What're You Lookin' At?
I'm peeved and dyspeptic. Just move along, move along. Any trouble from you today and I'll go Vincent and Jules on your monkey ass. Seriously. Come back in a couple of days. This mood is bound to pass. The weather is not helping one single little bit.

The Whole Gay Thing Aside
I watched some intarwebz replays of the disallowed US goal against Slovenia and it was dead solid perfect. That call should disqualify the lousy bastard who made it from ever officiating a football match again. (Is it less gay if it goes by "football" instead of "soccer?" Maybe. It's worth a try anyway.)

Adding The Market Ticker To The Blogroll
It's become a daily read and today's post there is no exception. In fact, it's worth a RTWT. I'll be adding that momentarily but first a snip from the post linked in the first sentence:

That of course isn't the point of the complaint. The complaint rests (properly, in my opinion) on the premise that the so-called "boom" in many parts of Europe was financed with German capital, which was effectively appropriated under false pretenses.

Gee, where have we seen this before? Banksters lying and cheating (cough-liar loans-cough!) and trading in derivatives without any money behind them (cough-AIG-cough!) and when the smoke clears suddenly the national governments are told "hand over hundreds of billions right now or the puppy dies!"

Uh huh.

G20 governments are increasingly coming to the realization that "borrow and spend" doesn't - and can't - work in the intermediate and longer term. Despite the bleating of Geithner at the G20 meeting he got nowhere trying to jawbone people into more Keynesian-style games.

We blew $4 trillion in the United States over the last two years and change and got nothing for it, and as a consequence we are stuck with the debt and haven't solved the problem. $4 trillion, of course, is about 30% of GDP, and this "support" has amounted to roughly 11% of GDP over the last three years.

Denninger gets right to the heart of the matter. I was at first disinclined to blame the "banksters" because of the massive culpability of the government in pushing fraudulent mortgages but I've come to realize that the current state of affairs is the very embodiment of moral hazard: profits are retained and when the inevitable losses begin to mount, they are passed on to the taxpayers. It's the essence of what really angers me about President Obamabi. He speechifies and acts like he's going to go all hard-ass on wall Street but all he's done is pump taxpayer money into those exact institutions he pretends to be against. And this new "financial reform" legislation does nothing but institutionalize bailouts with a $50B fund for precisely that purpose. That's taxpayer money he's putting up for his faux capitalist crony "bankster" friends. And they know it.
Even more unfortunately, the mainstream media either doesn't understand it or, as is more likely, doesn't tell the truth about it. Political power for the left is more important for the MSM than eternal verities like truth telling. I've worked in both banking and journalism. Neither profession can be relied upon. One has your money. One has your flow of information. Or, more accurately now, "had" as the rise of the Internet has seriously disintermediated the left wing journalist info guards. The Market Ticker is precisely one of those reasons the web is killing print news. We get more truth from knowledgeable people who are both directly involved and providing direct information for people who seek it out.
I hope you make the site at least a frequent stop. It may have a little more technical information than the average blog reader is conversant with but by sticking to the reading it will become progressively easier to grok.

When Good Onions Go Bad
Wherein the blog post starts with a brief digression into onion prices. The other day at Trader Joe's, I picked up one of their "Onion Trio" mesh bags which contains a red onion, a yellow onion and a white onion. Name becomes kinda obvious then, doncha think? I like onions and I seem to be particularly partial to red onions these days. But I don't use a heck of a lot of them being a single guy 'n' all. So I picked up the bag and hat the native wit to look at the price before I dropped it in my shopping bucket. $2.99. Paging Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to aisle 2! A dollar per onion! I do not think so.
Instead I grabbed a bag of yellow and a bag of sweet onions for about the same price as the "trio." At home I put the onions in a paper bag more to get them out of the way than properly store them only to find a little spot of moisture on the bottom of the bag the next day. That's not good. So I pulled out all the onions and wiped them down only to find no moisture. Hmm. Oh well. Back they went into the bag. Naturally I had to check the bag again and damned if there wasn't a new spot of onion exudate. This called for further investigation.
The Sherlock Holmes of the kitchen finally tracked down the culprit. One onion was rotting from the core. The outer four or five thick layers were fine, firm and dry but the center was like a reverse twinkie: full of nasty softening, gooey onion instead of delicious creamy filling. And the remains of the stem was actually wicking out the spooge. Bad onion! Bad!

What Are We Going To Do Tomorrow Night?

Is This How It Works?
President Bush cobbled together the education "reform" (which I think is defined in Washington as "Is there enough money to cover up the problems so we can't see them any more?") known as "No Child Left Behind."
And now Mrs. Obama is getting her designer panties in a wad over "childhood obesity." So nanny state government now wants "No Child's Behind Left."

It may as well be a dose of Megamucil, it's all gonna come out looking and smelling exactly the same.

SEIU = Barney
Big. Purple. Dinosaur.
That's all.

(Insert Snarky Headline Here)
So, anyway, I'm listening to the radio machine yesterday when the lady with the nice newsvoice comes on to tell me that "the market" is up responding to the moves the EU is making to stop Greece from going bankrupt actual instead of just bankrupt moral.
Yeah, right.
"Hello Mr. Brokerman? Yes, I'd like to buy 200 shares of Apple because I think Greece is not going to go under."
No doubt there are complex mechanisms that move the market up and down but the idea that the Dow is because Greece is probably not going into receivership is just effing stupid. I'd like the market to go up but the reported reasons for market change are moronic and they just frost my already chilly shorts.

As Craig Ferguson Says
It's a great day for America everybody!
UPDATE: I was moved by Barack Hussein Obama (umm umm umm) calling Murtha a "Marine Corpse man."

So, Anyway
There I was watching some of the product of the televisioning machine when who should appear but the First Lady of the United States telling me to be all kinds of generous to the sadly afflicted people of Haiti. I'm down with that. I'll be making a contribution to the Red Cross on Monday but not because that zombie told me to. Really. The over-made-up face, the dead, soulless eyes. That is one scary fembot. She must have found where to get a Hillary style nut-vise years ago.

Oh My Effin Gee
Pulled out the terminally hiPhone (that's "hip" buried in there, you see) this morning to look at the weather app. Ow! At noon, that's noon mind you, the temp was 23º and with wind chill (it's been more fierce than Beyonce and Christian Siriano put together), the "feels like" temp is one degree. One freakin' degree! Do I have to leave the bed today? I hope not. Wait, I'm at the computer. Too late.

In other news, or other non-news really, tomorrow will mark the first delivery of the revamped Washington Times to my frigid driveway. I believe I've said before that this saddens me. The newspaper is "re-inventing" itself as something akin to a paper which only has the "A section." No sports. Though the sudoku and crossword were brought back, the comics page has been gone for a while now. I doubt those returned features will be in the new version though. Basically, I will no longer be getting what I consider a newspaper. I will let my subscription lapse. And I will most certainly not be replacing it with the Washington Compost. -sigh- Sic transit gloria data.

UPDATE: Well, only the first step has been taken toward honey wheat berry bread - the wheat berries are boiled up to a pleasant mooshiness. Instead I made the first step toward my idea of "mocha" jello. Which would be a pan of chocolate jello. I'll need to make a pan of coffee jello and then cut each type into cubes which will be jumbled into a matrix of "milk" jello. I don't know if it'll be good and it may be not worth the effort but it's something I have to try. The idea springs from a blog post about "stained glass" jello.

A Word On Pedophile Rapist Roman Polanski
Don't worry: I won't get into an extensive who-shot-John exposition of all the ugly facts surrounding what the vile Polish director did in his violation of a 13 year-old girl. You can find that all over the blogosphere. I want to address an aspect of the case that rose at dinner last night with my boon companions the Wilmingtonians (recently the Yuman Beings).
I can't say that I know this for a fact but it was alleged in our conversation that Polanski had visited Switzerland before and was not arrested on those instances. Which led to the question of why was he arrested now? My response, based on nothing but an interior synthesis of the news is that the Swiss are reacting to the Obama administration's pursuit of "tax avoiders" by going after Swiss banking giant UBS.
It only makes sense that the Swiss government, whose hand was essentially forced by the US government, to break bank secrecy laws that have been in place for decades and have been a particular source of business for the "Gnomes of Zurich" would have good reason to decide: "If the American government insists on an absolute standard of the letter of the law, then we have no choice but to act on this outstanding warrant that has been in effect of the last several decades."

I'm not saying I have any proof but the reasoning fits the fact pattern rather precisely as I see it. And I can't blame the Swiss in the least. I hope they continue this idea and make sure that Americans in Switzerland are scrupulously law-abiding. It's not like the US is going to be providing capital for the banks now that the Obama economy is failing at full steam and the avaricious tax men continue to make trouble internationally.
If anyone else has a different interpretation, I'd be happy, no, delighted to hear it.

Installment The Second
This would be the second installment under the TTPMO tag. And what's making my sphincter itch today? Frakking jewelry ads on the radio masheen. Some jackanapes is advertising the "newest thing:" "chocolate diamonds." Oh just go straight to hell you lying peckers. It's bad enough that the deBeers people have cartelized the diamond industry but now we get "chocolate" diamonds.
Do you know what a "chocolate" diamond is (and this is where I really want to go full-bore Mark Levin on the monkey asses)? It's a freakin' industrial diamond that up until some ad man got hold of it was called a "brown diamond." It's crap, people!
And it pisses me off.
Even when the "mudhead" was re-named the "orange roughy" it wasn't as bad as this steaming Madison Avenue road muffin.
ERRATA: I was wrong about the orange roughy. According to Wikipedia, the fish is in the "slimehead" family. So that's "slimehead," not "mudhead." My mistake.

A New Tag: TTPMO
That would be "Things That Piss Me Off." Today's excursion into pique comes courtesy of my local noisepaper The Washington Times. Specifically, the book reviews in the Sunday paper. Even more specifically, the editing of that section. Let me winkle out a few examples of editorial malpractice for you.
First, in a review of a book called "The Art of The Heist," the find this paragraph:

Recounting his life of violence, theft and depravity, Mr. Connor (per Ms. Siler) speaks as if his criminal modus vivendi is perfectly natural, his God-given right. Quoting Thoreau (without attribution) that "men live lives of quite desperation" he says his "has been anything but."

Yes: "quite desperation." Good grief.

Then one review with two, count 'em two glaring errors. First in a very positive review of a Peter Leonard (son of Elmore apparently) work called "Trust Me" is this sentence:

Remember Chili Palmer, the movie-mad debt collector in Leonard the elder's "Get Shorty," who like a Lamars trainer, gently coaches a recipient of his massive blow to the solar plexus how to take short, sharp, breaths...."

I'll ignore the comma after "sharp" because the great thunder of calling "Lamaze" "Lamars" renders me incapable of increased dudgeon. Are there no editors of this page at TW Times? I'm left wondering that again after the final example of crime against language. Another sentence extracted:

Mr. Leonard packs a lot of detail and color into his book and may yet develop his father's mastery of the brushed back strokes, the dialog unspoken and the chrystalline sepia tones they evoke.

We have now descended into full-on WTF territory. "Brushed back strokes?" Can anyone explain that phrase to me? And have it make a lick of sense? Comments are welcomed, hell, encouraged. Then we have "dialog unspoken." Not a great crime against language but clichéd to beat the band (yes, I use a cliché to illustrate my opposition, it's very po-mo and ironic). Then a gross error in spelling only serves to draw our attention the phrase (and let's use the right word, eh?) "crystalline sepia tones." Does ... not ... follow. Sepia tones and crystalline are so fundamentally at odds that it renders the sentence meaningless.
Perhaps the reviewer (identified as "Lelei LeLaulu" which reads like an invented name - or, if real, should be) knew what he or she (?) had in mind but it most definitely wasn't communicated in that sentence. Isn't that what editors are in place to prevent?