The 2008 Election from Delaware

The line I faced this morning when I arrived at about 7:15am. I've voted in De in every election since 94, and can't recall such a crowd. I stood in line for about an hour. Granted, not as long as bigger states, but hey, this is Delaware ;-)

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We are going to do what we do every night, Pinky...

i luvz my lolz...

Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie

The Lexington Herald-Leader published an article about a man who knows how to wield a permanent marker.

When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over.

There are fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill lounging with George Bernard Shaw — and the TV squirrel Rocky and his less adroit moose pal Bullwinkle.

Click on the link, there's an amazing animation showing the whole basement. It's quite cool.

2008 - a new depression?

In reading news articles about Congress' rejection of the $700 billion bailout, I stumbled across disturbing testimony to the US House of Representatives' Committee of Financial Services regarding the parallels between the stock market crash of 1929 and the present economic situation.

The reader, if bold enough to undertake such a deep reading, should be quite disturbed by the fact that the testimony was given almost a year ago...before the subprime meltdown really got into swing and we reached the current state of crisis.

Some interesting quotes,

"Your predecessors on the Senate Banking Committee, in the celebrated Pecora Hearings of 1933 and 1934, laid the groundwork for the modern edifice of financial regulation. I suspect that they would be appalled at the parallels between the systemic risks of the 1920s and many of the modern practices that have been permitted to seep back in to our financial markets."

"Since repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999, after more than a decade of de facto inroads, super-banks have been able to re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s -- lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way. And, much of this paper is even more opaque to bank examiners than its counterparts were in the 1920s."

"A last parallel is ideological -- the nearly universal conviction, 80 years ago and today, that markets are so perfectly self-regulating that government's main job is to protect property rights, and otherwise just get out of the way.

We all know the history. The regulatory reforms of the New Deal saved capitalism from its own self-cannibalizing instincts, and a reliable, transparent and regulated financial economy went on to anchor an unprecedented boom in the real economy."

"Mr. Chairman, we are living on borrowed time. And the vulnerability goes far beyond the spillover effects of the sub-prime debacle.

We need to step back and consider the purpose of regulation. Financial regulation is too often understood as merely protecting consumers and investors. The New Deal model is actually a relatively indirect one, since it relies more on mandated disclosures, and less on prohibited practices."

And one last bit...

"One last parallel: I am chilled, as I'm sure you are, every time I hear a high public official or a Wall Street eminence utter the reassuring words, "The economic fundamentals are sound." Those same words were used by President Hoover and the captains of finance, in the deepening chill of the winter of 1929-1930. They didn't restore confidence, or revive the asset bubbles.

The fact is that the economic fundamentals are sound -- if you look at the real economy of factories and farms, and internet entrepreneurs, and retailing innovation and scientific research laboratories. It is the financial economy that is dangerously unsound. And as every student of economic history knows, depressions, ever since the South Sea bubble, originate in excesses in the financial economy, and go on to ruin the real economy."

Truly, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

The original article is very long, and very heavy in its economic details. I don't pretend to understand all of it, though I do get the jist of most of it.

In the end, it's very frightening, as are the times we live in.

Here's hoping we're not on the cusp of the next Great Depression...

I'm a Mac and I'm a PC...

Best...Parody...EVAR!

Election 2008

Normally, I don't post about politics on my blog...but this article disturbed me enough that I feel I need to this time.

Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes

Tired? Just go back 100 years...

It's been a bit crazy at work lately, things have been getting very busy and time consuming. The weekend went fairly well so far, we took the kid out to a playground with my parents and spent the day together. This morning was a lot of overdue lawn work. About four hours ago, the kid went down for her nap and my wife and I were just settling in for what promised to be a quiet afternoon, talking about what movie we'd like to watch.

It suddenly got a lot more quiet than we had expected.

A freak thunderstorm blew into the area with no warning, spraying rain and covering the sky with dark, ominous gray clouds. The soaked the ground with water, but then left as quickly as it came. It only lingered for a half an hour, but as it left it took our electricity with it.

It's been a long time since we lost the power, thank Heaven. Since moving into our house about five years ago, the local power supply has been remarkably robust, in spite of much worse thunderstorms in the past. This time, however, we lost our electricity after a few disturbing flickers that brought the lights up and down.

My wife and I were both surprised at the event, and immediately did the usual drill in case it was a long outage. We retrieved our candles, planned for a cold dinner, and thought forward to the next day. After taking twenty minutes to clean the living room (children are messy creatures ;) we then found ourselves wondering what to do.

There was no Internet, no TV. We couldn't run the dish washer, neither the clothes washer nor dryer. The air-conditioner was silent, as were the computers and all the appliances.

The depth of the silence was astounding.

We opened the windows, as the house was getting stuffy and the storm had passed. The cool air from outside breezed in, flushing away the stuffy air that had been stiffening ever since the central conditioner died with the rest of the house. The outside was as quiet as the inside. Gone were the humming noises of our neighbor's central air units, gone was the noise of televisions, radios, and even lawn mowers.

The only noise was the rustle of the wind in the trees, or the occasional twitter of a bird, the buzz of an insect.

At first, the quiet was slightly annoying. We both had things we wanted to do, chores to accomplish and entertaining electronics we wanted to relax through. My wife took to the quiet much more quickly than I did, having grown up in a quiet house. She simply picked up a book and started reading. For me, however, I had grown up in a house that was always abuzz with the hum of circuitry and the rush of air from a central unit.

Following Linda's lead, I went down to the basement to find a book to amuse me. For many years now, I've been trying to find time to read Huck Finn. So, I picked up a book I'd bought years ago with four of Mark Twain's novels.

Sitting down, I opened the plain book and quietly read the pages. Many, many years have passed since I read a book that was not a technical manual or a college text book. As I read the ink-laden pages of the tome, memories of my teen age years came back to me, when I had time to read books for leisure. The added silence of the power outage only enhanced the experience.

Five chapters and an hour later, Linda and I took to talking, giving our eyes a break from the reading. It was all the more relaxing, just chatting idly about matters of the day in our lives. Soon after that, we took to playing dominoes while listening to quiet tunes pouring out of the speaker of a hand-crank radio. The air was cool and crisp after the storm, and we continued our chat, the room filled with the music, the sound of our voices, and our laughter.

Gone was the world of electronic beeps and whirs, the emails, the web pages, the instant news, instant chat, instant everything. Life was slow again, and peaceful. I felt a calm overtake me that I had not experienced in years, perhaps even ever before. All that we had before us was each other and the gentle sounds of the radio.

After a good hour of this pleasant time, the entire house came to life as the power came back on, appliances whirring once more and computers beeping as they sprang to life. The central air rushed out of the duct at our feet, and suddenly the radio seemed small and insignificant in the face of so many other electronic components of our modern home.

We finished our last domino game and went back to our typical day. Perhaps we were just a bit more relaxed than before the power so graciously left us for the time.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as we sat in the silence, reading and enjoying each other's company. The experience was simply unparalleled in my busy life of late, so laden with the rush of work, childcare, and keeping up with family and friends.

Life truly has become too fast paced of late, I think. Not much can be done to stop it, we can't turn back the clock. However, I think we could all benefit by unplugging now and again, forcibly ripping the plugs and antennas out of our digital days to sit in the same peace and quiet as our grandparents must have enjoyed decades ago when the only media around was a record player or the radio. Perhaps we are more efficient and productive than they were, but are we happier?

There's much to be said for disconnecting, now and again.