than the Goldman Sachs partners if you judge based on his success at making billions by manipulating currencies over the years. Figure that Soros has also made at least a 200,000 percent return on his "investment" and you can assume that he's in his money bin rolling around in something like $10 Billion of your tax dollars.
see http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations/George_Soros.php

Talk about pirates! Shiver me timbers!

Referring to pirates, President Jefferson (or somebody) famously said, "Millions for defense, not one red cent for tribute."

Presidents Bush and Obama and their handmaidens Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Rahm Emanuel, Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner apparently believe in the motto, "Billions for contributors, a few red cents for the rest."

All in all, we're complacently overlooking the largest theft in the history of the world, the very Godfather of all thefts; while President Obama is keeping the media and us dazzled with his fancy footwork as he walks his new pooch and his smooth mouthwork as he proclaims how much he cares about the poor chumps who are going to get some crumbs from his programs.

A Treasury Secretary with his briefcase can steal a whole lot more than 10,000 men with guns. It's been written that 'every man defines the extent of his own greed." True enough, since Tim Geithner took the time and effort to cheat on a paltry 30 Grand or so in taxes while he was being groomed to steal tens of billions in the smoothest heist since that clever dude cheated his brother Ishmael out of his birthright for a bowl of porridge.

Incidently, please don't read this as a partisan attack on the Democrats. When politicians steal on this scale they make sure everybody dips their beak so they can be sure nobody important enough to get attention will squeal. Just to prove this really is a bipartisan post, here's then Senator Obama yucking it up at a roast held in 2005 for Rahm Emanuel. You will notice that there are no suitcases of small bills visible in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHX-g1FtaMs&feature=related

Some dreams come true

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

And, if you haven't seen this other one, it's worth a listen also. It's of Paul Potts, a cell phone salesman, getting his big chance to show what he can do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA&feature=related

Of course there are limits to what can be expected of amateurs, so here's a professional doing Nessum Dorma the way all of us shower singers wish we could sing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VATmgtmR5o4&feature=related

And, it's impossible to listen to Pavarotti doing Nessum Dorma during the Easter season without being lured to him doing perhaps the greatest song ever written. I especially like that Pavarotti clearly looks at his musical score many times as he's singing, even though he must have sung Schubert's Ave Maria a thousand times.

Oh for the innocent long ago days when the nuns marched us from Holy Saviour school down to the church singing this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uYrmYXsujI&feature=related

Full credit where due

Navy Seal snipers efficiently eliminated the three Somalian pirates who were holding and threatening the life of an American hostage.

Three cheers for the Seals. We all owe a great debt of gratitude both to the Seals directly involved in this situation and to all Americans who dedicate their careers to the arduous training necessary to carry out such feats, especially insofar as the Seals, like all of our fighting men and law men, also put their own lives at risk in situations dicier than this one in our defense.

Three cheers also for President Obama. We owe him gratitude for his clearheadedness and quick correct decisionmaking in promptly signing the death warrants of those pirates by giving the Seals and their onscene commander freedom to act as necessary to protect and rescue the American involved.

Are you adapted to run for your dinner?

Here's an interesting article on the subject of why people can run such long distances. I think I'm going to go out and try to run down a deer one of these days.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_running_man_revisited/

Speaking of dinner; we had a very nice Easter dinner at Jas and Kathy's house yesterday. All the usual suspects were present and accounted for except for Sam and Deb and Delores W., who presumably went to the wilds of New Jersey to celebrate the holiday with Deb and Delores side relatives. Alex and Christina drove down from Boston for the weekend which made it really great.

Johnny, Jennifer and Kathy put together a combo of lamb, ham, lasagna and cavatelli that was excellent; and of course there were several fine desserts, of which Linda and I contributed Mom and Aunt Mary's rice pie, or at least that's what the 2002 recipe scrawl in Mom's handwriting calls it. It's really more of a solid egg pudding. It came out excellent, at least it did after we baked it for more than twice as long as the one hour that Mom's directions specify.

1 cup rice cooked for 15 minutes and then cooled
3 pounds of ricotta cheese
2 cups of sugar
1 dozen eggs
2 tablespoons of vanilla extract
(Mom's recipe also calls for "1 cup milk?". Fortunately I didn't put that milk in. If I had put it in we would probably still be waiting for it to solidify)

Blend the cooled off cooked rice and the ricotta. Blend the eggs and the vanilla with the sugar. Blend the two mixtures together. Pour into a greased 9x13 inch pan. I used a glass baking dish and I put it on a cookie sheet for fear it would spill over because it was pretty full.

Mom's directions call for baking it for one hour at 350. After one hour the middle was still liquidy. At that point Linda let it continue to bake at 350 for another 20 minutes. I came in and noticed that the middle was still liquidy, but the edges were starting to brown. So I reduced the temp to 325 and let it continue to bake for another 20 minutes. Finally I reduced the temp to 275 and let it bake another 20 minutes, after which I turned off the oven and left it in there for another 30 minutes or so.

People seemed to like it; but only about 40% of it was eaten by the crowd of twenty or so. Marianne and Kathy must have really liked it because they took another 40% off our hands. The remaining 20% has already been cut into by Linda (last night) and me (I'm eating a big chunk right now); but I think I'll cut this recipe in half when I make it again next Easter.

Reflecting back I recall that there was always at least some of this recipe left over even back at the height of holiday gorging when 40 or more would troup through 403 Walnut during the course of Easter Sunday. Back then of course Mom would have brought 4 apple pies or so and Aunt Mary would also have made cream puffs if she didn't make one of those huge four decker six inch high cookie sheet sized rectangular rum and cream cakes. And Aunt Nancy would have brought her nonpareil rice pudding.

And we would have eaten those desserts after a a marathon of ravioli and stuffed olive eating. Sam, Matty and me each at least once managed to down twenty of Mom and Aunt Mary's huge meat raviolis, very easy to take because they came in three distinctly different forms - flat ones fried and then powdered with sugar, curly ones served al dente and white with grated cheese and (can't remember the name of the spice right now - note to self, get gingko biloba before you forget its name, also write your name, phone number and address on a card in your wallet in case they find you wandering around confused one of these days soon), and finally with traditional gravy and meatballs. All washed down with as much soda as you wanted to drink.

It's surprising any of us survived those dinners. Of course, the fact that we did survive is evidence of another survival adaptation. After they ran the antelope to death those long ago ancestors of ours ate the whole thing raw if they could, or at least several pounds of its juicy liver and other innards, before the lions and leopards and hyenas could have a chance to steal the carcass from them.

Two ducks just waddled down from the pond and hopped into the creek near the bridge. And there have been a couple of geese hanging around; but I haven't seen any evidence of a nest yet.

Maybe Gaia isn't angry; maybe She's on plan

In the beginning was the Bang. . .

Loki had gotten out of the playroom and set off a whole freakin' crateload of Thor's thunderbolts. In the confusing microseconds just after the Bang, Gaia and a whole shitload of Her sister planet goddesses got loose as well.

Loki was too stupid to suspect Thor of orchestrating the whole divine comedy; but the planet goddesses were smart enough to be pretty sure He had. There weren't any sparrows in those times; but the planet goddesses were smart enough to suspect that Thor would have had pretty good handle on all their tail feathers if they had existed to have tails and feathers.

The Big Guy probably wanted them loose. But not sure is not sure; She would be looking over Her shoulder, for a long time, now that there was time. They had been in His stupid garden playing the stupid harps since forever; and forever is a long thordamned time. Like Her sisters, or whatever the hell they were, Gaia boogied on out, surfing the bubble front as the new universe inflated. Was She going fast away from Thor and Her sisters, or was space expanding between Them? Who the hell knew? She had never been very good at math; Loki was the space and time and practical jokes Dude. Someday maybe She would invent a physicist who could explain the whole business so She could understand it.

Maybe She could even do more. Maybe with enough time and enough thought She could figure out how to put Thor in a damned garden playing a damned harp. There was a thought. She'd put Him in a ridiculous tutu just like He made Them wear and see how He liked prancing around on tippy-toe while playing a damned harp. Maybe She'd even let Loki loose in the garden once in a while to bust up the harp and rip off the tutu and. . . well, perhaps we'd best leave Gaia's thoughts at that point. Hell itself hath no fury like an Earth Goddess scorned.

I just read an excellent column by Lisa Mossie in The Norristown Times Herald. Lisa was on a subject of long term, if occasional, interest to me; a subject that should also be of interest to you if you give two damns about where it's all going.

Can we be good without God?
Why should we be good without God?
Does "good" have any metaphysical meaning without God?

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to pose answers to those questions beyond "Who knows?". I know, I know, there have been a whole bunch of constipated dudes who have written long and exquisitely boring books full of academic gas on the subject. But as far as I've been patient enough to try to figure out; to paraphrase Peter Singer, an Aquinas is a Descartes is a Goethe is a Nietsche is a Wittgenstein. The lot of them could have done with a good dose of laxative.

What struck me about Lisa's column was her mention, for effect, that maybe "Gaia is angry" just like the enviroweenies say She is. Maybe Lisa is telepathic; because, as it turns out, I did a little riff on Gaia just last evening on the phone with Alex.

The enviroweenies assume a Gaia who's all about, like, preserving the green, green hills of Earth, and watching the playful bunnies and possums and javalinas gyre and gymbal oer the wabe, except when She lets a hawk crush their cute little skulls or She lets rabies eat their brains so that they gyre and gymbal kind of funny for a while and bite other cute little critters before they fall over sideways and quiver on top of the green, green grass on the way to releasing their components to rejoin The Great Circle Of Life.

But what if Gaia is working according to a different plan?

The other evening I joked with Alex that Gaia may have stored up all the fossil fuels specifically so one of her critters could release the CO2 in them at this rough point in time. I joked that Gaia may want us to release the CO2 in those fossil fuels to prevent an ice age.

But that's only one possibility that's fully as logical as the strange certainty of the enviroweenies that Gaia is all about Earth as an "eternal" garden, even though Earth's atmosphere will be stripped away no matter what Gaia does when the sun expands in a few billion years; and that's assuming that the mother of all asteroids or a comets doesn't wipe out all green, green grass and the bunnies and the helgramites and the aardvarks before the the expanding sun gets a chance to.

There's another idea, maybe Gaia wants us to use the fossil fuels to get advanced enough to stop an asteroid or a comet that's already on its way from the Oort cloud. Maybe her long range plan to for us to get advanced enough to get us and Her off this planet and spread around like a plague on a million or a billion other planets before the sun expands.

Maybe Gaia's long run plan is to put Thor in a tutu and set all of us up on the mother of all bleachers around the garden to be spectators to Him prancing around forever on tippy toe playing a harp; except when She lets Loki loose for a little fun.

I hope She has vendors coming around the bleachers with hotdogs and cokes and peanuts and Crackerjacks. Maybe that's why we're supposed to do good works; to save up credit against that eternally lazy afternoon when we'll be wanting stuff from the vendors.

We now return this station to its regularly scheduled programming.

Your tax dollars being put to good use

General Motors and Segway have just unveiled your urban transportation future. They plan to fully engineer it between now and 2012 using your tax dollars while General Motors continues to lose billions per year because its cars aren't selling.

This thing is such a dangerous, bad and unnecessary design along so many dimensions that I can't find words to express how stupid it is.

I'm thinking that Al Gore's kid must have designed it on his Etch a Sketch.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123906731177395605.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

I thought the pastor did it with the hand bell in the choirloft

I figured the clues pointed to the pastor with the hand bell in the choir loft; but I got it just as wrong as those folks who guessed that the First Lady did it with the rake in the garden. The notion that the President did it with the scimitar in the Oval Office always struck me as ridiculous.

It looks like the visitor shot him with the gun at home.

http://www.gbmnews.com/articles/2383/1/Murder-Rocks-Chicago-Church-Community/Page1.html

Meanwhile: new clues suggest that Al Gore was also just a bit wrong when he said we would be sunbathing in January up here in Collegeville by 2020.

When you play Clue you have to be careful to let enough clues accumulate to allow for a reasonable guess. And you have to remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Oh, and by the way, the sun is still very, very quiet. Don't donate all your winter clothes to charity just yet.

http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/03/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/

It's a good time to buy a used boat

I'm open to the idea of someone mooring their boat in our pond, if it's a picturesque one. They can even live aboard it for a nominal rent. And they can keep all the snapping turtles they catch in exchange for an occasional couple of bowls of snapper soup.

Hunters are always trying to give us venison which we don't like; but snapper soup is another thing entirely. I think our edition of The Joy of Cooking has a recipe starting with the necessary cutting off of the head of the snapper with an ax. I'll provide the chopping block and the ax.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/01boats.html?_r=3&hp

Meanwhile, in other news: Detroit is reverting to the wild and there's a wide awake fellow selling skinned raccoons for $12 each. Slick Willy took his woman in 1970; but apparently he didn't take the Coonman's hunting dogs or his down home skills. I like his little touch of leaving one paw on the carcass.

"The paw is old school," says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. "It lets the customers know it's not a cat or dog."

During the seven or so minute video that accompanies the newspaper article the Coonman channels Julia Child with a nice raccoon cooking demonstration. And that's before he plays and sings a nice blues song that's got a tempo perfect for our level of West Coast Swing skill.

Unfortunately I've only seen raccoons two times since we bought our land in 1978; although there's no question that they're regularly around. Linda just pointed out a raccoon paw print to me down at the creek a few days ago. I may look into learning how to set a snare. That raccoon recipe looked mighty inviting; although I might be tempted to present it to Linda as rabbit if I ever get the chance to try it out.

The Coonman also sells rabbits and squirrels if you happen to be passing through Detroit and want to work up to the raccoon sort of sideways. I bet he would have a field day with the geese around here and up and down along the river drives in Philly.

The quotes from Beasley are priceless. An example - "Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do." That's a fellow I'd like to know.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090402/METRO08/904020395/To+urban+hunter++next+meal+is+scampering+by

And, in yet other news, here's a nice, very reasonable, well spoken Arab fellow who wants to come and make an impact on a neighborhood near you.

http://www.tangle.com/view_video.php?viewkey=0861ff3eabea1ceb73e4

They're watching you Debra

I think of Deb every time I see one of these articles about the increasing use of cameras to monitor traffic and neighborhoods and in school buses and public bathrooms and the changing rooms at Walmart and such. I'm just kidding about the public bathrooms and the changing rooms - I think. The authorities monitor behavior in public bathrooms with undercover cops, and Walmart probably monitors its changing rooms with geezers too frail to put up front where they might be trampelled in a shopper stampede. But they might be using cameras and we don't know about it because they haven't been caught yet.

I think this camera thing is a good idea; but it doesn't go far enough. Imagine how much more efficient government offices and school classrooms would be if the bureaucrats and teachers knew they were being watched and recorded full time. But we would have to be careful not to hurt the economy. The fall-off of donut sales near police stations would be dramatic and might put Dunkin Donuts out of business; and the sudden rise in demand for gas might drive up prices if all the ghost employees at the various national and state bureaucracies actually started having to show up for work. Also, imagine the stress on the supervisors at the Department of Labor and the Department of Education if they suddenly had to start showing up and also had to find make-work for all the sons and daughters and nephews and mistresses of the various Congresscritters so they would look busy on the videotapes. Claims for disability might skyrocket.

On the other hand, imagine the positive effects on the economy. The feed from a webcam trained on Michelle Obama's new vegetable garden behind the White House, for instance, would probably become an instant hit and generate lots of advertising dollars to help support the government. Imagine the sudden rise in the sales of seeds as everybody rushed out to get what they need to plant what Michelle is planting as she flexes those fine toned arms of hers that the press has been all in a tizzy about.

The public would also learn lots of important information as well if there was a camera focussed on Michelle's garden. For instance, does Michelle use a stoop hoe or a long handled hoe; or does she use those little ergonomic stainless steel trowels and rakes and dibbles that they sell at Smith & Hawken; you know, the kind of tools that look like they were designed by Buckminster Fuller and cost like $39.95 each? And when she picks her vegetables later in the year; will Michelle use one of the baskets that you get when somebody gives you a Harry & David Christmas assortment, the way I do; or will she use a faux Hopi or Navajo basket like those they sell at Williams and Sonoma when she picks her arugula? The boost in sales of gardening equipment and supplies could be immense if the public knew these things.

And then there are the questions pertaining to fertilization and soil amendment. Does Michelle use cow manure or does she use horse manure? Does she shovel the manure into a 55 gallon drum and then fill the drum with water so she can feed each heirloom tomato plant with a little cup of tea, the way Grandpop L used to do? Or does she bury a little fish with each corn seed the way the Indians taught Pilgrims to do before the Pilgrims figured they knew enough and drove all the Indians away? Does Michelle have a mulch heap like I do behind the house, or did the President buy her one of those fancy $179.95 rotating drum compost things that claims to make good compost out of kitchen scraps and lawn clippings in 30 days? Imagine the amount of potential mulch that must be generated by the White House kitchen when they throw those big dinners for all the third world dictators who visit.

And then there's pest control. Is Michelle planning to squish those big green worms between her thumb and forefinger if she finds them on her tomato plants? Will she have a tick can half filled with water like Pop used to have to drop the ticks into if she gets one on her while she's gardening, or if the girls find a fat tick on their dog? Or is Michelle going to teach her girls to gently return the tomato worms and the ticks to the wild the way the PETA folks would no doubt prefer?

These are the crucial questions to which the public needs answers every bit as much as the Limerick police need to know whether Deb comes to a full honest to God stop at the stop sign on Ridge Pike when she goes to work in the morning.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123811365190053401.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Dancing, Dancing With The Stars, and the dog show syndrome

Jas told me yesterday that Hobbs was viciously attacked by a pit bull while he was innocently performing his duty of taking Sam out for a walk. The pit bull viciously chewed up Hobbs' tail despite Sam's valiant efforts to drive him off.

Now, unless you happen to be a groundhog, you know Hobbs to be the very model of an even tempered, well adjusted and peaceable canine, exceptionally well suited for his role as Sam's minder when he's out of sight of Deb. Hobbs is very different from the sort of high strung, overspecialized and neurotic dogs that are being bred by upper class twits to win dog shows. Pit bulls are an example of the kinds of dogs bred in the past by lower class twits to win the kind of dog shows that predominated back in the age when bull and bear baiting and dog fighting to the death were the cultural equivalent of Dancing With the Stars.

In short, Hobbs is a good all-purpose dog while pit bulls are bad single-purpose dogs. Just as Jas and Kathy are good dancers and dance instructors while the sort of neuroticly grinning high kickers who teach and dance with the stars on Dancing With the Stars are bad dancers and worse dance instructors. The Dancing With the Stars instructors and the kind of folks who win dance competitions are the pit bulls and ridiculously over-grinning, over-coiffed, over pampered, over-bred, under-dressed, over-specialized poodles of the dance world. Not that there's anything wrong with that, except that the preposterous poodles and steoidal pit bulls are taken out of their properly fenced dog runs and inevitably escape the leash.

On Saturday evening Linda and I went to the Ballroom on High for its second anniversary dance. The first hour of the evening was given over to dance demonstrations that ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Jas and Kathy did a real Bolero. A western style couple did a real Two Step and some other country style dances. A swing guy did a real Lindy Hop, which is sort of a jitterbug on steroids. Lin Kettenberg and her husband did a real Foxtrot. All were sublimely better at those dances than any of us ordinary social dancers in the audience who dance for fun and exercise will ever get. But what made them sublime was that they were real; the level of their skill was within range of what we clodhopper social dancers can imagine as being within the range of the possible and desirable.

Interspersed with the real dancers listed above were others who "danced" in the manner of the sort of overbred Chihuahuas and Corgis and Schnauzers and Dachshunds who instruct the stars on Dancing With the Stars in the kind of "dancing" that's more suited to comparison with a performance by the Flying Wallendas or the Chinese National Acrobatic Troup than with a genuine social ballroom dance.

That wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that Jas and Kathy are planning to abandon us and move to Florida. And Farrell plans to turn over their teaching slot to a pair of haughty, overtrained Pit Bulls whose artificial international ballroom competition grins are a cover for their genetic predisposition to bite the tails off us clodhoppers and thus ruin the Wednesday night social dance lesson that we and the other social dancers enjoy.

We had a great time on Saturday night; but it's sad that the event also contained the clear message that the Wednesday night dance lessons will soon go the way of all good things once the "professionals" take over.

Our Brave New World and a change in my understanding of mark to market accounting

When I went to the AOL site this morning to get my email I found a new feature that's like the home price estimator at zillow.com. Having nothing better to do, because corporate recruiters are still among the unneeded and undervalued if not toxic assets of this economy, I clicked on it.

No surprise in the valuation. Our home is now estimated at $330,000, down about 30% from the $470,000 that zillow was estimating it at the very peak of the real estate boom valuations in July of 2007. What was really interesting is that AOL Real Estate has a much better satellite or aerial photo of our home and lot than the one I last saw on zillow a few months ago, and I can almost precisely date that photo.

That photo, a very clear one, shows the redbuds and the crabapples in bloom and my garden as a rectangle. It also shows the big hybrid poplar nearest the house, a tree we had removed in 2006, still in place. Finally, it shows the white plastic recliner out on the lawn in the sun. So it has to have been taken in the late Spring, about mid May, of 2005, almost surely on a Saturday or Sunday since I was working pretty intensively on the weekdays during that period. We all still thought real estate values would rise forever and the biggest business problem at my contract employer was the difficulty of continuing to hire enough new people to expand fast enough to ensure that the other commercial mortgage companies would never catch up in our specialized market niche.

First off, what a brave new technological world we live in. A couple of clicks and I'm looking at an image of our house and lot from above, an image clear enough so I would probably be able make a good guess at the tee shirt I was wearing if I had been in the recliner when it was taken. I think that image is from a stitched together pastiche of aerial photos rather than from a satellite photo. The implication is that the entire country, if not the world, is now imaged at a resolution of about a foot and searchable. Somewhere, some biology graduate student who knows that polar bears do not shit in the woods is counting the brown blobs on the snow and writing a paper on how many craps a polar bear took last week and how far apart they are. Somewhere else, someone with different interests is occasionally stumbling across a picture of a California or Florida swimming pool owner who thought he or she could take a dip in the nude in total privacy.

But enough of that line of thought. I have serious quibbles with the rather simplistic calculation assumptions that zillow and now AOL make about home values. Our home, for instance, appears to be valued almost soley on the basis of its square footage and bedroom and bathroom count. The system they both use assigns little or no value to the land that our home sits on, a much larger and infinitely more private lot than those of the houses presented as comparables. This is only natural because it's no doubt impossible, at least now, to put a value on purely esthetic factors, But the AOL valuation also misses the potential for subdivision of our five acre home lot.

Which brings me to my other point. The other day I asserted that the value of something is simply what someone is willing to pay for the thing. On Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog yesterday I came across a comment that made me recognize a slight wrinkle that I hadn't considered which is perfectly demonstrated by my reaction to AOL's valuation of our house. We, the owners, have a better understanding of both intangible and tangible factors that go into the value of our house. We know that the privacy has great value to us, if not to others in the general marketplace; and we also know that the lot is subdividable.

So there is no way we would trade our house and its lot for one of the comparable houses worth $370,000. As the commenter on Contentions correctly pointed out, accounting for value has to take into consideration the price at which the owner of an asset would be willing to sell it as well as the price at which some other party would be willing to buy it. And for thinly traded assets that bid versus asked spread can be pretty wide. For our home, for instance, the bid versus asked spread is more than the current bid price, at least as simplistically arrived at by zillow and AOL. We might sell if someone showed up tomorrow with a check for double the valuation on AOL; but I'm not sure. Even putting aside the pretty tangible value of subdivision we might not sell. Linda and I both like the pond and the privacy a lot.

So we're back to this question of mark to market accounting. The banks unwilling to sell those so called toxic assets at current bid prices presumably understand those assets somewhat better than the potential buyers do. Hence, the toxic assets are worth more than the bid price as I asserted the other day; but how much more? The mere fact that my best answer to that question is "Who knows?" says that this question of mark to market accounting is more complex than I asserted the other day.

Do bankers know the value of the assets in their vaults? Do bears shit in the woods? Do Californians and Floridians swim in the nude?

Not always.

And - in somewhat related news, here's a 3 minute speech by a member of the European Union parliament that's fantastic. We should offer this guy citizenship and elect him to our congress. It would be refreshing to have one politician down in Washington who makes sense.

"You cannot borrow yourself out of debt."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs

Bernie Madoff did some good

As usual most people are talking only about the negative vibes; but Bernie Madoff did this architect and his wife a big favor. These lunatics believe living uncomfortably can help people live longer and better and they designed houses to keep life annoying; so Bernie probably prolonged their life by stealing all their money.

Priceless.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785033607519075.html

Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world

Give me a lever long enough and a strong enough fulcrum and I will move the world. . . or at least a wayward tractor.

There is nothing quite so pleasing as a plan that works straightforwardly since plans mostly don't work without a great deal of fussing, if they work at all. The other day my dumb tractor went and got itself stuck over in the sewer easement just before Linda and I needed to get ready to go up to Pottstown to watch the dance demos and then strut our somewhat less impressive waltz, rumba, foxtrot, jitterbug and west coast swing stuff at the Ballroom on High. As a result the tractor spent its first night all alone in the woods in twenty five years, pitched down at about a 40% angle with its front wheels half buried in mud. Why the darn thing let me drive it down that slope is a mystery. It should have known it wouldn't have the traction to pull itself back up that muddy slope.

Anyway, it was the first time I've ever failed to retrieve the thing from its folly on my own. After past incidents I've always managed to get it out of trouble with a mere hour or two, or four, of individual effort, even that time it got itself wedged under. . . well, perhaps I'd best not go into that. . . Linda reads this blog.

Anyway, I went over to Sears while Linda was cooking dinner to get a second come-along. I already have a come-along that's rated at a ton; but that one ton rating presumes a certain amount of arm strength to apply to the 18 inch or so long lever. Back in the old days, when I used to do real pushups instead of sissy from the knee pushups, me and the come-along probably pulled a ton; but now maybe not so much. And I don't have a pipe that will fit over the handle lever. Memo to self - get a 36 inch length of pipe with an inside diameter greater than two inches. Faced with half the arm strength, one must double the lever length. Maybe I ought to look for a 48 inch long pipe. The ability to project future conditions and plan for them is the very height of what makes us human.

Anyway go figure, the Sears Hardware store up on Route 29 no longer sells come-alongs. What good is a hardware store that doesn't sell essential pieces of hardware? They still sell one and two ton car jacks for surprisingly reasonable prices. Even given that I would have also had to buy a second long length of chain to use with the car jack the total would still have been lots less than the cost of hiring someone with a four wheel drive tow truck capable of getting to where the tractor spent the night. But using a car jack in tandem with the come-along would have meant a lot of carrying of stuff out into the woods and a lot of careful fussing with the rigging because of the push rather than pull design of a car jack, and because of its very short working travel. A lot of fussing.

So I bit the bullet and asked Jas to come over on Sunday morning for a try at doing it the straightforward way with the one come-along. By great good luck there was a decent sized tree across the sewer easement directly behind and not more than thirty feet from the rear of the tractor. An easy reach for my existing length of chain and the cable of the come-along.

Lo and behold, with a skeptical Jas working the come-along and me running the tractor after jamming a couple of lengths of rug under its rear wheels, we retrieved the beast from the muck and mire within fifteen minutes or so.

"That's a real lesson in applied physics," Jas commented. When something works cleanly it's really satisfying. We celebrated over coffee and talked of the ballroom dance demos of the night before. Have I mentioned that Jas and Kathy wowed the crowd with their Bolero demo? There were flashier, much more athletic and choreographed pairs; but Jas and Kathy and a few others showed what ordinary people can do if they practice, practice, practice.

Jas and I also talked about our Saturday morning pinochle game with Sam. And we talked about Al R, and Florida home prices, and the news I heard that one of my acquaintances, a seemingly judicious fellow, on the fancy neighborhood side is suddenly facing bankruptcy because he got himself overextended in real estate development, and the upcoming trip to The Villages in late April early May. Sam was meanwhile out on the golf course, no doubt blissfully unaware that the handle of a golf club is nothing but a long lever and all the club heads are wedges of varying pitch.
Later in the day I successfully guided the much chastened and distinctly less adventurous tractor over to the old house on Route 29 where I ran into Dan K. I mentioned to Dan that my third option had been to call him and ask if he has a come-along, which it turns out he does, of course, like any sensible person. How do people get through life without essential tools? What do they do after they pick themselves up and check their extremities and their heart stops pounding to find that the tractor has not been so lucky and is a bit wedged under the tree that perversely fell the wrong way?

Anyway, Dan proudly showed me his growing pile of firewood, maybe ten cords so far. Top quality stuff because he's been cutting big oaks and cherries and chestnuts. He's also been been
patiently splitting, doing real yeoman work, ever since he got laid off a couple of months ago, with the work accelerating since his brother got laid off a couple of weeks ago. He also ripped a few really impressive quarter sawn slabs from the four foot or so in diameter oak at the back of their property. Those slabs should be worth a pretty penny if there is still anyone around here who does real furniture making.

Dan told me cured firewood is already up to over $200 per cord. I reiterated that he's welcome to cut at will along the tree line dividing our properties. There are three pretty big trees, one maple, one cherry and one chestnut, up there along the border near Route 29 that are ripe for taking. I suspect he's going to get even more than $200 a cord next year when the wood is cured, maybe a lot more if the government is insane enough to pass some version of cap and trade in the middle of a recession. Cap and trade will drive up electricity, oil and gas prices maybe thirty or forty percent.

Dan has also increased the size of his garden maybe fivefold for this year. He has me wondering whether I should increase the diameter of my garden. The S's who live in Mom and Pop's old house have a pretty good sized pile of horse manure that's there for the taking. Next weekend I'll retrieve a scoop load for my garden and one or two loads to drop off for Dan. Maybe I'll deliver the loads to Dan first. The tractor route across the marshland will get iffy once we start getting spring rains which are late this year. In a pinch I can take the tractor around the long way to Dan's via the roads; which does have the advantage of irritating and shocking the impatient yuppy drivers, especially when one does it with a load like manure which tends to dribble out of the tractor bucket a bit.

Why shouldn't casinos get stimulus money

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada is very concerned that the nasty Republicans added an amendment to the "stimulus" bill preventing casinos from sharing in the great deluge of our tax dollars that are being strewn around the country. This article doesn't say it, but it's probable Senator Reid also wants stimulus dollars for his favorite cathouses. If the manufacturers of cute little whips and the banks that finance them can get stimulus money, why can't casinos and cathouses get it?

Casinos and cathouses are important parts of the economy of Nevada. They provide tens of thousands of good jobs, they almost singlehandedly support the towel laundry services, and they funnel millions in "contributions" to Senator Reid. The good senator uses the casino bribes to get elected so he can continue to do good for the people. He mostly takes his cathouse bribes in trade because it's important that he stay in close touch with his constituents, and he has to remain well stimulated himself so he can deliver what the people of Nevada want and deserve.

Casinos and cat houses are every bit as worthy of stimulus dollars as banks and car companies.

http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=10043348

Schrodinger's cat is clawing at the financial system

Who knew that an understanding of quantum mechanics is necessary to be an accountant?

The so called toxic mortgage derivative assets are just like Schroedinger's cat. They have both value and non value until someone opens a bank vault and looks at them, thus causing their value to collapse into a definite state. Once the bank vault door is closed again the value of the assets can only be expressed as a quantum superposition.

In more formal terms, accounting for the assets of the banks must take into account that the psi function of a vault, whenever its door is closed, has in it both value and non value mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

Full disclosure: I got a D in second semester freshman physics at Illinois Tech, so someone at Fermilab or CERN or Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study should probably review this before passing it to Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the FASB for incorporation into the mark to market accounting rules and the regulations implementing same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat

Patrick Kinna has died at 95 years old - RIP

If you're at all into history there is nothing quite like the obituaries in the London Telegraph and other English newspapers.

This is a good example. It's the obituary of Patrick Kinna, who was Winston Churchill's private secretary during World War II.

Here's a sample:
"Offered a lift by a general and two staff officers, Kinna sat in the front of the car, with a rifle between his knees which was pointing at the general's head. The general asked if the safety catch was on, and Kinna – who had received no arms training – replied that he had no idea. The car was stopped, and the general examined the weapon to find that the catch was not engaged and there was a live bullet up the spout. Kinna never forgot the dressing-down he received."

The story about what Churchill, naked, said to Franklin Roosevelt when the president surprised him is also great.

And there are others.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/5012929/Patrick-Kinna.html

The AIG bonus hullabaloo may be a smoke screen

Everybody from President Obama down to pond scum like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd is yelling and screaming about $165 million in bonuses that AIG paid to employees who had contracts guaranteeing them those bonuses.

All this outrage is itself a hypocritical outrage because the stimulus bill that President Obama rushed to sign and that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd rushed through congress contains specific language that seems almost designed to guarantee those bonuses.

But I think this is all a sideshow and perhaps even a consciously designed smoke screen to hide the real thievery. The really interesting question is why everybody is so excited about $165 Million when AIG has already taken in $173 Billion of our money and has been rapidly paying out that money to a whole host of institutions all over the world with barely any transparency.

Here are the key question about this matter that we need an answer to before those tens of billions disappear and are no longer possible to recover.

Who is AIG paying those tens of billions out to? When did those recipients buy the the AIG mortgage derivative guarantees that AIG is paying off on with our money?

I think I saw the other day, for instance, that Goldman Sachs is a big recent recipient of money from AIG and that Goldman Sachs executives helped to design the TARP plan. Did Goldman Sachs buy those derivatives before or after it's executives "helped" Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke to design the TARP program?

I'd be willing to bet that there are smart folks out there who bought up AIG insurance guarantees at fire sale prices way below face value because they knew that they could get a little help from their friends in putting the government on the hook to pay off those guarantees at face value.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123743055512280701.html

Update: This guy makes a start at answering the question: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12679 I've quoted him below.

During his testimony this week, Fed Chairman Bernanke felt compelled to say, and I quote:
"AIG exploited a huge gap in the regulatory system; there was no oversight of the financial products division. This was a hedge fund basically that was attached to a large and stable insurance company, made huge numbers of irresponsible bets, took huge losses" One knows the folks at Goldman are no fools. Were they going to put good money down for CDS that their counterparty (AIG) might not be able to honor because it made no reserve provisions? Or was the temptation of another big pay day just too tempting not to risk Other People's Money to play the game?
To date we have poured $160 billion into AIG -- this while others see the value of their homes cut in half, the better part of their 401(k)s wiped out, their government services significantly reduced, and other lending institutions diligently try to work out past due credits, taking significant mark-downs and extending due dates to keep industries and corporations alive.
This, as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are being covered 100 cents on the dollar on their speculative positions of intrinsically flawed CDS derivatives on which they gorged themselves to the bursting point. It is past time that a distinction be made between that part of AIG's business that was a "large and stable insurance company," and that part that was a "hedge fund," or better put, a casino. So the big question becomes, why should AIG's CDS be paid down 100 cents on the dollar when the rest of the country is taking at or near 50% haircut on the value of its assets?

This post is only for diehard Scrabble players

Za is now a valid word according to this article that's in The Wall Street Journal today. So is Qi, which is already in Jas and Kathy's well thumbed Scrabble dictionary. ZZZ is also now a valid word, although you would need to have both blanks to make that word so I don't see much use for it.

Clearly we need to get a new Scrabble dictionary.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123731266862258869.html?mod=article-outset-box

Insisting that something is a fresh rose does not make it smell sweet

Last Saturday Sam brought up the question of "mark to market" accounting. Most people have completely avoided learning about mark to market accounting because it seems like one of those complicated subjects that are best left to the boring accountants who wear green eyeshades and garters on their sleeves.

But mark to market accounting is actually very simple. Anybody can understand it. Let's take an example.

If you are wise you have probably been saving some money toward retirement. Over the years that money has been slowly building up and you've been investing it, perhaps in stock market mutual funds. For years and years you were generally pleased with the statements you got from the mutual fund company every three months. Last September you looked at your statement and were pleased to see that the $5,000 you had invested over the years had grown into $10,000 or so in the account. Very pleasing!

But then you got a shock when you looked at your statement in December and found that your account had suddenly shrunk as the stock market went down, and the value was back down to about $5,000. Recognizing that the account is worth what its worth is mark to market accounting. Whether you like it or not the value of your investments is what it is. If you're like me you may be pretty optimistic that the value of the account will go back up again over time; but there's absolutely no sense in trying to pretend the account is still worth $10,000. One of the oldest and simplest rules of life is that an economic asset is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, no more and no less.

Some people don't like that simple rule, so they lie to themselves. They tell themselves that their stock market account is still worth $10,000 even though other people in the market are only willing to pay $5,000 for the stocks in the account. Or they tell themselves that their house is worth $200,000 because their neighbor on the right hand side sold his house for $200,000 a couple of years ago, even though they just talked to their neighbor on the left hand side who has had his house listed on the market for six months and the best offer he's gotten so far is $160,000.

Pretending that your stock market account is still worth $10,000 or your house is still worth $200,000 under such conditions is fantasy accounting. It may feel good; but it makes no sense. It's nothing but lying to yourself.

Timothy Geithner and many of the other big heads down in Washington want to let your neighborhood bank pretend that the stocks and bonds and mortgage derivatives in its vault are still worth what they were worth in September. They want to let the bank lie to you and to its owners and claim that those stocks and bonds and mortgage derivatives are worth what they paid for them. Trust me, those stocks and bonds and derivatives in the bank vault are worth what the bank can sell them for today, just like your retirement fund stocks or your house are worth what you can sell them for today.

The big heads claim that the banks need to pretend because there is "no market" for the mortgage derivatives that many stupid bankers bought and put into their vaults. But that too is a pernicious lie. I can assure you that there is a market for mortgage derivatives because I myself am ready to go to any local bank and inspect the paperwork and make an offer for some of their securities.

I'll go further and guarantee that I'm willing to buy a random selection of the mortgage derivatives in the vault of Citibank or Wells Fargo Bank or even AIG even without the chance to inspect them with no more surety than a notarized letter signed by the person who selects the derivatives and the Chairman, Chief Financial Officer and General Counsel assuring me that the selection is truly random, and I don't know very much about derivatives at all.

Heck, I'm even willing to name a price. I'll pay a hundred bucks for ten billion of face value of the mortgage derivatives in the vaults of any of the banks whose stock is listed on the NYSE, sight unseen, under those simple terms - a random selection. So all you bankers with toxic assets; send me the letter and the random selection of derivatives and I'll send you the hundred bucks. If you don't feel comfortable trusting me for the hundred bucks, send me the notarized letter alone and I'll trust you. Even though I know you have a history of lying I'll send you the hundred bucks even before you send the random selection of derivatives.

Give me a few days to put together a team of a two or three folks who know more about mortgage derivatives than me and I'm very confident that we will be willing to pay more, maybe even a thousand or ten thousand bucks per billion of face value, for derivatives if we can visit the vault of Citibank or Wells Fargo or even AIG and pick the ones we're buying. So don't go on telling me there is no market for mortgage derivatives.

I don't expect to be offered the chance to buy mortgage derivatives at those kinds of prices, of course, because there are lots and lots of other people in the world with much more money and much more knowledge of mortgage derivatives than me. And lots and lots of those people already have staffs of people who can help them evaluate the derivatives on very short notice.

There is a market for the so called "toxic assets" of the banks; but the executives of those banks and the big heads down in Washington don't want to recognize that the prices that market is willing to pay is much less than what they are claiming on their fancy accounting statements.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/16/mark-to-market-accounting-business-wall-street-fasb-157.html

This would be funny if Barney weren't still giving more billions of our money to AIG

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/29717507#29717507

Here's a proposal. How about Barney Frank going back to Massachussetts? His claims that he bears no responsibility for the situation is beyond preposterous. He's the Chairman of the House Banking Committee and his party controls Congress.

Why are Barney Frank and Timothy Geithner and Chris Dodd and President Obama giving more billions to AIG if it's conduct continues to be "outrageous"?

I wonder how big a kickback Barney and Tim and Chris and Barry get out of the billions of our money they give to AIG.

And here's some breaking news. At least we're getting some bang for our buck in the form of good relations and a better image for things American around the world. Germans find President Obama to be so "finger lickin' good"that a company there has started a new product as "a homage to the American lifestyle and the new US president." See the link below.

I checked but could find no data on whether sales of arbuse are up in Germany. Hey, don't go thinking I'm constructing a subtle message here! I'm only reporting on the bare facts, which is the least I can do lest Attorney General Holder should deride me as cowardly.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,612684,00.html

Incidently, the sun's still very quiet, which may or may not be good for German arbuse farmers.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWRmNmQ3YWQwYWYwZWYwOTJiZWMwYjE3ZjBmZmYzOTk=

Dinner at Delores W's and a stroll through Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

Linda and I just returned from a nice walk through the neighborhood. We took the walk after getting home from the excellent dinner up at Delores W's place in Sanatoga. The owl is hooting out there; but it didn't swoop down on us when we walked out and back in the driveway.

There was great food and great conversation up at Delores' place; the apple and peach pies were particularly noteworthy. But, as sometimes happens, one learns things one perhaps preferred not to know.

For instance, Sam and Marianne admitted that they regularly eat creamed chipped beef on toast. I wish I hadn't learned that. It calls into question everything I think I know about genetics. Sam and Marianne are not only Italians, they are among the last of the purebred Marche'Gians; and now I learn that they willingly eat shit on a shingle.

Sam and I met Charlie A, an 87 year old former B-24 engineer and gunner, in the parking lot. One of his jobs on the B-24 was to crank the ball turret down into position after the little ball turret gunner got into it. Uncle Frank was a ball turret gunner who flew thirty or so missions. The fact that once the ball turret was cranked down he was stuck in that turret with no way to escape until it was cranked up again by the guys like Charlie A in the plane may account for some of his quirks in later life. Charlie A also told us that his grandfather's name was John A.

What are the chances of wandering out into the parking lot of a retirement community and meeting an old fellow riding a little battery powered tricycle who used to crank ball turret gunners down into position and whose grandfather's name was the same as your father's name? Sometimes you get the feeling that you've wandered into Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

Of course, strange things can and will happen in real life. For instance, I once met a fellow aboard the Enterprise whose name was also Sullivan A. He was a Filipino whose last name came down from Spanish ancestry, not too surprising if you do some thinking about the likely origin of the last name "A". I've always thought that a lot of former Roman legionaries came to be known by some variant of "A" as a last name in honor of their padrino when he arranged for them to get grants of land as a form of retirement pension.

That Filipino fellow and I may well be the only two Sullivan "A"s on earth, assuming he's still alive. What are the chances that perhaps the only two Sullivan "A"s in the whole world once found themselves serving on the same ship at the same time, even if the ship had a crew of about 5,500?

Lest you too quickly toss aside my conjecture about the rarity of Sullivan "A"s: all of the first thirty or so hits on a search for "sullivan a......." on Google refer to me, except for the mistaken hits that lead to folks whose last name is "Sullivan" and whose first name is "A". Go figure. There are apparently lots of people with the last name Sullivan who give their offspring the first name "A", which is interesting of itself; but people with the last name "A" apparently almost never name their offspring Sullivan.

Google did find one lonely reference to a "Gen. Sullivan A....." attending a fundraising dinner; and I've never been a general, so that isn't me. I looked pretty carefully for more references to a "General Sullivan A..." and couldn't find any. I think his name was listed backwards in that dinner announcement.

I think it's possible that there's another Sullivan "A" in the world who has dodged having his name appear on the internet; but I'd be willing to take a bet on very long odds that there is only one Alexander Sullivan "A" in the world. Linda and I didn't set out to do it but I think it's possible we created a new unique name in the history of the human race when we named Alex.

But back to the old bomber crewman on the tricycle; he told us his grandfather was Italian but that he came to this country from France. You should know that Charlie also told us he had forgotten to put his hearing aids in before he jumped on his tricycle for an evening spin, so all facts from our conversation with him are suspect. One thing's for sure. If his grandfather really was an Italian named John A who lived in France I doubt he ever ate shit on a shingle unless he was starving.

During the course of the evening we also learned from Deb that Mr. Rogers wore long sleeved sweaters made by his mother because he had tattoos on his arms from his time in the military. During his time in the military he won the Medal of Honor. That was while he was a Navy Seal.

Snopes has a problem with that set of "facts." Snopes says Mr. Rogers was never in the military, and didn't have tattoos on his arms. Snopes doesn't address the question of whether he had a nice little butterfly tattoo on his buttocks. Snopes also doesn't address the question of whether Mr. Rogers' mom made his sweaters. It does address and debunk the question of whether Mr. Rogers got into doing childrens television because he was assigned to do childrens shows as a result of a conviction for child molestation. Snopes thinks someone started that rumor because of the Mr. McFeely character on the show. It is just a tiny bit odd to our current suspicious sensibilities to have a character named Mr. McFeely on a childrens show.

Snopes says that Mr. Rogers named the character Mr. McFeely because his middle name was "McFeely." Would you trust your kids with a babysitter named McFeely?

But who knows whether Snopes can be trusted. If Big Brother is secretly running things he's certain to have taken firm control of Snopes. He may even have invented Snopes.

A couple thousand years ago Juvenal warned: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Several hundred years before that Plato also warned about the problem, but I couldn't quickly find his quote; and anyway Plato's quote probably includes characters I can't type here without installing a Greek language symbol pack, which I'm too lazy to do. For the record I couldn't have been sure of accurately quoting the Latin until I looked it up; but I knew the English to use on Google to find the Latin. You'll just have to do the reverse if you want to know what it means. Of course the quote may not be accurately spelled anyway since we only know the quote because it was copied over many times by monks who spoke church Latin that's pronounced very differently from Ceasar's Latin, or at least that's what I understand.

It's a little like that riff by Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street. "You say Tomahtoe and I say Tomato." Caesar said "Keyzzarr" and the Popes said "Seeser", which explains why the world has had Kaisers and Czars instead of Seesers and Seesirs.

But I have digressed. Back to Mr. Rogers, or rather Sam. I don't think Sam has tattoos on his arms either; but I'm not sure because he's always wearing Mr. Rogers type sweaters. This year Sam's been wearing his Mr.Rogers sweaters over a shirt that's just like the top of those old union suit long johns, which led to an unresolved discussion last night about whether Sam was wearing the bottom of the union suit as well.

Turns out I was the only one who remembered that the old union suit bottoms had a back flap which could be unbuttoned so as to make use of the outhouse easier on cold nights. That led to a discussion of outhouses. And that led to remembrance of the Redpeppers picnic since there was an old outhouse at the picnic grounds. That led to us remembering the time Matty drank a whole case of eight ounce sodas at one of the picnics. It also led to us learning that Dave M grew up on a farm that had an outhouse still in use, although the house had an inside bathroom. And I shared the fact that Aunt Mary and Uncle Chick's house next to ours in Norristown still had a functioning outhouse in the early 1950's. There is a picture of me and Medio playing next to the outhouse.

Again with the digressions. Back to Sam. Last year, when we shared a bathroom at Matty's, Sam didn't have tattoos on his arms, and he didn't have a tattoo of a butterfly on his buttocks; but I haven't seen his bare arms or buttocks since then, so only Deb can answer the question of whether he has tattoos on them now. Anything is possible in this Brave New World. I've known that since Joey R and Sonny started showing up at family gatherings wearing earrings.

http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/mrrogers.asp

Update: that giant horned owl is perched high up in the big silver maple down by the creek this morning, swivelling his head around ominously. I think I'll put up my hood when I muster up the energy to walk out the driveway and get the paper. If I had a battery powered tricycle I could ride out there.

This explains my recent losses at Scrabble

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1162052/Old-age-begins-27--scientists-claim-new-research.html

It also explains how David came to beat Kathy last week.

You cannot make this sort of stuff up

Rocket scientists have almost perfected a laser system for killing mosquitos. Once they make it safe for humans and beneficial insects they plan to install it in African villages to help in the fight against malaria. I wonder how many opthalmologists Doctors Without Borders has available to treat blindness in the event there are some minor systems glitches.

I hope they're working on a version to target those nasty green biting flies at the beach. And I also want a battery powered version I can mount on my hat to eliminate those annoying gnats when I go out in the woods in summer. Come to think of it, such a system could also be programmed to protect cross country skiers from Great Horned Owls that swoop down. And wouldn't it be the bomb to have a system that hikers, bicyclists and cross country runners could wear to protect them from grizzly bears and mountain lions.

It would probably be good idea to program the system so it won't kill endangered species or else the environmentalists will have a problem with it.

Surely it would be okay for such a battery powered system to automatically target and kill those big fat tomato worms. Grandpop and Pop used to squish those worms between their thumbs and forefingers; but I have never been able to make myself do that. So I toss them as far from the garden as I can and the damn things probably spend all night crawling back.

Come to think of it, such a laser system could also be scaled up to protect the gardens of African villages from elephants and hippos, or it could be programmed to protect villages from marauders with machetes. Maybe the system could even shoot the machetes out of the marauders's hands the way Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger used to shoot the guns out of the bad guys' hands.

Think of how many more useful scientific discoveries will be flowing out once President Obama's stimulus money hits the labs.

http://www.comcast.net/articles/finance/20090314/SB123680870885500701/

Update: I hope someone is keeping an eye on the spread of this technology. If some bad guy ever thinks of mouting frikkin' lasers on the heads of sharks those SOBs could attack people at the beach even if they aren't in the water.

And: in other related news, The United Nations has put Libya, Iran and Cuba in charge of the soon to start World Conference on Racism. That's like putting sharks with frikkin' lasers on their heads in the performance pool at Sea World so they can zap the spectators. I think we should install a laser system in New York and program it to fry anyone who comes out of the U.N. building.

I'm going to take my Prozac now.

One more blow against starvation and waste

Many was the time back at Visitation B.V.M. grade school when the nuns patrolling the cafeteria told us that it was a sin to waste food while children were starving in India or China or Africa or on an Indian reservation. Generally they told us this when the cafeteria ladies had just slopped something particularly egregious onto our plates, like creamed chipped beef on toast.

The Irish kids would eat it, and the Germans could maybe choke it down; but there's never been an Italian in the history of the world who would eat that stuff. And, since at that time it was still funny to ask "Is the Pope Italian?" just after asking "Does a bear shit in the woods?" I felt myself to be in pretty good company and on pretty solid moral ground in refusing to eat it.

But there is sin and then there are the wages of sin. The nuns were pretty crafty, and very watchful, and very dogmatic on the subject of sin; but they would have had to actually have eyes in the back of their heads to get me to eat that white glop. Wait. . . wait. . . wait. . . Now! Into the empty milk carton with it while she's busy over there beating on Russell M.

Even if the Pope would eat it, dumping shit on a shingle while descendants of Geronimo and Hannibal and Ghengis Khan are starving certainly ain't a sin if you don't get caught. And neither is giving Russell M a broad smile and a little meaningful wave of the criminal milk carton as he's being smacked smartly about the head.

I'm reminded of this because for some time there have been complaints around here about my waste of flour when I make fish for dinner. I generally dump a couple of heap of flour on a big plate, dredge the couple of pieces of fish in it, and then dump the nine tenths of the flour that's still on the plate into the trash can. Having had a very thorough education in the practical fieldcraft of sin concealment, I generally put some newspaper over the evidence; but sometimes I forget in the rush to get dinner finished before Linda gets home if I've lost track of time while scouring the job market for leads or watching Fluffee videos or some such. On those occasions I get some variant of the old nuns' chastisement - sin, waste, shame. . . Oh, The Humanity!

So tonight I finally got smart. I dredged the fish in corn meal. Then I turned the leftover corn meal into polenta. So I can report with some pride that no children were wantonly starved in the making of our dinner, nor in the writing of this blog entry.

The polenta was quite good with a little drizzle of honey on it; and the corn meal crust on the fish was excellent. On the side we had creamed spinach that I picked up one time on impulse in the market when it was on sale. I don't know how long it's been in the freezer but it tasted pretty good and there have been no adverse effects as of yet. I warmed up a can of tomatoes, okra and corn for Linda to put over her polenta. She likes okra. As for myself, I seriously doubt they ever ate any of it up in the big house back in the old days down South. Naturally we had a salad as well. Tonight's was cucumber, red pepper, artichoke hearts, romaine lettuce, onions dressed with Aunt Mary R's specified mixture of two part olive oil to one part vinegar. Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Balsamic vinegar, of course.

Meanwhile if you haven't discovered Fluffee. . .

If you haven't yet discovered Fluffee you're missing the genesis of a major future star. The link below is the first of his videos I've found that can be posted on a family blog. If you watch other of Fluffee's videos I won't be responsible for what you may find; but I suggest that you not be drinking anything that may go up your nose when you laugh. The young fellow is a very acute observer of the human condition. A world that can produce such youth is probably not as bad off as we old farts generally think.

I'm proud to say that I found Fluffee all on my own. which probably means that I really do need to get a job.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxIH1Mmle-I&NR=1