Are my eyes really blue?

I’ve frequently thought that the House of Representatives is the world’s biggest open-air special-needs class, and the GOP contingent a bunch of snake-handling mouth-breathers, but if this is true, it’s an inspired move. Sure, the government is on the hook if things go pear-shaped, but insuring bad debt for private companies who agree to take it on – and charging them for said insurance – is a hell of a lot less of a budget-buster than buying up all the bad debt outright and hoping against hope that it’s worth something someday. I mean, seriously. Put the profit potential of mortgage bonds in one hand and crap in the other and see which fills up first.

If this “toxic debt” is really something that will pay out for us in the end, then the private sector should be just as happy to make a profit on it, right? Especially with the government as the reinsurer of last resort? The best part is, it’s a simple plan along the lines of FDIC insurance and it leaves the heavy lifting on the industry that got its tit in a wringer to begin with. I think the watchword for anyone working on this deal should be “elegant in its simplicity.” These Rube Goldberg three-rail bank shot schemes are where shit comes unravelled.

And again, if I’m rank-and-file at Lehman, I’m climbing a bell tower with a high-powered rifle right about now…

…you can take it or leave it, but I’m starting to wonder if there’s something to it, and it’s this:

Anything that we were hung up about when we were 13 or 14 or 15 – our body issues, our social problems, our self-consciousness and fears and anxieties – anything from that 8th and 9th grade range just gets burned into the ROM and we’re stuck with it for the rest of our lives. No matter how brilliant or gorgeous or successful or lighting-our-hundreds-with-hundreds rich we get, at root, we’re still the fat kid, the nerd, the burnout, the reject, the freak, the flake, the basket case. And while all your adult hangups can eventually be cured with enough drugs and therapy and liquor, the stuff that was there originally is damn near impossible to overcome, because it happened when you started being an adult. Whatever you thought you were when the switch flipped, well, you’ve got yourself a duck.*

This dovetails nicely with the old line about how high school IS the real world, it’s just not the whole world…because anybody who thinks the real world isn’t like high school needs to get out in the real world some more.

Anyway, it’s a theory…

* old line about imprint theory: “if a duck hatches from its egg, and you’re the first thing it sees, you got yourself a duck.”

Michelle Cottle basically lays down the smack on behalf of those of us who know that we’re not the Chosen of God just because we grew up in East Butthole, Alabama.
And spares me writing basically the same thing all over again.

Quite frankly, the more companies there are out there producing the next generation of superphone, the better. Plus somebody needs to push the iPhone team…because the Blackberry and Windows Mobile aren’t gonna do it.
T-Mobile is in a bit of a weird spot, given that their 3G is in a band nobody else in the world uses (1700 Mhz? Really?) but at least you get to reuse your 850 Mhz antenna. Sort of. (Honestly, I think it would have been better all round if they’d just given us two harmonics to begin with for mobile phones, but then, Europe kicked our ass up and down on the mobile phone front, so that ship has sailed.) But for the first time since the Pearl, T-Mob has a really compelling product that moves the bar and legitimately brings the Internet to your pocket in a way that Blackberry never did and WM6 never could. And let’s not even get started on how Symbian never took off in this country…
So welcome to the fight. Your move, Apple.
ETA: After looking over the reports and liveblogs, it looks like they’re going right for the gut on all the stuff the iPhone didn’t ship with: physical keyboard, contexual menus, 3G out of the box, wide-open developer program, etc. So now we get to see what’s doin’. I suspect that there may be some battery life issues at first, unless they’ve crammed in a much larger battery or Android does something truly astonishing with power management. (Pulling hard for the latter.) The fact that the phone will only launch in markets where T-Mob has already rolled out 3G, though, points up exactly why Apple skipped 3G in the first iteration of the iPhone.

This may be the single best obituary of all time. I have my work cut out for me.

They really like us!

ETA: they must really like us…Vandy vs Auburn has been picked up for ESPN’s prime-time game, Saturday Oct 4.

No, no, no, a thousand times no.

“We ran the economy to the brink of oblivion, so let us have $700 BILLION to bail out the firms that did it…without applying any regulation, without any sort of corrective measures, without even allowing anyone to review or approve the process. Just give us a shitpile of cash and don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of things.”

Is there any reason – any reason AT ALL – not to expect them to make a hash of this? And don’t start with that bullshit about what Obama would do, or what Clinton (either) would do. The old theoretical equivalence game is not in play here. The responsible party is the one who has fucked us sideways, so they are the ones who have to demonstrate why handing them one bazillion dollars scot-free is not THE STUPIDEST FUCKING IDEA ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

Fourteen years it’s taken…but today, the Vanderbilt Commodores are ranked #21 in the AP poll.

I’m going to go get very, very, very drunk now.

Four wins, no losses.

Two conference wins, no losses.

One win over a ranked foe, no losses.

Outscored opponents 51-10 in the second half.

To cap it all off, not one, not two, but FIVE AP-ranked teams lost, and five more that didn’t have a loss already.

And we were the first team “also receiving votes” last week.

If the Vanderbilt Commodores aren’t ranked in the Top 25 when the new poll ships on Monday, they should cancel the whole thing for the rest of the year. Because right now? Any time, any place, any team…WE WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

DYNAMITE GO VU!!!

War in Iraq. Recession at home. Me in a funk. It can only be…1991.

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