Category: Economy

No show

Oh my screaming g’s the Detroit Philly game. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Six inches of snow on the camera crew and half the football disappears when you put it down. When the player rooted double handsful of snow out of his face mask I howled.

Furnace is broken, internet is spotty.  Working right now, but who knows later.  It’s been like this for days now.

We’re at the end of Season 4 for Burn Notice and Jeff has declared a short moratorium.  That’s okay, because I’m currently thrilling to the amazing dress sense of the lovely Phryne Fisher of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries.  It’s very much in the Foyle’s War category of murder mysteries, except Australian and Phryne is a SLUTTTT! A cheerful, unapologetic and unambiguous one (but sex scenes are strictly decorous and mostly off screen).  She drives a Hispano Suiza! She has a gold plated pistol, which never seems to have any ammo! She is awesome.  So until I get Michael Westen back, probably about a week from now, I’ll have to watch Farscape and Miss Fisher instead.

Person to see the shop yesterday didn’t show.  Somebody else called, I’m showing it Tuesday.

David Simon (of the Wire) talkin”bout capitalizm.

I am thinking of going to the shooting range the next time Keith and Rob go.

I know I spend a lot of time whining, but I am really happy to be alive, and I’m writing and practicing every day, and there’s food in the fridge, and my friends love me, and my cat is cheerfully indifferent to me unless I’m crinkling packaging.

Eddie is feeling a bit better – his appetite has returned – but he’s now hiding in Jeff’s bathroom cupboard a good chunk of the time.

I have half completed my first of two new homilies (March 9 and May 11, or perhaps the other way around) and intend to have a completed draft of the first by the end of the week. mOm I should have a bit off to you shortly.

The Alberta government has tabled legislation that will prevent public sector union employees from even TALKING about striking.  What unutterable bullshit! My prairie populist ancestors are whirling in their graves like a rotisserie set on stun.

Yay, Natalie Reed is blogging again. She is a queer trans blogger living in Vancouver and she can write like a m*****-******* riot.

walking every day

My healthy habits attempts continue, much assisted by the weather.  It is fricking gorgeous.  I am walking every day.  It’s going to hurt no matter what I do, so I may as well stay mobile.  I’m also ramping up my weight bearing exercises.  I can pretty much move my right arm where it’s supposed to go, with assistance, but the strength is lacking and so I’m spending a lot more time doing the physio exercises.

I stood in line for a long time today at a government agency, where I was served by a very nice young man after the tedious wait, and took a bus back from Metrotown.  In my continuing efforts to spoil Jeff rotten I picked up some croissants.  And cookies.

Dishwasher’s burbling away.

Katie is employed! She starts work today.  I am pleased. Now hopefully her brother will stop grinding her about looking for work; I don’t think he has a clue how hard it is out there right now.  I heard from an employment agency today, but I don’t expect much to come of it.

roundup

Mohenjo Daro one of the (in my view) current wonders of the world, is dying, disappearing, thanks in part to the poverty and incompetence of the government in charge of it.

A great collection of reaction gifs, some not safe for work.

If you want to find out what an ultra-thin and flexible BRDF [bidirectional reflectance distribution function] is, follow this link.   safe for work

This is no way to greet the dawning future, except that it is true.  safe for work.

I spoke to Lois, Kaitlin’s mother, last night (thank you Keith for arranging that).  She is doing about as well as can be expected. I don’t have much more to say.  I mostly listened.  I am very thankful that she has the support of so many family members and friends right now.

 

Too bad

I WISH I could talk about work in detail.  There was a communiqué from Finance yesterday that managed to combine Kafka, Jacques Tati and General Nivelle in its spirit, tone and usefulness.  The originator will be receiving one of Allegra’s Famous Emailsâ„¢. Since that about covers it without being too specific or blaming individuals, I’ll let that one go out into the world unchallenged.

Last night Jeff and I had purple potatoes, steamed carrots and onions, and the leftover pork chops.  The purple taters were so om nom nom.  I will do them mashed sometime for fun.

After supper we watched Capitalism, A Love Story which had the usual annoying Michael Moore tics (I prefer people with some dignity so I always hate it when he lets people cry on camera, but that’s me being a frikkin WASP there darlin’) but was otherwise very well done, and if I disliked the crony politicians of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush eras I loathe them now.  The scale of the plunder that has occurred and the short sightedness of it all disgust me to my core.  However, a collapse at this point is inevitable, and Canada and many other places will get dragged into the maelstrom, so everybody learn to grow food.

After the movie, I dragged myself out to the Puddleâ„¢, where Paul, Keith and Katie were also swimming and soaking.  It was very nice to hang around with them.  I didn’t actually swim, I just gave my back some relief from the horrors of being attached to me for a while.  Then I came home and slept until 6:03 in the morning, which is like a frikkin’ miracle.

Also, I finished a song in Songwriter (Walk Away)… the one that goes I have tried to walk away, but my thoughts will not wear shoes, I would pity my poor mind, if I had a mind to lose (which I wrote last summer but seems very apt these days).

I don’t know if any of the foregoing constitutes staying busy or not.  When I see what other people accomplish I feel pretty slow.  Anyway, to horse!  I need to get into work and flatten some paper.

 

And every word of it is true

I am Allegra Sloman, and I subscribe to this management decision.

An extremely rare kitty photo for Jeff.

Glenn Close has her genome mapped.

Snails are gonna eat Florida.  Here’s a pic of and article about the critter in question.

When is a species extinct?  You’d think it’s a dopey question, but apparently it is not.

Aggressively massaging its books. Great expression for part of what preceded the collapse of Lehman.  And since there’s been no meaningful regulatory reform, it could all happen again, how very cyclical.

Yes, that Nascar crash was no accident.  To keep ratings high, the Nascar management is encouraging it.  Hope nobody dies.

Yesterday I made spare ribs, and that, candidly is about it.  I hope to have a marginally more productive day today.

I thought today was Pi Day, but apparently there’s some dispute about that.

The market collapse

When I was so small I was practically transparent, my father first spoke to me about short selling.  It’s about how you take a bet, preferably with somebody else’s money, that a stock price is going to drop.  The first time pOp explained it to me I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard, expecially since he was explaining it in the context of the 1929 stock market crash.

So this short film by Judd Bagley is a fair commitment of your time at almost half an hour, but I think it’s well done and it helped me understand just what triggered the first round of the collapse.  Mario, a former coworker, forwarded it to me.  Please note it’s Vimeo, which some people have trouble running.

From Bloomberg today

more China stuff…  Good luck with that!

China, the U.S. government’s largest creditor, is asking “the U.S. to maintain its good credit, to honor its promises and to guarantee the safety of China’s assets,” Wen said today in Beijing at a press briefing after the annual meeting of the legislature.

“China should be concerned, in that they hold roughly a third of their almost $2 trillion in FX reserves in U.S. Treasuries,” said Michael Pond, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Barclays Capital Inc. one of 16 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “As a Chinese official put it a couple weeks ago, and I’ll paraphrase, he said, where else will we go?”

China held $696 billion of U.S. government securities at the end of last year, 46 percent more than 12 months earlier.

Money-market rates show short-term borrowing costs are still increasing as banks hoard cash after almost $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.

nothing to say

so I’ll just blather.

Checked the Vancouver open mic scene.  There’s nothing I want to do until the 18th of March… I put it on the calendar.

Jeff’s up doing garbage, it being that time of week again.

Watched The Bank Job last night. I quite liked Jason Statham as a venal everyman forced to think fast.

I am going to try to get to work early this morning, the weather was supremely uncooperative yeesterday.  I left 20 minutes early and got there 2o minutes late.  I hope the person who made the decision to put the office at the top of that bloody hill gets a sound caning at some point.

We’re in the Phony War part of the depression.  Nobody but the homeless believes it’s happening.  You can still get sushi and big screen tvs.  China’s governors are proclaiming 8 percent growth this year.  I cannot believe, after closing 65000 factories, that anybody in China or out of it could spout such nonsense.  Global and domestic demand has plummeted.  There are millions of unemployed who left the cities to go back home so as to at least be able to mooch food off their families.  They sit around smoking and gambling and getting into trouble, and this is going to help domestic tranquillity how?

Katie has a plan to move out of her dad’s place and in with two girlfriends.  I know for a certainty this is not going to end well, and I can’t do or say a damned thing about it.  She can’t really move until she has a job, and I have tried to help her with that, including a snotty voicemail to change her equally snotty voicemail message.  If I was an employer and I heard that message I’d slam the phone down and say ‘next’!

Darwin is the cutest baby I didn’t give birth to, but I’m sure he’ll lose that crown when Tanya’s tamaiti is born.

I left Grampa’s stories in Paul’s car, and now he and Keith are reading them.  Bwa ha ha!  My evil plan is working.  That would be the plan where I do things by accident and things turn out well anyway.

I can’t think of anything else and I should shower and caffeinate and swap laundry and depart.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

One of the many useful internet acronyms is TL;DR.  That’s when your truncated attention span decides to step out for a soda.

Continue reading Too Long; Didn’t Read