Puns (from an internet email)

 I changed my iPod's name to Titanic. Now it's syncing. 
 
When chemists die, they barium.

 

Jokes about German sausage are the wurst kind.

 

I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.

 

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

 

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

 

This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never met herbivore.

 

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can't put it down.

 

I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words.

 

They told me I had type-A blood, but it was a type-O.

 

PMS jokes aren't funny. Period.

 

We are going on a class trip to the Coca-Cola factory. I hope there's no pop quiz.

 

I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

 

Did you hear about the cross-eyed teacher who lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?

 

When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

 

Broken pencils are really pointless.

 

I tried to catch some fog, but I mist.

 

What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? The saurus.

 

England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

 

I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

 

I dropped out of Communism class because of lousy Marx.

 

All the toilets in New York's police stations have been stolen. The police have nothing to go on.

 

I got a job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.

 

Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.

 

A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.

 

Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!

 

The earthquake in Washington was obviously the government's fault.

 

Be kind to your dentist. He has fillings, too.

 

Velcro. What a rip off!

Vacation Time!

It's time for the year end holiday for me and it's time for a long vacation for this blog - possibly forever!

So, thanks to everyone who has visited and TTFN!

(Note: during the week of 2011 November 26th we had our 100,000th visitor!)

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Most popular videos of 2010:

Hits	Link
3,143	Deer Chaser (really!?)
1,345	Fantasmic Part 3

Most popular music of 2010:

Hits	Link
863	Spawn the Dragon (Matthew Moore)
470	Jingle Bell Rag (Stephen Clarke-Willson)

Most popular photos of 2010:

Hits	Link
28263	Cinderella Castle Tokyo
23240	Disneyland Paris with Tinkerbell via Google Earth
6543	Krogroth Gameboy
6277	Sleeping Beauty Castle Paris
3032	Sleeping Beauty Castle Disneyland
2818	Cinderella Castle Walt Disney World
2781	Japan at Night
2477	Supreme Commander (NOT)
2171	Frozen Water 6
1766	Sleeping Beauty Castle Paris (Model-like)

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Most popular photos of 2009:

Hits	Link
13880	Tokyo Disneyland Cinderella Castle
5789	Japan (Tokyo) at Night
4626	Kogroth Game Boy
4294	Disneyland Paris Sleeping Beauty Castle with Tinkerbell as seen through Google Earth
4068	Walt Disney World Cinderella Castle
3835	Disneyland Paris Sleeping Beauty Castle
1920	Disneyland Paris Sleeping Beauty Castle - looks like a model
1914	Frozen Water #6
1569	Cind-E hair flip
1524	Cind-E with short hair
1247	Disneyland California Sleeping Beauty Castle with Walt and Mickey in front
1161	Manhattan Beach at Twilight

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(Oh ... and don't forget to buy Nano-Plasm in paperback or for Kindle.)


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© 2005-2010 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

/dance

Slash dance

last dance for love

yes, it's my last chance

for romance tonight

 

I need you, virtually,

beside me, to guide me,

to sync me, to scold me,

'cause when I'm bad

I'm so, so bad

 

So let's dance, the slash dance

let's dance, the slash dance

let's dance, online tonight

 

Slash dance, last dance for love

yes, it's my last chance

for romance tonight

 

Oh, I need you, by me,

beside me, to guide me,

to sync me, to scold me,

'cause when I'm bad

I'm so, so bad

 

So let's dance, the last dance

let's dance, the last dance

let's dance, an online dance tonight

 

Yeah, will you be my Mr. Right?

can you fill my appetite

I can't be sure

that you're the one for me

but all that I ask

is that you dance with me

dance with me, dance with me, yeah

 

Oh I need you, by me,

beside me, to guide me,

to sync me, to scold me,

'cause when I'm bad

I'm so, so bad

 

So let's dance, a slash dance

let's dance, this last dance

let's dance, an online dance tonight

 

Oh I need you, by me,

to beside, to guide me,

to sync me, to scold me,

'cause when I'm bad

I'm so, so bad

 

So, come on baby, sync slash dance

come on baby, dance that dance

come on baby, let's dance online...

Bjarne Stroustrup says

Bjarne Stroustrup says in his FAQ:

"I also worry about a phenomenon I have repeatedly observed in honest attempts at language comparisons. The authors try hard to be impartial, but are hopelessly biased by focusing on a single application, a single style of programming, or a single culture among programmers. Worse, when one language is significantly better known than others, a subtle shift in perspective occurs: Flaws in the well-known language are deemed minor and simple workarounds are presented, whereas similar flaws in other languages are deemed fundamental. Often, the workarounds commonly used in the less-well-known languages are simply unknown to the people doing the comparison or deemed unsatisfactory because they would be unworkable in the more familiar language."

Symp

I recently sent off some nine-track tapes to a fellow named Bob Chicko who had a tape reader and could recover some of the data. These tapes are old and contain some archives from my college days.

I found this email hilarious in its obscurity:

Jingle Bell Rag

Annual 'bump':

Happy Holidays from Above the Garage Productions

It's Jingle Bells played ragtime style and very fast, performed by yours truly.

Woot!

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Nano-Plasm FTW

There's still time to order Nano-Plasm and get it by Christmas if you use 2-day shipping!

Be the first on your block to find out what those spirographs are all about!

(More blog posts about Nano-Plasm...)
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Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention."

Too bad this guy died.  I wish he had lived another 10 years so he could see just how wrong he truly was.  But I don't think even directly experiencing how poorly his ideas worked would have convinced him.  Japan has been following this nonsensical teaching for the last 20 years (pushing 30 years now) and all they have to show for it is increased debt and stagflation.  So even in the face of evidence that government can not spend its way out of a recession Dr. Samuelson would still have been a believer.

If you read the whole article you'll see that Dr. Samuelson advised President Kennedy to cut taxes to get out of a recession.  No doubt, leaving money in the economy, even at some cost to the government in terms of interest payments, might actually help, as the economy grows enough to cover the additional interest payments.

But just because it works once in a while and at a small scale does not mean that a government like ours with tens of trillions of dollars in public debt with a constituency with another tens of trillions in private debt can spend its way out of the sinkhole of debt that has been created.  Japan, which 20 years ago had a huge surplus, and was therefore in a much stronger position to potentially stimulate their own economy, has utterly failed at the task.

The reason is simple - governments don't create productivity.  Governments can spend money and governments and print money but governments don't generally create much of anything except paperwork.

Unfortunately the die is already cast.  When the stock market crashes again and everyone once again panics we'll be told that we have a liquidity crisis and only intervention by the central banks can save us.  They will print another couple of trillion dollars and give it to the banks who will use it once again to buy their own stock offerings.  More savings by the middle class will be wiped out and another 10 million people will be out of work.  In the meantime, useless politicians will tool around in limousines and pat themselves on the back for the important work they are doing.  Ugh.


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Obama Lincoln

Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone: "What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

*Sigh*.

Obama says he admires Abraham Lincoln and that Team of Rivals was a huge influence.

I guess he paid particular attention to the part where Lincoln and his Secretary of the Treasury discovered a clever way to pay for the Civil War: print money.

I guess The Peace President needs to print a lot of money because we have a number of wars going: The War on Drugs; The War on Poverty; The War in Iraq; The War In Afghanistan; The War against THE CLIMATE; and I'm sure there are more.

Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."

In fact, Obama is doing what Lincoln did - appointing insiders.  The so-called "Team of Rivals" was Lincoln's cabinet.  It's "ex post facto" storytelling by Doris Kearns Goodwin that Lincoln hired his team because he wanted alternative views.  In fact he wanted insiders to balance his own outsider status ... and if they had conflicts with each other then he resolved them - but Ms. Goodwin gets the cart before the horse.

It's the same for Obama.  He's the outsider but 100% of the people around him are Washington insiders.

Our presidential elections are a no-win situation.  The president is a figure head.  Washington is run by the insiders who have formed a bureaucratic cesspool of toxic insider deals.  I guess as figure-heads go Obama is doing a fine job - he just got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush.

Today, the great enabler, of course, is the Federal Reserve, working jointly with the banks and the politicians to ensure both groups have plenty of scratch.  Lincoln was on top of the situation in that regard as well, as he created a central bank that printed money to fund the war.  Luckily that bank eventually failed just as the Federal Reserve will.  All paper money eventually fails just as all Ponzi schemes eventually fail.  Figuring out the timing is pretty tricky but one day the people in Bernie Madoff's fund were millionaires and then five minutes later they were completely broke.  When it happens, it happens fast.  Anyone with something called a dollar is a participant in the Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme and when it collapses it will happen very quickly.

It's best to be prepared.  If you can figure out how, that is.  I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
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Stephen Colbert on the Federal Reserve

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Fed's Dead
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Apparently there are parts of the media that are not under the control of the monetary elite!

(Click on "Fed's Dead" title in case the movie won't play.)
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Elizabeth Warren on TARP

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Tivoli One

I've always wanted to listen to a Tivoli One and last weekend I got to do it in a decent, quiet listening environment. (That really is one, isn't it? Don't tell me it's a knock-off ... I couldn't stand the truth! I can't find that exact model online.)





.. and indeed ... it sounded wonderful.

(And that's not my book: the spouse was reading it.)

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Winter Sunset

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Overnight case

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The W Seattle

The W in Seattle has very dark hallways with multicolored lighting.

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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Sarah Palin

I was admiring my bubble of blog tags (which should be to the right somewhere) and I noticed the Sarah Palin is notable enough to deserve her own tag.

And yet ... I have no pictures of her!

Shocking.

(Okay, there are links to a couple of funny videos.)

My wife and I went on a cruise to Alaska last summer and we visited the Governor's Mansion in Juneau. When I tell the story I mention that Sarah Palin would come out and model a new outfit every day at 2:30 p.m. for about a half hour and ... many people buy it!

Instead of adding a picture of Sarah Palin to the blog I thought I'd give you a Google Image Search of Sarah Vowell, who is a true super hero.
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Bernanke - too painful for Nassim Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Good Bye! The Reappointment Of Bernanke Is Too Much To Bear: "What I am seeing and hearing on the news -- the reappointment of Bernanke -- is too hard for me to bear. I cannot believe that we, in the 21st century, can accept living in such a society. I am not blaming Bernanke (he doesn't even know he doesn't understand how things work or that the tools he uses are not empirical); it is the Senators appointing him who are totally irresponsible -- as if we promoted every doctor who caused malpractice. The world has never, never been as fragile. Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific."

Wouldn't be awesome if Obama read the writing on the (Great) wall (of China) and fired the whole bunch of misfits he has in charge of our economy?


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Dubai [World]

Abu Dhabi’s Silence Raises the Heat on Dubai - NYTimes.com: "Many here had assumed that Abu Dha bi would bail out Dubai’s flagship company, Dubai World, which set off a swoon in global markets last week when it said it was seeking to delay payments on $59 billion in debt. But so far there has been no announcement, and insiders suggest that Abu Dhabi — which already bailed out Dubai to the tune of $10 billion earlier this year — is seeking greater economic or even political control over Dubai as the price for any further assistance.

To make matters worse, the Dubai government distanced itself from Dubai World on Monday. Abdulrahman al-Saleh, the general director of Dubai’s Department of Finance, told Dubai TV that Dubai World was “not guaranteed by the government,” and that creditors needed to take some responsibility. “They think Dubai World is part of the government, which is not correct.”"

So I'm not the only person that's confused about what's what. In my earlier posts I said that Dubai was defaulting. It's actually Dubai World, a separate company. But everyone (including me) assumed Dubai World was basically part of Dubai.

In our country, there was a bank called The Bank of The United States that failed, but everyone thought it was the government that failed. This caused a huge bank run.

Having said all that, it's still the case that there are tightly interwoven relationsips in Dubai since nearly all relationships are blood relationships.

In the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Administration (FHA) have implicit government guarantees, but as Market Skeptics points out, these are not real guarantees. So it'll be interesting to see who is left holding the bag when those agencies finally and completely implode.



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Dubai - Incredible

Dubai is in the news because it's defaulting ("postponing") payment on $60 billion in loans.

So I though I'd fly over the place in Google Earth.

I recommend you do the same. Just fly to "Dubai" and zoom out and you'll quickly find the man-made Palm Islands. Hunt around for the monorail track, the aquatic park, the giant hotel, and the range of homes/apartments, and ... lots of still empty sand.

It's unfrickin' believable.



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Key Fact

Legendary Financial Historian Ed Griffin on the Economic Crisis, the Monetary Elite and the Future of the Internet: "Daily Bell: Has the stimulus helped? Why or why not?

Griffin: Has the stimulus helped? I guess the question is has the stimulus helped whom? Or What? The general idea is that the stimulus is supposed to stimulate the American economy and help the American people and in that I don't believe that there is any reason to think that it has helped at all. I don't think it was really designed to do that at all. It was designed to be sold that way but I don't think that anyone in Washington thought that it would actually accomplish the end objective. Now I suppose that some people did think so, I would have to backtrack on that, there are some collectivists that believe the government can solve all problems, that the government can take everything from the citizens and redistribute it back to them in a more efficient manner. There are people like that out there and they thought the stimulus package would help. Surely everybody understands that the money that is being spent is coming out of the pockets of the very people it is supposed to help."

[Emphasis added.]

Actually, I'm pretty sure most people do not understand where money comes from. The value of a dollar has been so greatly cheapened by the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies that an entire generation (especially the politicians) think that money can be called into existence at any time without any cost.

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