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Showing posts from February, 2009

Amadeus - 3 miles at a time

I try to run 3 miles 4-5 times a week. In winter this is a bit more difficult due to shorter amounts of daylight (I usually leave for work before sunrise and get home after sunset) as well as colder and wetter weather. For such times when I can't easily run my outside route I have an elliptical machine to help compensate. Nothing replaces actually running but one advantage the elliptical affords is that I get to listen to more music as I exercise. (When outside I don't listen to music as I prefer to hear approaching vehicles and other sounds - like dogs.) I started out the winter listening to my favorite contemporary band - Coldplay . But, their five CDs didn't last very many exercise sessions. I have been a huge lover of classical music since my college days and this winter I took the opportunity to listen to all of Mozart's 27 piano concertos in chronological order. Generally, I could get at least one full concerto in during every running session. I listened to some

Winter Devotional

On the cold, dark mornings of this winter, having gotten my daughter out of bed for school and myself dressed for work, I have set aside 10-15 minutes with a cup of coffee for myself and reading one of the oldest books in my personal library, The Portable Thoreau from 1977. I bought this book during my senior year of high school. At the time, no philosopher spoke to me in such a familiar, agreeable voice about the wonder, peace, and rich experience that is to be found in nature as Henry David Thoreau . The book, like most that I own, is written in, highlighted, and underlined from repeat readings. So now, with a few exceptions, I browsed through these yellowed pages, meeting old friends each morning, reminiscing of past readings and times, while touching the intimate truths to be found here over the course of these past months in the predawn of winter before the work day began. “In the winter, I stop short in the path to admire how the trees grow up without forethought, regardless of

Abstracts of a late afternoon sun

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A couple of effects I created today from pics taken during a walk in a rare lazy, late afternoon sun. Last Monday I mowed for the first time this year. Mowing is a wonderful thing. You can experience a meditative state so easily when mowing, just mowing on and on. I did the lower field, roughly an acre. Jennifer and I walked down to enjoy the space. Two beers, the view, no cars. Crows cawking . The wind in pine needles. So far apart that you have to holler just a bit to hear the other person. Space. And silence to raise your voice in. Home. No worries right Now. Compare this pic with the pics I took of the lower field on October 26, 2008. The sky was really this blue. I can honestly say I own the view. After the walk my daughter came up to Jennifer and said: "Mama! What are you wearing?! I want to take everything you have on and burn it." Jennifer took this pic of the vapor trails from two passenger jets scattering in the wind miles over our house. We wondered if the X was

Rewarding the Losers

I wish I hadn't worked hard and saved money and paid off my mortgage early. I wish I wasn't debt free. Right now I wish I was up to my eyeballs in debt and facing foreclosure. THEN, I would qualify for assistance. INSTEAD, I am indirectly penalized for my financial prudence because NO ONE HELPED ME and now you want to take MY tax dollars to "spread the wealth around." I just realized how pissed off I am. Everything about this stimulus and bailout sucks. My opinion is that we are creating a much larger problem for the future of this country by making the Bush public debt look trivial compared with the eventual Obama public debt. We are sending the wrong message to the mass of mediocrity that make up this pathetic consumer-driven democracy - that winners are to pay for the sins of the losers and that losers will always be rescued for their sins. Let Rome burn. (A contemporary Howard Beale .) The market broke through the November 20 lows today. The Great Recession does

Simple Pleasures, Sobering Facts

Over the weekend we decided to make a chocolate cake for no reason. It wasn't because it was Valentine's Day. It was just because it's February, the weather's getting just a tad old and we needed something spontaneous yet simple to lighten the overall effects to a dull winter, a rough economy, and the general rut of the momentary Now. Grandmother Carson's chocolate cake was just the ticket. I'm not a dessert lover but for years I enjoyed GMC making this cake when we used to drive down to Dothan every Thanksgiving for a visit. If I was lucky she would make it on the rare occasions when she came to visit us. Fortunately, Jennifer got a detailed lesson in how to make the cake directly from her grandmother so that now, even though GMC is gone, her cake remains. It is actually not completely chocolate. It is a Duncan Heinz Golden Butter Recipe cake with a special chocolate frosting. Theoretically, the frosting is supposed to sit for 24 hours on the cake before you

Dark City, Dark Knight

I've watched two films on DVD recently that have impressed me in different ways. Dark Knight was last summer's blockbuster. It was written and directed by Christopher Nolan , the artist I feel is the best active director in film today. His earlier work, Memento , is one of my all-time favorite films. Nolan has had an impressive career to date. Dark Knight is classic Nolan and one of his best films. He has Hitchcock's sensibilities about suspense. His films build momentum, relentlessly, be they pure drama or action-adventure. His choice of music for the film is particularly noteworthy. But the film is stolen by Heath Ledger's brilliant portrayal of The Joker . I can't help but compare Ledger with my favorite actor, Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the same role in the 1989 Batman . Nicholson was twisted, maniacal, but Ledger pushes these qualities with a deeply insightful character, who understands things about the world and plays them to his advantage. Ledger h

Red in Winter

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Compare these recent pics of our Nadina with the ones I posted on September 27, 2008. A bit of color in an otherwise rather dull winter palette .

The Problem to All Our Solutions

"So far, the measures we’ ve taken to resolve this crisis have thrown the rational principles of finance out the window. We are going on a crash diet—contradicting mortgage contracts on an ad hoc basis and giving away handfuls of money—when we should be coming up with an eating regime we can live on indefinitely. Instead of making whatever short-term patches seem necessary, we might take a more systemic, market-based approach, such as stipulating that mortgage values always be linked to housing prices and adjusted each month. "Speculative excesses are an endemic problem of the market system, but capitalism also provides its own self-correcting mechanisms. There’s no reason to abandon those tools now." - Robert J. Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC . The quote is from Foreign Policy Magazine and pertains primarily to the housing crisis but it is applicable to the stimulus overall as well. I'm still a bit m

The Stimulus is a Mistake

President Obama is at his best when he is speaking and last night's press conference is no exception. He is acutely persuasive and charismatic. And he is highly "presidential" in that he upholds the time-honored technique of answering the question he wanted to be asked rather than what was actually asked. The press was submissive. I respect the fact that the president is a very intelligent man and he is impressive on a number of counts that I enumerated in an earlier post. But the man, those behind him, and those elected officials supporting him are totally wrong about the need for the stimulus , the effect it will have , and naive as to its potential for worsening the Great Recession . Obama was a bit disingenuous last night when he stated that politicians were the only ones who disagreed over the need for "government intervention" on the economy; that there was little or no serious disagreement among economists. As the inset on this post i

"A Stranger to Myself"

The last couple of nights I have torn through a remarkable military memoir by a German infantryman turned acting bombardier, Willy Peter Reese . The memoir tells of Reese’s experiences in the war against Soviet Russia in World War Two. I am not a big fan of soldier memoirs. All war is crazy, chaotic bloodshed punctuating extended periods of boredom. This is the way most every soldier experiences war. I’ve always been more interested in the operational and strategic basis for the fighting, rather than the personal narratives. But, Reese is compelling because he was a young man who wanted to be a writer, who had talent with the pen, who wrote poetically in an intimate, distinctive style. The beginning of the book does not read like a war memoir at all, displaying Reese’s literary aptitude. “I walked the beach in storm and sunshine. I lay on the dunes and dreamed to the crash of the waves, listening to crickets strumming of hot noons while Pan slept. I sang and whiled away the hours. A st

Nuking Deflation

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Deflation is our worst nightmare. In deflation the cost of everything goes down. Goods and commodities get cheaper. Doesn't sound that bad, does it? But, here's the kicker. In a deflationary environment everything gets cheaper but the amount of debt you owe stays the same . So, in relation to everything else your debt actually feels like it goes UP. We don't need that right now because the country, the government, the consumers are all awash in debt . During deflationary periods (which is what we have right now and have had for months) what you owe on your assets gets heavier while the value of your assets shrinks. This is the sub-prime mortgage fiasco on steroids . We have to create inflation . It is the only way to make the debt manageable because as things inflate the perceived weight of the debt comparatively goes down. Jack Schannep sent his subscribers a mind-blowing graph today. This the "monthly reserves and monetary base " for the Federal Reserve Bank