congress -- fail

congress -- fail, originally uploaded by pr9000.

cripes.

dukakis -- fail

dukakis -- fail, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Barack Roll

in the spirit of that last entry ...

chamberlain -- fail, originally uploaded by pr9000.

The "fail" woman is like Forrest Gump, or if he's not available, Leonard Zelig ...

thanks to one of my faithful readers

This is a real, honest-to-goodness photo from the bailout hearings yesterday.

and this is my take. If you don't know what the sign means, click here.

And why does Bernanke look all pasty and white?

web

web, originally uploaded by pr9000.

The spiders have been out in full force the past week or two; if you go to my Flickr page, you'll see a particularly ugly one that's been perched in our front yard for a few days. I thought it was a brown recluse, but I think I'm wrong. It's not a black widow; that's of little consolation. I'm starting to think we moved to the wrong state. Alaska, I'm guessing, doesn't have a lot of nasty bugs.

And do you ever wonder why the sight of a spider makes us recoil? Feel things crawling up our legs when it's just our imagination? Claim you can hear them screeching as they apply warpaint to their faces, ready to chomp on your neck in the middle of the night? And why do I think they have faces? Seriously, I worry about myself sometimes.

I'd rather contemplate the gorgeous webs that the smaller spiders leave, particularly in the bushes along our sidewalk. After a rain (or, in this case, judicious application of the sprinkler system) webs are majestic, the water like little snowglobes, the spiders off somewhere muttering "Rosebud" for nobody to hear ...

***

This picture seems appropriate today of all days; I've been nervous since before sunrise about getting trapped in the mess of a web Wall Street has spun ... or is it "spinned?" (Someone get back to me on that, please) Since the last bubble burst, I've acquired a mortgage and a 401(k). Back in the late 90s, I felt insulated from the insanity -- partly because I never invested in silly stocks like e-shoehorns.com ("We've revolutionized the art of putting on a shoe"), but mainly because I didn't make enough money to afford e-shoehorns.com common tender. I remember being at a wedding shower in late 2000, and the entirety of the male small talk was: stock tips, hot women and golf. I felt completely out of the loop, and remember wondering if I was ever going to grow up and care about this kind of stuff.

Well, one massive financial system meltdown later, I know why grown ups drink Pepto straight from the bottle.

What depresses me most: the blame being slung (slinged? "Slung" sounds better but again, let me know if I'm wrong here) by the usual partisan suspects, and the accompanying nonchalance about the results if, as seems likely, Congress won't approve the bailout plan Bush is proposing. I keep returning to the description of what almost happened last week -- the credit markets almost "seized up" and failed to function. To me, "seizing up" reminds me of (1) car engines, and (2) recipes. I've had both happen to me (the former was a Buick Century, the latter most recently was a chocolate fondue) and in both cases, the results weren't good.

I'm not an economist; allegedly, I have an undergraduate degree at least tangentially concerning economics, though the extent of it was praying that I'd pass micro and writing a 20 page paper on Thorstein Veblen. I bet he'd have a field day with the past 15 years, though he'd probably be posting his thoughts on the Huffington Report and doing segments with Keith Olbermann, and I'd hate him with the power of a thousand suns because of it.

So, as "not an economist," my analysis of the situation is ... well, somewhere between "laughable" and "fark.com" but the part I keep getting back to is this:

If President Bush hadn't done such a masterful job of being a divider, not a uniter ... and had not forced Iraq on a Congress that was all too ready to roll over for him ... and had campaigned in 2004 with just a touch more grace and a lot less ballbusting demonize-the-opponent old school politics ... and had been a little more in touch with the disaster that was Katrina (even though most fault truly lies with Ray Nagin and whoever Louisiana's governor was) ... and hadn't spent federal funds like a drunken sailor on shore leave ... and had announced Rumsfeld's resignation before the midterms in 2006, thus blowing a chance to show that he thinks himself capable of making mistakes ...

In short, if Bush hadn't burned through every ounce of goodwill over the past eight years, he could have approached Congress with this very same bailout plan and had it received with more thoughtfulness and seriousness. The administration's actions to this point make everyone (on both sides of the aisle) say "Hell no, we're not rubberstamping this" -- thus leading the market to worry that maybe Bernake and Paulsen aren't coming to the rescue, thus making the situation that much more toxic, dangerous and potentially devastating.

I wasn't ready to say it after Iraq turned ugly. I wasn't ready to say it after Harriet Miers. I wasn't ready to say it after Katrina. I certainly didn't think I'd have to say it after he took a political risk and backed "the Surge" and turned out to be right, against all odds.

But I'm ready to say it now: on the whole, George W. Bush's presidency has been a disaster. Which is not to say that his team didn't do some important, great things (North Korea, the aforementioned Surge, fighting AIDS in the developing world, leading the humanitarian response to the tsunami), and which also is not to say that history won't judge him better than we do now.

Good leaders lead. They consult, they cajole, they convince, and at the end of the day they lead their people. George W. Bush has done none of this, and now, when the country is facing a crisis that is as unpredictable as it is dangerous, we're all reaping what his administration has sowed.

here comes fall ...

here comes fall ..., originally uploaded by pr9000.

Stock Market Invincible!

Stock Market Invincible!, originally uploaded by pr9000.

Pencils for Sale, originally uploaded by pr9000.

And this is the first thing I've heard from the Democrats in Congress that actually makes any sense.

can you even imagine

from 1968, when the beatles were in india ... photo courtesy Child of the Moon.

sweet fancy moses

sweet fancy moses, originally uploaded by pr9000.

I was out walking Trotter on Saturday afternoon, and we went down to the "chess park" (so named because there's a massive chess board there with pieces as large as a four year old boy) to throw the football a bit, before Ohio State's annual "crap the bed" game against a ranked opponent.

As I was walking into the park, I saw the cuddly little thing shown above. After I soiled my boxers, I ran back home and locked Trotter inside -- it may have been hungry and followed me home -- and grabbed my camera. The one with the long, long lens ... and then hightailed it back to the park.

It must have been an amusing sight, me trying to get close enough to take this picture without getting close enough to be eaten alive by this vicious, snarling beast. And yet I was oddly soothed by it, mainly because (1) I had to admire its dogged pursuit of prey, because the web was like 20 feet wide; and (2) it was obviously a Steeler spider, as evidenced by its black and gold regalia. So what's the worst it could do? Get me in its clutches and then fail to score more than 10 points against a horribly coached Browns team on national television?

Anyway, I haven't seen it since. I'm not sure, but I think it bought a townhouse alongside the park and is busy unpacking as we speak. I'll see it at the residents' club, on a treadmill, next weekend. and i'll have to be nice to it. That's the Westhaven way. :)

out of gas, and an apology

Seems like middle Tennessee is running out of gasoline. I can attest -- I was listening to the radio in the car last night, and there was a news story about some areas in Knoxville actually running out of gas at several stations. Not more than a minute later, I passed the local BP and saw an employee removing the numbers from the price sign for regular unleaded. Cars were three deep at every pump.

So what did I do? Why, I filled my car up, of course. I added to the problem. I became part of the crowd. To quote Dr. Hibbard ... "we've given the word 'mob' a bad name."

***

Also, I got an anonymous comment from someone concerning a post I did a few years ago in Maui. I was describing my quest to get the perfect beach babe/surfer shot. I think the commenter was the one associated with my heartless phrase involving cottage cheese. She complained 

well, i found it anyways...a year and half later. THANK YOU by the way. I would GREATLY appricate it if you would that that picture off the web.

I couldn't take it off the web, so I deleted the post. If you want to see it, here's the Google cache.

My apologies.

in the great smoky mountains

in the great smoky mountains, originally uploaded by pr9000.

god bless holy taco

It's only funny because ... well, John D. Carroll has this huge poster from "Far and Away," the first date he went on with his lovely wife, and it was the main piece of artwork in their living room at the Hampden Court apartment. And also because I know one of the people in this poster, and aside from "Juno," the poster's title is pretty accurate.



God bless Holy Taco (nsfw)

why is my sister wearing such an obscene shirt?