IT'S ALL IN THE PERSPECTIVE

"Exxon Profit Down 33% as Prices Fall" - NY Times

"Exxon Shatters Record with $45.2 Billion Profit" - Wash. Post

January 30, 2009

ROLL BACK THE CHEESE TAX

Departing administrations do all kinds of odd things on the way out.  The Bush boys have tripled the duty on Roquefort cheese.  We'll teach those beastly frogs a lesson, right?  Actually this is just one item on a humongous list of European products that the Bushies want to discourage us from buying, in response to the EU's ban on hormonal beef from the U.S.  See the full list here.  Read the Washington Post's story here.  January 29, 2009.

HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR

If you're up to it after last night's merriment, don't forget that today is New Year's Day throughout Asia.  January 26, 2009.

HAPPY 250th BIRTHDAY, RABBIE

It's Robert Burns' 250th birthday.  A quarter of a millennium!  Read his incomparable works and other good stuff here and sometime this evening raise a glass to his immortal memory.  January 25, 2009.

HANGING TOO GOOD FOR THEM?

It's interesting to read this morning that the two principal culprits in the tainted milk scandal in China have been sentenced to death.  I'm not a great fan of capital punishment, but that is not so much for any moralistic reason as because of the risk of a mistake and because it's so inconsistently applied.  But maybe we should institute it for destroying people's lives, which could be construed as a form of murder, and apply it to some bankers.  Take them out into center field at Yankee Stadium and pop them one in the back of the head, in front of a packed crowd of their victims.  "Il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres", as Voltaire wrote of the Royal Navy's execution of Admiral Byng.  January 23, 2009.

ECONOMIC STIMULI

Read the text of the House Appropriations Committee's "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" bill here.  The mark-up is tomorrow, with hearings on Thursday.  January 20, 2009.

REBUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Read the text of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's plan here.  This was created in the "lame duck" Congress but presumably contains much that will come up for discussion in the next few days.  January 20, 2009.

COAL IS GOOD

This morning's NYT had a headline "For Stores, A Lump of Coal", above an article about poor retail sales.  This miraculously changed in later editions, so maybe someone more influential than me pointed out to them that a lump of coal is positive, not negative, symbolizing warmth and energy.  In Scotland, the two symbolic gifts that the first-footer is supposed to bring are a lump of coal and a loaf of bread.  But I've seen this negative reference to coal often enough to wonder why some people use it that way.  Let's come up with a more appropriate negative symbol, keeping it clean, of course.  A lump of rock, for example, or a dead iguana.  January 9, 2009.

RIGHT, ENOUGH OF THIS MUMBAI NONSENSE

Almost nobody in India refers to Bombay as Mumbai, or Calcutta as Kolkata, or Madras as Chennai.  And the train station in Bombay, officially referred to as Chhatrapati Shrivaji Terminus, possibly the most beautiful train station in the world, is still known to virtually everyone in the region as VT, short for Victoria Terminal.  So, if the locals don't use the official names, why should we?  Nobody expects us to refer to European cities as Roma or Firenze or Beograd or Moskva or dozens more, names which the locals do actually use.  Bah, humbug, my New Year's Resolution is to stay grumpy all year long.  January 2, 2009.

STILL NOT SNOWING

HAPPY NEW YEAR !

Oh, pshaw, it's not gong to be that bad.  I say that the economy will start to recover in the third quarter.  But what do I know? January 1, 2009.