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Thursday, February 5th, 2009
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11:24 am - Bug Man
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Bill Gates has become a super villain, which is actually a step up for him. Now we just need Steve Jobs to don a red cape and a white jumpsuit, and watch The Apple roll over Bug Man.
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
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3:36 pm
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Dear Democrats,
Please learn how to do your taxes properly. It's really embarrassing.
Signed,
A tax-paying Democrat
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
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1:35 pm - Be Seeing You
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| Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
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2:08 pm - He is our hero
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| Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
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11:40 am
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| Monday, October 6th, 2008
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2:51 pm - Economic crisis flow
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From what I gather, mostly by listening to stories on NPR, here, in a nutshell, is the chain of events that has obliterated our economy:
1. GPM (Global Pool of Money) wants to make more money, treasury bonds are too low yield, GPM gets into the mortgage game.
2. Small banks & mortgage brokers get pressured by larger banks to acquire more mortgages to sell down the line to the GPM, these banks begin offering mortgages to people without considering risk. Small banks bundle up the mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and sell them off.
3. Individuals who have obtained mortgages they can't afford start defaulting, housing market begins to collapse, house values go down.
4. Big banks notice the housing market collapse, stop buying the mortgage-backed securities without warning. Little banks are stuck with the bad mortgages and start foreclosing and/or going out of business.
5. The failure of the credit rating agencies to properly rate the mortgage-backed securities erodes faith in the system.
6. Major banks, which own bad debt via the mortgage-backed securities and other "toxic waste" loans, begin to show losses.
7. Funds start to engage in netting through credit default swaps. These work like insurance: funds can buy protection against a company or bank defaulting, but are not regulated like insurance. Further, they are not traded on the open market, and companies that buy & sell these do not have to disclose their financial statements.
8. Netting works by purchasing insurance against a given bank or company failing via a credit default swap, and then selling insurance against that bank or company at a higher premium when that company starts to show poor financial health. If the company defaults, the fund collects the insurance from the fund or bank they bought it from, and then sends it to the company they sold it to, thereby hedging themselves.
9. Various funds and companies buy and sell these credit default swaps. If any company or fund along the chain is for some reason unable to pay, the entire chain breaks down, and other companies or funds along the chain also cannot pay.
10. Lehman Bros. involves themselves too deeply in the credit default swap market, is unable to pay, defaults. The chain breaks, further eroding confidence in the credit market.
11. Commercial paper, a market that is used to provide short-term loans to companies and banks to allow them to operate, freezes up after money market funds that are normally considered "safe" actually go down in value due to financial losses after having invested in Lehman Bros.
12. Normal, ordinarily solvent businesses and banks can no longer get short-term loans via commercial paper to continue normal operations, and there is a general panic in the market similar to a run on a bank.
13. The credit crunch introduced by the erosion of faith in accurately assessing risk due to the factors listed above causes a general decline in the market, as speculators transfer their cash into relatively safe low-yield treasury bonds.
That's where we are today. Obviously much of this list is over-simplified, but I think it presents a reasonably accurate cause-and-effect explanation of the crisis.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, September 11th, 2008
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9:58 pm - Bunnies
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| Monday, September 1st, 2008
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8:45 pm - Fairy Fail
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| Monday, July 14th, 2008
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9:32 am - My New Favorite
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| Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
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5:14 pm - Waltham is Trying to Kill Me
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My office is in Waltham, a small suburb/city about 10 miles away from Boston. Yesterday a hideously dark cloud descended upon the town and poured torrents of rain and hail down on us right as rush hour began. I barely survived the journey: the roads were more lake than asphalt and I had to pull off the road at one point when visibility was close to nothing. When I crossed over the border into Cambridge, however, the rain immediately dissipated and all was well.
Today the very same thing has happened, except this time I took public transportation into the office, and will have to take a bus back. It's practically a hurricane out there right now and the bus stop is unprotected.
I just commented to a co-worker: "the weather.com radar map has a giant skull over Waltham, is that a bad sign?"
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, June 15th, 2008
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6:10 pm - 6/15
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| Monday, June 9th, 2008
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12:39 pm
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| Thursday, June 5th, 2008
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6:49 pm - Ouch
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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11:04 pm - Pimps Don't Commit Suicide
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I saw Southland Tales last night, which was Richard Kelly's followup to the remarkable Donnie Darko. Widely panned by critics, the movie features a parade of B-list stars and washed-up former A-list stars: Christopher Lambert, Jon Lovitz, John Larroquette, The Rock, Wallace Shawn as a mad-scientist fop (inconceivable!), Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Justin Timberlake in a surprisingly effective role. It has none of the subtle beauty of Kelly's first film; Darko transcended film-making, it was more like a complex, melancholy painting than it was a movie. Southland Tales contains much of the same apocalyptic scifi mumbo-jumbo and watery special effects that were an integral part of the framework of Darko, but eschews the subtlety in favor of slapstick-style comedy. Most of the time, anyway; Tales does have its solemn moments. I think Philip Dick would have liked the film; I think it's the first time I've seen a film maker really capture the frantic quality of Dick's later works, and Kelly must have been aware of his movie's debt to Philip Dick because there is at least one reference: after brutally murdering two people, Jon Lovitz, playing a corrupt policeman, mutters "Flow my tears." The film is full of jabs like that, most of them in-your-face style poetic references. If they had quoted another Robert Frost line I might have left the theater in protest.
The film wavers unsteadily between being a joke and pushing a frankly rather shallow political message on its viewers. It lampoons Lynch-style questions of identity, as well as some of his recent film-making style, and it pokes fun at Darko's hopelessness, replacing it with the guffaws and outlandish nonsense that might be found in a late-night sci-fi channel show. There are references to the events in Darko: at one point a character has a blood stain on his shirt that very much resembles the rabbit spatter, and later in the film a character is shot in the eye, which once again begins the final countdown to apocalypse. Was the intention to create Darko Light, the end of the world made palpable for the whole family?
Southland Tales is garbage. But it's the kind of garbage you might find near a Parisian club: it's refined garbage. I'm not sure I'd ever recommend the film to anyone, but I wouldn't steer anyone away either. I don't think it has much mass-appeal, but there might be a niche for it somewhere.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, April 21st, 2008
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10:14 am - I <3 Beirut
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I was traipsing around Cornell's campus on Saturday evening at around 10 pm, as I am wont to do, when I noticed blue and red flashing lights emanating from the library nearby - not resembling the kind of flashing you'd see from a police car, but something that appeared to be more like a rave. Pondering whether the school had gone so far beyond the pale as to hold a rave in a library, I decided I'd better investigate. As I got closer, however, I realized the lights were not coming from the library itself, but from the walkway in front of it. For those of you who speak Cornell, it was happening at the location near the bookstore on one side and Willard Straight Hall on the other.
The first thing I noticed, other than the flashing lights, was that someone had placed ten or so mattresses on the walkway, and had blocked the area off with tape forcing people to walk around if they wanted to pass. The mattresses were covered in sheets, and there were one or two people in black clothes lying on them chatting. The flashing lights continued, and there was techno music playing in the background. I stood and stared for a while, unable to fathom what this could possibly be. When I saw that the people in black had "I <3 Beirut" written on their t-shirts, I came up with two possibilities:
1. Mass public orgy.
2. They were going to somehow project a concert performed by the band Beirut on the sky...or perhaps against the moon.
Finally I decided I would not be content unless I discovered what was actually happening, so I approached one of the people lying on a mattress. He quickly got up and began directing me away, he wanted me to go around and continue down the plaza. I asked him what was going on as I hastily backed away, and he told me they were having a "Lebanese Day" with food and music. I guess "I <3 Beirut" meant the real Beirut, not the band. I'm still not sure why Lebanese Day requires a lot of mattresses strewn around a public walkway, though. Is this a tradition celebrated in that country? The Great Mattress Debacle, a tradition celebrated since 1326 AD?
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2008
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4:16 pm - Addendum
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I forgot to include one other detail about my stay in the train station: I noted when walking through the parking garage that they apparently store and maintain a team of monkeys somewhere within the bowels of the building. I could hear them gibbering wildly as I walked in, and then again when I left on the way home.
To the best of my knowledge, they were not three-tailed.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, April 4th, 2008
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9:42 pm - Rensselaer, NY: 3-9 pm, 4/3
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I arrive a little after 3 pm expecting less than an hour wait for my train to South Station to begin its departure. Upon reaching the ticket counter, however, it quickly becomes clear that I'll have longer than that to wait. The train is delayed, and not just a little bit delayed, but airport-during-a-blizzard-style delayed. At least two hours, if I'm lucky. The trip to Albany by car was a little over three hours, so I have only two options: wait, or abandon the romantic cross-country train idea and drive the remaining distance in my own car. Since I didn't print any driving directions beyond Albany, and I don't relish the idea of steering my car through rush-hour Cambridge-area traffic, I choose the former.
I check for a wireless signal in the small coffeehouse-style restaurant in the train station. No such luck, I shouldn't have bothered. Although the station itself is immaculate, the town it's stuck in does not seem particularly conducive to embracing new technologies. It's late in the afternoon, and the coffeehouse only has vending machine sandwiches and muffins on offer for food. Time for some exploration.
I drop my bags off at my car and start walking. Rensselaer reminds me almost immediately of the section of the video game Half-life 2 when you first leave the train station: in short, like a demilitarized zone. Decrepit houses, garbage strewn across lawns - not just little things, whole appliances like dishwashers and sinks and automotive equipment, almost no car traffic, and the occasional blasts of a terrifying alarm horn emanating from the station loud enough to be heard for miles. I keep an eye out for striders, but I am lucky enough not to encounter any.
I have a lot of time to kill so I set off in one direction hoping to find a better section of town, but the situation only gets worse as I proceed. I walk for about thirty minutes before I become concerned that I might not ever make it back if I continue, so I turn around and walk back. I notice a small tavern across from the train yard advertising lunch, so I walk in. The interior decor isn't too scary, but parts of the store look like they've been ransacked. There's one family with a small child toward the back, an older man notices me and waves at someone else in the kitchen. They bring me a menu. From my table, I can see an LCD television playing episodes of Monk. It's the only thing present that can convince me that I'm not in an impoverished Eastern European country. My server informs me that they do not have a liquor license in this tavern, so passing the time via deep intoxication is not a possibility.
An hour passes, I eat a decent hamburger and watch some television. I start to get a little worried that I might miss my train, so I leave the tavern, pull my bags back out of my car, and walk back into the station. I shouldn't have bothered. It's approximately two hours after my scheduled departure, but the ticket agent helpfully informs me that I have at least another two hours to wait. I do a quick calculation and realize that the subways in Boston would almost certainly be shut down by the time I arrive, potentially stranding me in the station. I make a quick phone call and arrange to be picked up, though I cannot yet specify exactly when I might actually get there.
Two more hours pass, I sit in the train station and wait. I hear mumblings about derailments but cannot piece together the full story. Other people around me are getting edgy. Some trains are being replaced by buses, some going as far as Chicago. The clientele do not look pleased. People wearing New York Yankees caps are giving the ticket agents lip. Other people just sit and look desolate. Still no sign of my train. I was supposed to leave at 4, it is now 8. I have been in Rensselaer for five hours.
Another hour passes. The station is beginning to empty out, and I start to get concerned that I may not get a train or even a bus. I watch the Simpsons on a television in the station's convenience store until they kick me out and close. The restaurant/coffee house has closed too. I return once again to the ticket agent, who helpfully informs me that my train is there, but they need to load other people first. It is then I realize that this train station is only able to load one train at a time, despite having at least eight separate gates.
Another forty-five minutes pass, but I have finally embarked. The train starts moving. An older gentleman, say around 65 years, gives me the full scoop on the delay. He was on a train that was heading to Boston from Chicago, but near the beginning of their journey his train hit a car and killed two people. He said he never even felt it, and the train's engine was completely undamaged - it just plowed right through. The train still had to stop, though, and they spent the next four hours surrounded by police and fire fighters. They had to replace the train's engineer because the previous one was too emotionally shaken from the accident. This accident sent ripples of problems up and down the rail. Then, to add to it, there was another derailment somewhere upstate, which caused more problems. I bring up the possibility that the people in the car were committing suicide. My informant tells me he thought the same thing.
South Station in Boston is very interesting at two in the morning. They let us into the station itself, thankfully, since it is bitter cold and raining slightly. The station is empty, save for a janitor driving a small cleaning vehicle around and one other unshaven gentleman sitting at a table seemingly talking to himself. I am offered taxi rides repeatedly by some men in suits who must have been called in by the train service, but I decline - it's not yet late enough for me to have lost my ride. Fifteen minutes or so later I am whisked away.
When I arrive in Somerville, I am too wired to sleep.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 28th, 2008
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11:30 am - Enough Already
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As much as I love my alma mater, I am starting to lose patience with the almost-constant barrage of literature and attention I receive from the school. I must have gotten ten "thank-you" letters in different forms since I made my first-ever $5 donation four months ago, and since then I've been hit by some form of college-related media almost every single day via email and post. This does not fill me with a desire to give them more money, it just makes me wish they'd leave me alone.
This feeling is compounded by the distaste I have for the college administration, which intends to take my money and use it to destroy all of my favorite buildings. I know in ten years I will return to campus and will be unable to find my way around because everything will have been replaced.
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, March 3rd, 2008
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1:56 pm - How We Handle Trash Monsters In Our Neck Of The Woods
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| Thursday, February 28th, 2008
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12:57 pm - It's Better Without the Feline
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Garfield minus Garfield is a good deal more amusing than the original, albeit in a much different way than was perhaps intended. I wonder what other alterations could be made to the Sunday morning funnies page to redeem it from its current state of post-Larson mediocrity.
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(comment on this)
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