Empty Pockets Blues: AIG

I'm one of those people who didn't know what AIG was until a couple of months ago. Now, thanks to taxpayer bailouts to AIG of 150 billion dollars, it has piqued my interest to learn more. There is a good piece in the NY Times that explains all. This includes full description of scams that, even now, our bailout money is perpetuating.

"Here’s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can’t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps would “blow up,” and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful."

We own 80% of this company now. Whaaaaaaaa.

Pomonkey History

I stopped by Van Scoder's today not to fill propane tanks but to check up on local history. Jon has a photo of a tavern run by my mother's father Will Blanchard in Pomonkey. He died in 1915 at age 33. I always wondered why. So, I checked with Van to see if he knew anything about an old tavern in the area. He referred me to the people at Pomonkey airport now known as Maryland Airport, I think.

So, I hunkered down with the old pilots there and noticed the sign "Old pilots day-care center" obviously put up to poke fun at the old codgers there. So, we talked about history a bit. One fellow was 88 and still licensed to fly which is very rare given the physical requirements. I'm going back with Jon's photo of the tavern to see if that evokes any remembrance. I think it was somewhere near there.

Save your Blog

I contribute to several blogs, and I am looking into different ways to save them.  Most importantly, I am interesting in keeping a copy of my baby photos blog, since I updated it much more often then my daughter's baby book.  Haven seems to have just had an accident with her blog, so I thought I would post here in case any of the rest of you are interested.

There are two sites that I have found that publish blog books, Blurb  and Blog2Print.    Its a nice idea for a completed blog, or you could order an edition once a year or so.  Blurb requires a download and it doesn't seem to work very well with my photo blog. Blog2Print is fully web based and does a better with the photos, but does not allow quite as much customization as I would like and, obviously, videos don't work out at all.  Bloggled should be coming out with a third blog to book service soon.  I really like the idea of a baby blog book, so I probably will order one.

The Real Blogger walks you through creating a mirror of your blog and with printing a copy.

You can sign up online with BlogBackupsOnline, a free account will backup your blog, but wont restore it.  BlogBackupr is still in beta, but its free.  Both back up at least once a day.

Google has provided instructions on downloading all of your blogger blog posts.

BlogBooker provides LiveJournal and WordPress users with a PDF file of their blogs, free.

Another option is to set up your blog to email you all of the posts and comments.

Horology

Today I took Jon for a CAT scan. Afterward we returned to the farm for a leisurely perusal of QST magazines, an ARC-5 transmitter and his Boiea plants. Jon has figured out how to easily make the Boieas clone themselves by simply peeling off a piece of "leaf" and placing it on the soil. I conjecture that wind in its native desert does the same thing. But on to other matters.

Jon built a grandfather clock using a fine quality mechanism and a homebuilt case. The important aspect of this clock is its wonderful timekeeping ability and why that is possible. The secret lies in the pendulum. It is made of seasoned wood. Wood is temperature stable in the longitudinal direction. Wood also has a low thermal diffusivity. The result is that the thing is surprisingly accurate over long time periods.

Jail time for using plastic bags

In Delhi, India, the use of a plastic bag can get you fined and 5 years in jail.  

America Populated 50,000 years ago

Here is a link to the Topper, SC excavations that have established a pre-Clovis site there with a layer below that which is radio-carbon dated to 50,000 before present. A peer reviewed article is in press and referred at the end of the linked page. All this is heresy according to standard archaeology.

Comments from our Maplewood, NJ archaeologist would be welcome.

Waiter, there's a fly in my Apple Butter

Salmonella in the peanut butter is bad - but what else are we eating in processed foods? The Food and Drug Administration has an illuminating little booklet that actually describes the allowable amounts of bug parts, rodent hairs, mammalian excreta, etc. in common foods. Here are some interesting threshold excerpts:

Apple butter - Insects - Average of 5 or more whole or equivalent insects (not counting mites, aphids, thrips, or scale insects) per 100 grams of apple butter

Oregano, whole plant - Mammalian excreta - Average of 1 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound

Popcorn - Rodent Filth - 1 or more rodent excreta pellets are found in 1 or more subsamples, and 1 or more rodent hairs are found in 2 or more other subsamples
OR
2 or more rodent hairs per pound and rodent hair is found in 50% or more of the subsamples
OR
20 or more gnawed grains per pound and rodent hair is found in 50% or more of the subsamples

If you take a look at the booklet, its a good idea to eat something first.

Review: moby dick's house of kabob

Have you been here? It is the best family owned chain resaurant I know of besides listrani's. It's not seafood,it's the best place for Kabobs, falafel and hummis (well I know one place better- sorrento grill). Moby dick's is not too shabby. The name comes from the original location in Tehran,Iran which was next to the then US embAssy. They wanted a name Americans would find familiar so Moby Dick's was chosen. Check out one of their many DC area locations.

Joined a cult

Brian and I joined a cult....we got Iphones (which I am blogging from right now!!!!). They are purty darn nifty. In other news, I have a cold or maybe the flu. My doctor says I will either get well or die.

Future Wealth

Is anyone following the efforts of our leaders to bail out the banks using the future wealth of an entire generation? I've read that the new initiative should be referred to as the 'Bad Asset Resolution Fund' or BARF for short. I believe this calls for tee-shirts for Linnea, Julia, Sofi and Sam that say "I spent a trillion on bad assets and all I got was this lousy tee shirt".
All solutions stink, but from what I'm reading the correct way to do this is to nationalize the insolvent banks so the taxpayers get something for their money. Remember, trying to save the shareholders is helping the same guys that gave themselves millions of bonuses with the last bailout money.
The gumment is saving the bailout details until after the stimulus bill passes so we (poor dopey public) won't won't have to focus on two things at once.
UPDATE: The Obama administration’s plan to stabilize the financial system no longer includes creating a "bad bank" but will still contain measures to encourage private firms to buy up toxic assets from financial institutions ...

Happy birthday, Frank Buckles

Our only WWI veteran turns 108 today.

Farmhouse Cheddar 2 - Success!

We opened our second homemade farmhouse cheddar cheese today and had a taste test.  I prefer it over the first one.  It is milder and tastes more like cheddar, though it is not as creamy.  It is still drier and more crumbly then storebought cheddar.  Again, there was some undesireable mold underneath the wax.  

Relaying character through story - Bizzaro World

I don’t mean to sound self centric, but stuff happens to me that doesn’t happen to other people. If you are a member of my family, you’ll know exactly what I mean, because strange things happen to you too. It took me a while to understand that our stories aren’t typical. A friend of mine has taken to calling me B-Dub for Bizarro World because of the strange happenings in my young life. I would relay my stories to him with a sense of innocence, like “This is what I did last weekend, I went in the bathroom only to discover a copperhead wrapped around the showerhead” and he was astounded at the multitude of strange events in my life.

With that said, I have a number of stories that say a lot about who I am. I could blog about being kidnapped at 15 and how I made a daring escape or about the dead body found on my driveway three days after the kidnap incident. I could blog about harboring runaways in my basement or about my relationship that ended when my boyfriend skipped town with my car and the contents of my bank account. Those stories all have shaped my character, but I think any one of those would be too much self disclosure for this setting. With that in mind I’d like to relay the lighthearted tale of a simple grocery shopping expedition gone wrong.

I went to the grocery store with some friends to pick up a few items, and on my way in I perused the fruit and absentminded partook of the juicy free samples of pineapple they always have. I started to make my way up stairs with a friend to look for toothpaste, as this was a two story emporium of an urban grocery store. On the stairs, a security guard ran up to me, I think he was Ethiopian. Out of breath he said, “Miss, I saw you, you TOOK something!” Imagine how confused I was about being accused of shoplifting. He obviously thought I should have my hands cut off for my offense. I was aghast and denied that I had done any such thing. Still he continued to repeat, “I saw you do it, you took something and put it in your mouth!” Finally it occurred to me I had picked up a free sample. I told him, I had a free sample. He looked confused and said “No you TOOK it”. Really miffed at this point, I said “Allow me to show you, Sir” and took him to where it read in capital letters “PLEASE TRY A PIECE OF PINEAPPLE”. He said, “Oh” and disappeared out the door without apologizing for almost getting me arrested for taking a free sample. That was when I realized he didn't even work there. So that’s just a typical trip to the grocery store. My point is, whatever happens to me, at least my life is never boring.

Living well- with heat

At 2 am so AM two nights ago I realized that our furnace wasn't working. I had just finished getting Sam back to sleep and heard it cycling on and off every few seconds. This happened to us once when we first purchased our house, and a neighbor helped us replace the thermostat which fixed it right away. My first thought the other night was, therefore, where would I buy a thermostat at that time of night? It was 2 degrees outside and there was no way that I wanted to wake up Sofi and Sam to move them to a warmer place if it started to get cold. Being from our do-it-yourself family, I decided that the best approach would be to start Googling the problem to see if I could figure out a middle of the night work-around. Matt came upstairs in the middle of this process to start trying to figure out what to do and said, "can't we just call someone?" This had never even remotely crossed my mind. We did, and they were at our door within the hour to start the day long process of furnace rehab that followed (and it's a good thing that there were professionals involved, it was more than a thermostat). As I was awake for those hours in the middle of the night- the first in years without a child somehow harassing me- I started a long thought process about self sufficiency, a specialized economy, habitable climates, and where everyday life has to intersect with the big picture (not to mention the peak oil sorts of things that are always flying around). In the end, I've been too tired to sort it out very clearly; tonight as I hear the rumbling of our central heat doing what it should I sure am glad today that we have furnace repair specialists here.
On a side-note, I got a google ad from the Longmont Dairy- my longtime local milk delivery- the other day on this blog that made me really happy. (It was even right after we had completed our first completely successful local cheese project)

My life

On the TED web site Sir Ken Robinson said:

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong ?