Susan and I have two dogs, Soolin and Nori. On Saturday they were flipping out in the yard, so we went to check it out and discovered what appeared to be a stray dog sniffing noses with them through the ~4′ chainlink fence that surrounds the yard. We live on the corner and one of the streets is pretty busy, so we worried about the safety of the dog, and both of us tried to coax it into coming over, Susan from inside the fence and me by making my way onto the street from the other gate. The dog was skittish and ran away once, but then came back and to our great surprise it coiled itself up in a ball, made a huge standing leap onto the top of the gate, perched there for a moment like an owl, then lept into our yard. It was pretty amazing to see. This was not a large dog, standing a bit shorter than Soolin at the hips, but boy, it could leap like a kangaroo. Our best guess was it was on the prowl for a mate based on how he chased Nori around, but he lept right back over the fence when we tried to approach him to read his collar.
Category: General
ware the halloween candy
No, I’m not talking about the razor blade in the apple type stuff. A reminder to folks as your kids wander about harvesting candy tonight: when companies make announcements like this (halloween candy from a particular manufacturer has no melamine problems in the US – it’s only the Canadian candy you have to watch out for) you should really watch out. I have no idea how pervasive the melamine poisoning really is, but it’s clear it’s in some and possibly many products that made it into North America. I remain concerned and if I had kids they wouldn’t be eating chocolate from anywhere I was remotely unsure of.
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Delicious food tip: celeriac
- Image via Wikipedia
Susan’s a member of a local CSA farm, and she often picks up celeriac, which I’d never had until a month or so ago. Celeriac is the root of a particular kind of celery plant. It looks like a very large gnurled potato, but it has almost no starch content so it’s perfect for diabetics. You can prepare it much like you would prepare mashed potatoes, or you can dice it and steam, boil. or stirfry it and serve it as a side vegetable with your dinner. It’s great! It has a very mild celery taste, it’s versatile, and when you can find it it’s dirt cheap. Definitely worth trying if you’re looking to add some healthy variety to your diet.
One mortgage, infinitely leveraged
From the ‘why we’re fucked’ file, here’s a great little sample from a lengthy thread over on metafilter covering what’s up with credit default swaps:
20Rafaelloello, yes, that is true, but as I understand it, most holders of CDS have them hedged off to someone else. …”
In (most?) lines of insurance you cannot take out a policy unless you have an insurable interest in the asset or life. In CDS’s there was no requirement of this.
Somebody buys Rafaelloello’s mortgage, they want to hedge that risk with a CDS, fine.
5,000 other investors say, “Hey Rafaelloello hasn’t missed a mortgage payment, I want to “insure” that he continues to pay.”
Then 5,000 more say, “I’ll take that bet, because even though it looks like he’s going to continue to pay, I can hedge my bet that he wont…” Enter the next 5,000 “investors”.
Before you know it, Rafaelloello is the equivalent of a top-ranked college athlete. Tens of millions of dollars are being bet on my ability to perform, with no direct ties to the underlying assets (My home and my ability to pay).
You’re only hedged as well the ability of all parties to pay their bets/bookies/vigs obligations. In this ring of hedges it only takes a player or two to skip town and the whole game implodes.
The rest of the thread is over here, and it’s well worth a look if you’re trying to grok what’s going on with the financial system. I’ll repeat my oft repeated assesment though – in layman’s terms, it was a giant fucking ponzi scheme.
My impression of the VP debate
Here’s my take on how the debate went last night. Imagine the following exchange:
Ifil: Next question. Governer Palin, you first. Can you explain to us how you would bake a chocolate cake?’
Palin: Sure, I’d be happy to. Let me tell you about the time I was at the game with the hockey moms, and I sucessfully negotiated for cheaper hot dog prices for all the kids from the vendor at that stadium. It just goes to show how my experience as an executive demonstrates my experience! And did those kids enjoy those hot dogs? You betcha!
Ifil:… Senator Biden? Would you like to respond?
Biden: …err… [big fake smile, demonstrating he thinks Palin’s charming] well, back in PA, my mom made the best chocolate cake, and let me tell you how, but before I do, let me just mention that John McCain voted against chocolate cake 37 times since he’s been in the senate….
God help us if the Republicans take the White House again. Everyone’s giving Palin credit today for not blowing it, but I’m completely appalled that anyone could watch last nights exhange and continue to count Palin as a credible candidate. I got up this morning and did the same thing I did after watching the last debate: went over to the Obama campaign’s website and donated $100 to their campaign. Here’s hoping they win, we’re all in deep shit if they don’t.
An ode to the Poot
My sister’s dalmation Helena (more commonly ‘the poot,’ or ‘pootie) passed away recently. Pretty sad news, I really loved her. She had a great, full life, and made a remarkable recovery from an infection of the heart to live to a ripe old age of 13. My sister’s written a wonderful eulogy to her over on her website, and you can scope out some photos of the poot in action over on her website. Give your pets a scritch behind the ear in honor of good old Pootie, I’ll miss her.
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Are we also facing a food crisis?
Lost in all the noise about the economic crisis we’re facing is that we may also be facing a crisis in our food supply. The same rationale of deregulating the financial markets appears to be impacting the oversite of our food supply as well, the chinese milk melamine tainting scandal being only the latest issue to crop up. This stuff is creeping out in the global food supply and it’s making me increasingly leery of processed foods. From numerous ground beef issues over the past couple of years, spinache, lettuce, tomatoes, and more, there’s a constant stream of news about tainted food, and with the global connectedness it’s really hard to track where this stuff turns up. What set me off about this today was news that Cadbury had to pull some of its chocolate off the market because they detected melamine in some batches of it and another vendor of creamer for coffee had to do the same. None of this particular scandal’s food has been detected in the US food supply as of yet but I’m not going to be surprised if it does, and increasingly I feel like folks are best advised to steer clear of processed foods. That frozen pizza won’t seem as convenient if it turns out the cheese was made with melamine, and that bag salad will stop seeming like a time saver if you end up ingesting ecoli because it had cow poop on it.
I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.
Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.
Home sick
Not as in missing my hometown, as in like, I have spent the past two days lounging about the house nursing a miserable cold. It’s not excruciatingly bad, it just features sniffles, headaches and a sore throat. Susan is suffering the same fate as I, which we’ve been debating. Is it better to both be sick at the same time, or in sequence so one partner can take care of the sick partner? We haven’t decided yet. Whatever we have has been making the rounds at the office. My weekly IT heads meeting had half the staff out sick yesterday, including me. Must be the time of year.
What happens when you don’t go to a dentist for a decade
That’s right – I haven’t been to a dentist in over a decade, with the exception of an oral surgeon who removed my wisdom teeth about 6-7 years ago. I fell out of the practice of getting annual cleanings shortly after college when I moved away from my family dentist and didn’t have dental coverage during my early career. One way or another I always managed to avoid going until yesterday. The oral surgeon didn’t help things much back when I had my teeth removed, because he scoped out my teeth and commended me on them being in such good shape. Unfortunately they’d started to stain recently, and one stain in particular was driving Susan nuts, so after much cajoling I made an appointment.
The good news: no cavities. Brushing and flossing plus some help from genetics seem to have protected my teeth over the years, which I was greatly relieved about. The bad news: I have gum disease and have to go in for some serious under gum cleansing procedures which will apparently be pretty unpleasant. Once that’s done I have to go to the dentist every three months for a couple of years for followup cleanings which should entirely clear up the gum issues and protect my teeth for the long term.
The other good news is that the stains will all come off, and the dentist thinks I should consider a bleach treatment for them once the cleaning is finished, which should remove the yellow coloration. He also thinks I should get braces to fix my front teeth. I’m not sure on the braces but I’ll probably do the bleach treatment next spring since it seems to mean so much to Susan.
Anyway I’m not sure if there are any lessons learned. I avoided a decade of the discomfort of the dentists chair with seemingly little consequence, though I’ll reserve judgement and possibly sing a different tune after I’ve been through a couple of these undergum cleansing treatments.
The real risk is in the credit derivatives market
I first started hearing about credit derivatives a couple of years ago, around the same time I started hearing about how there was a looming mortgage crisis. If you want to scare the hell out of yourself, go read this article over on financialsense.com. It will take a while to work through it but it’s a great distillation of what’s going on in our capital markets right now and where this might lead us. I could sum it up in a couple of ways – a) it’s all a giant fucking ponzi scheme that deregulation facilitated and b) the risk in credit derivatives makes the subprime mortgage crisis look like paperoute money. We’re talking 10’s of trillions of dollars here.
Even trying as I am to understand all of this I really don’t feel like I have a handle on it. Still, I will say my gut tells me that dropping 700 billion into the markets as is being proposed isn’t going to do anything except possibly stave off the inevitable. From what I’m reading our capital markets and indeed the entire underpinnings of our economic system are profoundly broken. Propping up these cancerous institutions doesn’t fix the problem, it just keeps the patient on life support while it spreads its disease further.
Anyone counting themselves a citizen should be reading up on this stuff. There’s a wonderful irony to all this, in this season of campaigns promising change: all signs point towards us getting change all right, change so radical it’ll shock all of us, only it has almost nothing directly to do with our political candidates.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 