A Blog is Like a Third Leg.
Now that I’ve amputated mine from my life, the wound has closed up as completely as if I never had one. Where on earth did I ever find the time? And the drive?
I know this place feels a little orphaned and half-empty and half-built, as yet. Now that this month’s grueling work is almost over, I will try to hang around more, and supply some living plants. (Well, after I do three years of taxes. That’s apparently one of the things I was blogging instead of doing. I wonder how many more will turn up, like bloated corpses that died of neglect?) I like the company here so much. I love hearing your voices on the front page. I know that it isn’t finished or furnished yet. It doesn’t quite have a life that’s “taken,” yet. The good stuff is here but it doesn’t coalesce into something greater than the sum of the parts, yet. Please don’t give up!
This is going nowhere good
“Without intimating a view on the ickiness of what Mr. Wolf had described, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that the law might treat different undergarments differently. ‘The issue here covers the brassiere as well,” he said, “which doesn’t seem as outlandish as the underpants.'”
Pictures of Sausage
The axes began falling today in the sausage factory where I work which is not a sausage factory. I will still work at the sausage factory in July, but many will not. Many who do the heaviest work will be gone and many who stay can hardly tie their shoes unaided. The axes were a long time coming. Because we put too much sawdust in the sausage for too long and because people thought they could get sausage on the Internet instead. Not realizing it was only pictures of sausage.
-Miles Lascaux
A modest proposal
Resolved: a top marginal tax rate of 90% on all income to elected representatives, including of course campaign financing and “gifts” to friends and family.
We then use the proceeds of that tax to bail out the legacy media companies on a perpetual basis.
Motion to approve?
Isn’t It Convenient
That the list of the nearest sun-like stars, those most like our sun in brightness and age, and thus most likely to have an Earth-like planet around them with some sort of evolved life, already have names that look like they were coined by science-fiction writers?
Epsilon Eridani
Tau Ceti
Sigma Draconis
Delta Pavonis
82 Eridani
Beta Hydrii
Zeta Tucanae
Beta Canum Venaticorum
Gliese 67
Gliese 853
18 Scorpii
51 Pegasi
Most of them go back to the 17th or early 18th centuries, thanks to the Bayer and Flamsteed catalogues.
-Miles Lascaux
Foolish Games
In the news today: PepsiCo has apparently offered to purchase two of its largest bottlers for a cool $6 billion, 17% above their market price.
Those of you who haven’t religiously followed the financial markets for the past fifteen years may be wondering: “Why doesn’t Pepsi actually own its bottlers already?” Good question! The answer is that over a decade ago, Pepsi followed its rival Coca-Cola in selling off all most of its bottling operations, while keeping enough equity shares to maintain control over these companies.
The reason? Thanks to a number of factors including agricultural subsidies, fructose water with bubbles is a much more profitable product than glass or plastic bottles with said product in them. By “outsourcing” bottling, the soda companies could post extraordinary profits (for a number of years, Coke’s return on assets averaged 18%), thereby attracting increased investment and vigorously expanding their marketing and R&D efforts. All the while keeping the massive bottling plants – whose annual depreciation costs would otherwise constitute a massive sinkhole in the corporate profits – off the books. The continuing equity stake minimized the impact of these losses, while still giving Coke and Pepsi’s corporate headquarters a high level of control over the actual decision-making at these operations.
At the time, this was actually something of a financial scandal – you can read more about it here for the gritty details. It never really amounted to much: everything they were doing was legal if not exactly kosher, though it tied more than a few investors’ brains into knots. But it made for an excellent Harvard Business School case study, and was a primo example of the late 90’s craze for outsourcing everything that’s not essential – even if it is, in fact, essential.
So Pepsi’s announcement today may very well signify the end of that particular era, and one form of financial shenanigans that characterized it. It’s not surprising that Pepsi rather than Coke would be the first to move on this – their corporation is far more diversified in terms of products and revenue streams. And while both companies remain profitable, legal threats suggest that the writing may be on the wall for overly-sweetened fizzy beverages.
~Maxwell
“CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.”
Oh, really? How about 2,974 times?
Baby Watchers: Have You Seen This Mysterious Phenomenon?
My 33-year-old nephew Matt, a new father, described watching his baby daughter’s face “scroll through” the full repertoire of human expressions and emotions — in her sleep. And only in her sleep.
I’ve seen this too! But thirty years ago, when my niece, Matt’s cousin Paloma, was a baby in the first few months of life. Awake, she had about four basic, dazed expressions; she looked the way you might expect a newly minted person to look — foggy, vague, not yet fully here. But when she slept, her face knew the Greek comedy and tragedy masks, and so much more: hilarity, amusement, disgust, despondency, sly cynicism, wistfulness, ennui — sophisticated, seasoned expressions that you’d think an old Frenchwoman would have had to earn by six or seven decades of hard living. Non, je ne regrette rien!
What is this?? What stage of sleep does it correspond to, what’s going on in the brain? Is the baby dreaming, or in deeper, dreamless sleep? How would a neurologist or a child-development expert explain it? I’m not sure they could. It’s been shown that emotions are inseparable from their physical expression: to make the face is to have the feeling, and vice versa. So we’re hardwired for emotions we have yet to grow into? Expressions we regard as exquisitely cultural and social, like full-blown language, are actually biological? What?
A baby that can manage at most a wail, an unfocused stare, and a goofy, convulsive smile when awake appears, in its sleep, to rehearse the dramas of a lifetime. I wonder if this was one of the things that inclined people to believe in reincarnation. A sleeping baby lets its mask slip, reveals its old soul, remembers its long, rich lives and tumultuous experience.
Have you seen this?
Songs for the Times
I wanted to post up “Depression Blues” by Gatemouth Brown, but I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Never mind, this one will do:
Look at all the Germans just standing around. How can you stand around when Gate plays? Europeans may respect the blues, but they don’t effing get it.
-Miles Lascaux
Dylan Covers
While driving today I heard Bob Dylan’s song, “Lay Lady Lay.”It is hard to think of anyone with as much talent for writing music and as little a gift of vocal range. It got me thinking of how many recording artists have done covers of Dylan songs. Here is one of my favorites:
Stevie Wonder does a version of the same song that makes my hair stand on end. Do any of you have particular favorites?
Ambiance 