Hot or Not

Kids today love the extreme sports. Jumping off stuff with high probability of death is apparently required to be hip.

Sky diving? Pfft; try platform jumping.

Cliff jumping? Dude, croc diving is the new hotness. (Is that verbiage cool? Probably not; I'm old.)

A Shopping Dilemma

We have a problem with squirrels, raccoons, and rabbits in our backyard. After working most Saturdays and a number of weeknights all spring and summer taking out trees, removing bushes, leveling the soil, and improving the lawn it was more than a little frustrating to find that animals are digging up the grass. Apparently grubs (which have been a whole other source of headache) are good eating this time of year.

We've tried traps without success and have looked into poisons. So far no acceptable solution has emerged. We've finally decided that we'll need to enlist the help of an air-powered pellet rifle in our backyard rodent battle. I'll be going shopping for one soon, which leads to a question: should I take my older girls with me?

I'm very opposed to raising prissy girls who think hamburgers are grown in special McDonald's saturated fat laboratories and want them to understand that guns can be a useful tool. At the same time, because they are young I'm not sure the image of their father as a squirrel assassin will do much to help them become well adjusted people.

All of the safety and practical concerns aside, my real fear of having the girls accompany me is that I'll end up coming home with something like this:

from boingboing.com

If the police came to check on why someone was using a fully functioning AK-47 in their backyard, I'm willing to bet that the gun itself would be less problematic for me at trial than the oh so manly crocheted stock cozy.

How I Get Through Earnings Season

Four times annually, I get to spend a few weeks listening to hours and hours of conference calls as companies announce their results. These are generally hour-long events that are 53 minutes of blather punctuated by a few minutes of information or questions that actually matter. Usually I try to be productive while ignoring the irrelevant parts of the call. Sometimes though, I'm very grateful for the internet.

Here's my latest pastime. See how well you can do at matching your short description of an image with an anonymous partner. There are people with more than 10 million cumulative points. I'm guessing they listen to a lot of conference calls….

Always Look on The Bright Side of Life

Thursday afternoon was rainy in midtown, so my walk to Grand Central was an exercise in umbrella jostling and soggy appendages. By the time I reached the station I was in a foul mood. Thankfully, I soon got to chuckle at the misfortune of a fool.

Rain brings out two extremes in pedestrian commuter speed. First is the ginger stepping, handrail holding, cautious person. These safety conscious impediments to effective crowd management somehow turn a three minute walk to the track into ten minutes of frustration. The other commuter is the "what rain?", full speed ahead, out of my way person. These self important menaces to society are the leading cause of train-related death in metropolitan areas. (Little known fact: dehydrated vole carcasses are the overall leading cause of train-related
death.)

As I was making my way down the three flights of stairs from the Madison Avenue entrance, unhappy with the woman in front of me who had decided that the proper way to rid her umbrella of excess water was to tilt it backward and shake, I realized that a member from the latter class of extreme speed commuters was in for trouble. He had a minor slip on an upper stair, but didn't slow down even slightly. The stairs were crowded and the escalator full. A fall would be problematic and embarrassing.

Only seconds later, it happened. His right foot went out from under him as the shoe failed to find traction on a step half-way down the staircase. Due to the forward momentum from his speed and negligence in not holding a handrail, he went down hard. This was not a garden variety stumble followed by awkward recovery. We're talking flat out, on his back, foot in the air disaster. He may have even slipped down a step or two on his bum. The fall was sufficiently dramatic that many of the few dozen people who saw it exclaimed some variation of "ooooohhh" or "ouuuuch". I, of course, was the only person callous enough to laugh. While a thoughtful man asked about the status of the prone, even more soggy than before faller, I chuckled. Suddenly my crappy commute wasn't all that bad.
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I may have pulled a muscle or two in the fall, but I'll be fine. Thank you for asking.

More Stupid

I don't really care much about oil prices, but know many people do. For a subject that gets so much of the American public's, media's and government's time and attention there is a frightening amount of misinformation. As an example. take the following question: Where does most petroleum consumed in the United States come from? I'm willing to bet that few Americans could correctly name more than two of the top five international suppliers of US crude.

See how well you do.

Rank the following from greatest to least in terms of oil exported to the United States year-to-date:
Saudi Arabia
Algeria
Iraq
Virgin Islands
Kuwait
Venezuela
France
Canada
Nigeria
Angola
Mexico
Russia
Iran

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Determine your list before you scroll down.

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According to the US Department of Energy as of July '07, the largest exporters of petroleum to the United States are:

Canada - 2.4million barrels per day
Mexico - 1.6m bpd
Saudi Arabia - 1.4m bpd
Venezuela - 1.4m bpd
Nigeria - 1.1m bpd
Algeria - 722k bpd
Angola - 556k bpd
Iraq - 475k bpd
Russia - 417k bpd
Virgin Islands - 327k bpd

Of course my question was deliberately flawed, since the largest supplies of US petroleum come from domestic production. Next time someone whines about going to war (yes, war is bad; yes, current US involvement in Iraq is of questionable value) over oil you should kick them. Or ask when we're going to assassinate Chavez, Yar'Adua, and Bouteflika.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

-- George Carlin

I'm often uncharitable in my treatment of the stupid. To be clear, I think of stupid as a state of mind rather than a permanent condition. I'm frequently stupid. With that disclaimer out of the way, can someone please explain how the following statistic means anything other than that nearly two-thirds of Republican voters are mouth breathing morons?

"In a September 28-30 Wall Street Journal / NBC poll, 59% of Republican voters said trade has been bad for the economy." -- Bloomberg 10/10/07

A Good Parenting Moment

I'm not a particularly successful parent and as a result my enjoyment of some parenting responsibilities is low. Don't get me wrong, I love all my (many) children, am proud of their successes, and generally enjoy their company. Much of the time though my contributions to raising the small people constitute maintenance -- get them ready for and into bed, provide enough money for new dance outfits, keep them quiet in church, take them to soccer. Sometimes though, the mundane becomes sublime.

John was fussing last night around 10pm; he wanted to go to bed. I wasn't quite ready to bathe him yet since finishing my rapidly melting ice cream was more pressing, so I put him in my lap. This did nothing to quiet him. I tried singing and bouncing him without success. Thankfully for both of us, we discovered that just a little taste of ice cream gave him something better to do with his mouth than cry. This was the result:

The lesson I took away from this is that for me, stretching the rules of good parenting leads to fun and profit.

Seriously, Who Buys This Stuff?

In the last thirty hours:

1) I spent all day Sunday sitting in a chair or on the couch whining about back pain
2) My employer announced a $3.4 billion write-down because "oops, someone forgot we're not a hedge fund"
3) I had to eat my third choice cereal for breakfast because the craptacular closet of questionable food that passes as a cafeteria here didn't have anything better

Of these I'm most upset about number three.