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Page 3 of 796 pages « First < 1 2 3 4 5 > Last »
September 2008
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Watch Your Step
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Sun Sep 21, 2008
11:21 am
by McGehee
Talk back
[Our Times]
[Get Offa My Lawn!]
[Here's Your Sign]
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...that slope is slippery.
In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.
The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s “This Week,” telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is “a distinction without a difference to the American people.” »
Foreign banks may get help
I beg to differ…
Leaving that aside, however: this is why getting the government into the bailout business is ALWAYS a bad idea. There is no logical stopping place. If the government can offer loan guarantees to Chrysler, why can’t it also bail out mortgage lenders? And if it can bail out American corporations, why not foreign ones as well? There will always be a good-sounding argument for taking it that one step further, and at what point does it finally become respectable to say, “Wait a minute, stop! That’s going a step too far!”
I submit that the “one step too far” was taken over 70 years ago. Maybe longer.
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The McGehee PDA Zone
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Wed Sep 17, 2008
3:02 pm
by McGehee
1 comment
[Asides]
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Readers viewing this site with a PDA or other small-display device should change their bookmarks to McGeheeZone.com/index.php/pda/
That URL will show you a much-stripped-down version of this site—lacking, for example, the sidebar with its blogroll and other links.
I welcome feedback from users as to its readability on their devices.
Update: URL fixed.
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The Conscience of the Kingpin
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Tue Sep 16, 2008
9:19 pm
by McGehee
Talk back
[Asides]
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Chris and I have recently become riveted to the new FX TV series “Sons of Anarchy.”
I read somewhere that there are parallels to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the character relationships of Jax, his mother Gemma (Katey Sagal), and her second husband (and the gang’s leader) Clay (Ron Perlman, by himself the reason we watched the pilot). Mindful of this, I’ve been paying particular attention to what is being developed on the series about Jax’s relationship to his late father as well as to his mother and stepfather. If the tension there is fully explored, at some point Gemma will be caught between her flesh-and-blood son on the one hand, and her husband and the figurative family the gang represents, on the other.
If this were a Lifetime-TV series, she would of course choose Jax over Clay. But “Sons of Anarchy” is from the creators of “The Shield,” and though I’d never watched that show I quickly saw similarities between “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Sopranos.” No, Gemma wouldn’t side with Jax. But she can’t turn against him either, since family ties have been paid some serious lip service so far even by Clay. How she tries to hold it together will be interesting to see.
Readers of the story I’ve been writing are aware that family ties are one of the larger themes being explored. Chapter 4 in particular deals with the familial relationships among the three Scruggins men that you’ve met so far, though some of the tensions glimpsed have been only partly exposed. I know why the source of Bob’s given name is an issue between Seth and Caleb, but I haven’t decided whether it will be more than a side strand to that thread. It gives some insight into the Scrugginses themselves but may only be a matter of texture rather than an actual plot point. I will admit that Seth, never having appeared directly in anything I’ve ever written before, is proving to be extremely interesting to me. I’m finding it challenging to move away from the Scrugginses and back onto the other plot threads I want to write about.
I’m gradually working my way through a revision of another Scruggins-centric story I wrote years ago, bringing it more into the continuity represented by “Play Rough, Fight Dirty,” and will have it posted fairly soon. Maybe the work I’m doing on it will slake my interest in that clan long enough to get back to the Calhouns and Ironwoods, et al, for a few more chapters.
Update, Wednesday: I reached a cliffhanger situation of sorts in rewriting the old short story, and posted it here. I’m sure I’ll resolve the cliffhanger.
Eventually.
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[checks calendar]
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Mon Sep 15, 2008
11:42 am
by McGehee
1 comment
[Wackadoodle]
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...nope, it’s September 15, not April 1. So, my question about this is, when did The Penguin become the CEO of Google?
Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”.» Google search finds seafaring solution
Apparently that whole “Don’t Be Evil” thing has gone by the boards—along with the unspoken “Don’t Be Campy” and “Don’t Be Bond-Villain-esque.”
Holy megalomania, Batman.
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This Just In: Vegetarians Are Pinheads
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Mon Sep 15, 2008
12:09 am
by McGehee
1 comment
[Our Times]
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This news is almost as earth-shattering as the discovery that things thrown up into the air don’t as a rule tend to stay there.
Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage.
Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin.
The link was discovered by Oxford University scientists who used memory tests, physical checks and brain scans to examine 107 people between the ages of 61 and 87. »
Eating veggies shrinks the brain
On my Facebook page I recently changed my political label from “conservative” to “red-meat hippie.”
So right, it’s embarrassing.
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Buh-Bye, SiteMeter
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Sun Sep 14, 2008
11:16 am
by McGehee
5 comments
[Asides]
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As so often happens when somebody “upgrades” a service that works perfectly well, SiteMeter turned their hit-counter service into something completely unusable.
I don’t get more than 150 uniques per day anyway, so it’s not as if having a count showing on the page was ever doing me any good. Scroom.
Update: Now giving StatCounter a try.
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Meh.
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Sat Sep 13, 2008
8:03 pm
by McGehee
[Asides]
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I stole the background image (file here in case I stop using it) from Andrea after she promised she was going to ditch it (she hates stripes).
I don’t mind stripes, but I don’t care for the color. Paint can’t do a thing with the file, and I haven’t tried GIMP because, well, I really haven’t played with GIMP enough to have any idea how to use it.
What I’d like is to get the colors to a variant on the solid background color I’d been using, which is the same as…
...this.
I don’t know whether that color looks goldish to anyone else, but I kind of like it.
Update: Still no clue how to GIMP it, so I tried just making one from scratch using Paint. Unfortunately when I converted it from BMP to GIF it came up looking like carp, so I’m stuck (for now at least) with the BMP version.
It does look more like what I wanted.
‘Nother update, next morning: ...and now I’m tired of it. Maybe I’ll randomize it so it’ll be the gold stripes sometimes, or the solid background, or the blue stripes. You’ll just never know from one page-view to the next.
<evil, maniacal cackle>
Or maybe I won’t.
<evil, maniacal cackle>
I’ll think about it.
<evil, maniacal cackle>
‘Nother other update: I thought about it.
<evil, maniacal cackle>
Yet another update, Monday: Three new background images, courtesy of Jed at FreedomSight (discovered via my new StatCounter stats). Turns out he knows how to use GIMP, whereas I know how to rummage through the menus, look confused, and say, “Heck with this, I’ll use Paint.”
Yet another other update, Monday: One of Jed’s images was a little more contrasty than I wanted on my screen resolution (A 1280-px width shows lots of background space on either side of the content), so I fiddled with it in MS Photo Editor to tone it down a bit.
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Tina Is More Entertaining
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Sat Sep 13, 2008
12:27 pm
by McGehee
Talk back
[Our Times]
[Nature]
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She had that high-heel strut thing going on in that video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”
Ike, on the other hand, just sloshes all over the place, blowing out windows and flooding neighborhoods.
Also, driving up gas prices. In my area, the prices I saw for unleaded today ranged from $4.079 at a regional-chain convenience store to $4.359 (or thereabouts) at another regional-chain convenience store.
And yet the highest price I saw for diesel in the same sampling of gas stations was $4.199 at a freeway-side gas station. Flash Foods had diesel for $3.999, and its closest competitor (literally and figuratively) was selling diesel for the same price as it had for unleaded: $4.099.
Now, I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve noticed an equilibrium of sorts between the price of gasoline and the price of diesel at stations that sell both. Generally speaking in our area—at least until the last few months—diesel has tended to be priced at most a few cents higher than premium. If any grade of gasoline went very much higher than diesel, one of two things was pretty much guaranteed to happen: either diesel would start creeping upward, or gasoline would eventually drop back down where the price of diesel indicated it should be.
During this past summer the gap between diesel and premium soared, even as the prices of the various grades of gasoline was going way up. Recently, until the Ike scare set in, that gap has been narrowing gradually as the price of gasoline has subsided and diesel has come down with it.
Now, while the Kroger fuel center sells unleaded and diesel at the same price, and Metro Petro actually sells diesel about 25 cents cheaper than unleaded, I think it’s fair to say the price of gasoline is going to be coming down fairly quickly unless the infrastructure damage from Ike matches the worst-case scenario predictions trumpeted in the media.
I’ll say here more or less what I told my wife’s aunt via Facebook a couple of nights ago: unless you’re really hurting for gas right now, hold off a while before getting into line at the pumps.
Never participate in a price panic—it costs you money and it doesn’t teach the retailers noth’n’.
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