Okay, so this seeming Asperger's case (late teens or early twenties, staying with his folks ... he interrogated me for five minutes last night on the protocol for tsunami alerts in an insistent monotone) is driving me a little nuts as his group gets ready to go. He has spent the last 20 minutes pacing by himself in slow circles in front of the ( Read more... )

In the journalism game, year's end is the time for lists ("Top 10 Movies of the Year," "The Year's Best Celebrity Crotch Shots," etc.). Lists are great, because they don't require any fresh reporting, they're easy to write, they're as fitting a way as any to mark the end of the year, and they fill space that would have to otherwise be filled by ( Read more... )

Nice to see my account is still current, what with the neglect of late. There's been a great deal going on lately, but very little of it has involved me directly.

For the past few weeks, I've been spending a lot of online time with a fast-money stock-market crowd at Slope of Hope, run by a swashbuckling trader extraordinaire name of Tim Knight. It ( Read more... )

And so we shift from summer crowds to the weekend pop-overs, from weeks of sunshine to weeks of rain, from baseball (moment of silence for a Red Sox team that went perhaps further than they should) to football (moment of silence for that Pats, who suck without Brady). Whatever the consequences to the Parseghians' cash flow, I'm looking forward to a ( Read more... )

Ya know, I've been brooding over this slow-motion crash in our economy for more than a year. I feel I'm as well prepped as I can be. I have a tiny balance on a car loan, no other debt, a reasonably Spartan lifestyle, and the foresight and cowardice to have moved most of my little all out of the market months ago ( Read more... )

More precisely, on the motelier's desk, I have a thank-you card that sets the standard against which all future thank-you cards shall be judged.

It's from the young Eugene couple who held their wedding here this past July. They've now been upgraded from "some of the [sic] favorite people I've met in this job" to "some of my favorite people, period ( Read more... )

When it comes to investing, it sucks being both right and poor.

Your humble correspondent has spent the last year and half despairing over the economic news and positioning his portfolio accordingly. Sticking with dividend-paying bedrock consumer and heathcare companies, dumping financial stocks, and upping the ante with put options and inverse ETFs ( Read more... )

So it looks like you and I are now on the hook for $5 trillion in mortgages. It's not a surprise, but it sure is depressing.

Also, banks are unsurprisingly and depressingly starting to fail, and the FDIC's fund for insured deposits is not exactly flush. Once those premiums (which the banks pay) run out, the taxpayer covers the rest.

We also have to ( Read more... )

Oh, what I wouldn't give for a hidden office microphone, or, failing that, decent recall ( Read more... )

A local Alaska politics blog has some fun local color for y'all on Palin and Wasilla, her executive post previous to the governor's seat. You really have to visit the town (as I have, a few times) to enjoy fully the notion of it as a springboard to world power.

Luckily, the blog includes a picture of Wasilla's bustling commercial district.

If McCain ( Read more... )