Dances With Wools

Anyone who knows me also knows that I hate change.  Perhaps it comes from growing up in a house where the furniture never moved, where neighbors never moved, where my mom’s hairstyle never changed.  Change angers and frightens me.

I stewed over the new Trek movie for several weeks and a few curious thoughts struck me.  First of all, Chris Pine is Kirk the way original Kirk (William Shatner) used to be.  He’s all full of confidence and arrogance, bravado and bluster.  He’s a skirt-chasing sumbitch and we all love him for it.  There are moments — a turn of the chin a furrow of the brow — when he looks so much like Shatner that it’s scary.  Kirk and Shatner aged, got heavier, got slower, just as we all do.  God knows, I did.  Now, Pine comes along and breathes new life into the character, gives us back that jaw-breaking action we’ve been longing for throughout the past few headier Trek movies.

So, I can accept it.  New Spock kind of bothers me but only because I’ve been watching him on Heroes for so long I can’t see him as anything but.  And the destruction of Vulcan bothers me too.  There are how many Vulcans left in the universe?  The planet’s gone.  Shame on you, Abrams!  That was just mean and wrong.

Also wrong was the red matter.  I’ve been watching/writing Trek since 1969 and I don’t know what it is.  Where did it come from?  What’s it’s purpose?  It smacks of a Mary Jane story and it sticks in my craw.  That needed to be dealt with in a less superfluous manner.

At the risk of seeming disingenuous, I do love the new McCoy.  He’s more animated, more generous with his emotions.  He’s almost sexier than Kirk himself.  I said, almost.

So, while I can accept the whole altered timeline/new universe with its younger, hipper, more action-packed characters, I still swear allegiance to the TOS actors and the characters they bore into the world.  Sorry, new guys, but that’s just how it is.  I had one Kirk rocket me through puberty and now another arrives to rocket me through menopause.  God must like me at least a little.  Now, could he give me a new, hipper Guiding Light to ease me into my golden years?

Live long and prosper, dudes!

I went to see the new Star Trek movie Tuesday night.  Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve been a die-hard trekker since 1967 when I saw my first episode by hiding behind a chair in the living room.  I didn’t really want to go see the movie, but I was bullied into it.  I should have held out.

I will say that the IMAX experience was amazing.  The effects were stunning.  There were moments when I was jubilant to see the youth of our favorite characters played out before my very eyes instead of merely alluded to in dialogue.  If they had stuck with that, I would have been the happiest person on the planet.  I would have extolled the virtues of JJ Abrams and crew from the highest mountain.  But they didn’t.
Without giving too much away….aw hell!….I don’t care.  Read on and skip the movie.

Star Trek has dealt with alternate time-lines and realities before, a la “Mirror, Mirror” and a host of others.  That’s fine.  The one thing they always did was to return to normal before the end of the episode/movie.  That makes everything okay.  I think I know why the movie was released when it was.  The Great Bird of the Galaxy and his devoted wife, Majel Barrett, have both passed.  They would turn over in their graves if they saw this one.  I feel certain that Majel would not have allowed it to be made.

Okay, so this Romulan goes back in time to seek revenge on Spock for allowing the destruction of his home planet.  Fine.  First, he attacks and destroys George Kirk’s ship, killing Jim’s father in the process.  Everything from that point on is altered.  Suddenly, Jim’s father is dead, his mother remarries and Kirk is nothing more than a juvenile delinquent in the making.  I get that certain things would change by the simple act of killing Jim’s father, but it would NOT change the fact that the USS Enterprise was built in San Francisco, where Starfleet Headquarters is.  All butterfly wings aside, one man’s death wouldn’t change all that.

Now, the Enterprise is apparently built in Iowa, where Jim was SUPPOSED to be born.  I guess they had to get him back there somehow.  Pike is the one responsible for getting Jim into the Academy.  Sure, the re-programming of the Kobayashi Maru stands pat, but suddenly Cadet Kirk has a thing for Uhura and Spock ends up with the girl.  Wha?????

During the course of the movie, Spock’s entire planet of Vulcan is destroyed and his mother (the only person who ever loved or supported him) is killed.  His life pretty much continues on its normal course, except for those two facts.  Spock Prime would never have allowed that to happen, never mind new Spock.  Spock also believed in the Prime Directive.  Neither of those Spock incarnations would have run around telling people the formula for beaming a man directly onto a ship traveling past light speed.  They would never have allowed their mother to be killed, and if they did, they would have traveled back in time to fix that.

So, I’m supposed to believe that Spock Prime traveled back in time to bring Kirk and Spock together and to give Scotty his future formula for said trans-light transporting…but he would NOT travel far enough back to prevent the destruction of his planet?  Or to prevent the birth of the man who caused it?  Or to correct his own mistake and save Remus thus preventing the Romulan, Nero, from causing all this time-line destruction?

My head hurts with all the ways this is wrong.

If they had made this movie without calling it Trek, it would have been fine.  An outstanding time-travel space opera with all the action you could hope for.  Why on Earth they allowed a non-trekker to be in charge of a Trek movie, I’ll never know.  What was Abrams’ ultimate plan?  To revive the series by making a movie of each TOS episode, re-worked to fit HIS new altered time-line vision?

The only thing he had to do to save this movie and make absolutely everyone love it was to have the Enterprise go back through the black hole at the end, hit the right moment in the past, and stop the whole thing from happening.  Kirk would have insisted on it.  Spock would have stolen a shuttle and, with the help of Spock Prime, returned everything to normal in order to save his mother and home world.  It would have taken about fifteen minutes of screen time and made everyone happy in the end.

The casting was interesting.  I loved the characters of Spock, Scotty and Bones.  Bones was dead on and I adored him.  Kirk, a character I have adored since I was trapped in puberty, became almost unlikeable to me.  I could find nothing endearing in the arrogant portrayal, despite repeated attempts at interjecting humor.  He was more side-kick to Spock’s starring role.  I hated that.

And by the way, the name of the man who so tormented Jim Kirk at the Academy was Finnegan.  It would have been nice to use him and at least nod to the days of yore.  And Spock does not kiss women unless under the influence of alien spores.  And the Enterprise was not a brand new ship when Kirk arrived on her.  She had been Captained by not only Christopher Pike (who already had Spock in place and visited Talos IV BEFORE Jim Kirk ever took control of the ship….alternate time-line notwithstanding).  Robert April was Captain before Pike.

I hear there’s a sequel in the works to be released in 2011.  IF they use that movie to go back and fix the whole altered time-line fiasco, all might be forgiven.  MIGHT.  I enjoy the new actors, though Neo Spock needs a little polish.  Sulu seems a bit more gun-ho and macho and I found the improved character to be exactly that: improved.  Chekov was a bit of a bitter pill.  The inflection and accent were way over-played, to the point where I groaned if he was on camera.

So, the whole thing could have been avoided with the asking of one simple question: If you had the wherewithall to go back and fix the death of your father or mother, wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to do so?  Especially if your best friend came back in time to tell you how it had happened?

Damn straight!

I’ve always hated change.  When I was a kid, I would refuse to eat anything but chicken sandwiches and chocolate milk for lunch.  Cinnamon toast and hot cocoa was my breakfast, when I ate it.  Hot roast beef sandwiches for dinner.  I didn’t need any more than that, my best friend, and my bike.  Life was simple.  Life was good.

I changed, though I fought that change.  I got taller, older, hopefully smarter.  I grew up.  Given a choice, I’d still eat those simple foods every day.  Given a choice, I’d also still be 100 pounds dripping wet.  But I wasn’t asked about either of those thing, nor the other thousand changes that occurred in my life in the meantime.

When I first moved to Florida, there were still two water fountains in every park…one for the whites and one for the “coloreds” as my parents and the other adults on hand called the African Americans.  Of course, now we have the term “African Americans” and a single water fountain.  That’s progress and it’s a good thing.  A lot of change isn’t a good thing.

When I was a kid, my parents smoked everywhere.  They had ashtrays everywhere.  You could smoke in the theater, in line at the grocery store, even in the damned hospital.  It was awesome.  Nobody looked at me like I was walking around with a second head.  Nobody complained.  It was cheap and easy to smoke.  It was really easy to steal cigarettes from your folks and start your lifetime habit.  It’s not so easy to quit.  I’m not sure I want to.

At the age of 9, my mom was home during most days.  She had a huge soap opera addiction and I think she watched a dozen a day.  I watched Guiding Light with her.  I watched it with my grandmother.  Later, as an adult, I watched it with my best friend, Sarah.  And now, I watch it with my kids…until the final episode on September 18th, that is.  Through my entire life, Guiding Light was there…live, taped on my first VCR, recorded on my DVR.  Every afternoon, it’s my kids, the home work, and Guiding Light.  In two years, my kids will be in college.  Mom and Grandma are long dead and my best friend long gone.  I was kind of looking forward to growing old with the cast of Guiding Light, even having the time to watch it live.  Not so much.

Ratings have declined in recent years.  Costs have gone up.  You see, back in the day, women stayed home and took care of their kids, cleaned the waxy build-up off the floors, and watched soap operas.  Then, along came the ERA, the sexual revolution…suddenly, women are supposed to get jobs and stand up for themselves.  They’re supposed to have MORE in their lives than children and floor wax and soap operas.  Great.  Now, we can go to war, we can die with the best of them, we can work our asses off for a piss-poor salary.  Progress.  Wonderful.  But what if ALL you want in life is those kids, that wax, and Guiding Light?

Screwed.

Nobody asked me.  Nobody ever said, “Hey, Trish!  Do you want to be equal?  Do you want to blow up small villages and kill men, women and children in a foreign country?  Do you WANT to sit on the group W bench and get the hairy eyeball from some father-raper?”  If they’d asked, I’d have said, “No, thank you.  I’ll just keep sitting here watching Guiding Light and crocheting booties forever.  Thanks.”

I don’t want to be equal at all.  I like the fact that I can put up wallpaper and apply boo-boo stickers better than my man.  I like the fact that he can lift heavier things than I can.  It’s natural.  It’s normal.  I see no reason to change it.  We have our roles.  We like them.  Why change it?

When I was 18 and struggling with the death of my mother, I made up a list of reasons to stay alive.

1. Star Trek

2. Guiding Light

3. Horseback riding

4. Chocolate

5. Sailing

Years later, I added:

6. My kids

7. To outlive the people I hate

Many years later, I have no horse nor a sailboat.  There is no Star Trek series currently on TV.  All but two of the people I hate are already dead.  And now Guiding Light has been cancelled.  So, all I have left is my kids and chocolate.  Wait!  I have high cholesterol and I’m not supposed to eat chocolate.  Okay, I have my kids.  I love them more than I can express on these pale pages.  The thought of their faces kept me alive in a far-away ICU when even the doctors thought I’d never walk out of the hospital again.  It’s enough.

Forty years after I watched that first episode of Guiding Light finds the world a very different place.  We must add several words to George Carlin’s list of words you can never say on TV.  Hell, poor George Carlin is gone.  You can’t smoke anywhere anymore and if you do, you have to count those ciggies carefully because they cost MORE THAN CRACK!  Get it?  MORE THAN CRACK OR POT OR COKE!  Shit!  Star Trek has left TV, Gene Roddenberry is gone and Guiding Light has been cancelled.  We have our first African American president.  We’ve seen two planes crash into the Twin Towers.  The economy is in the crapper.  All but one of my kids is almost grown.  Women are now liberated enough to fight in wars, die from heart attacks, and spend more time with their boss than their kids.  Hell, those kids can now be tried as adults when they’re as young as six years old.

Change sucks.

If I could invent a time machine, I’d go right back to the sixties.  I’d sit down in that big avocado green naugahyde recliner, light up a stogie, click on Guiding Light, and have a nice box of bon bons while I watch Bert Bauer and Mike Bauer argue over Ed’s affair with Leslie.  Then I’d spend my afternoon cleaning the waxy buildup off the terazzo floor in the kitchen, and serve up a nice lunch of chicken sandwiches and chocolate milk.  Primetime still featured the original Star Trek, in all it’s pre-CGI glory.  Before bed, there would be Walter Cronkite reporting on the Viet Nam war.  A good dose of body count helps with the sleep, dontcha know.  Carson would still be on the Tonight Show, though I don’t think he was as funny as Leno is.

Life was simpler then.  It was better.  Everybody knew where they stood, what their roles were.  Kids weren’t sleeping with their teachers and they weren’t out shooting people.  Parents paid attention.  Parents were home.  Both parents.  And they cared.  Moms had soap opera-based dreams instead of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  And Dads could still work on the family car.  People carried Zippos instead of Blackberries.

Progress is fucked up.  It’s working in reverse.  It is not our friend.

We need to change change.

More later.  I’m going to watch a Star Trek re-run and smoke a few.

There is no wax on my kitchen floor.

I have an addictive personality.  Nothing harmful, mind you, unless you count cigarettes.  I have a life-long addiction to those.  But I get addicted to other things very easily.  Chocolate.  Coffee.  The usual.  I got addicted to crochet when my mom showed me how to make my own poncho 35 years ago.  Thanks to her, I have more afghans in my house than a family of 20 would need and I would have more if I hadn’t donated and/or gifted a good 50 of them.

When I was 4, a neighbor gave me my first Breyer horse.  That started a life-long addiction that nearly ended when my mother forced me to get rid of my collection at the age of 17.  I had 73 horses at the time.  I’ve almost reconstructed the old collection, plus added quite a few new ones.  I love them.  I can’t help it.

My newest addiction is something I never saw coming and I blame David for it.  We were at the Navy Exchange and he picked out a pig for Katie.  It was a Webkinz pig.  I warned him not to do it.  I told him that the stuffed animal had to be registered, that there was a virtual world involved, that it wouldn’t end with just the pig.  He bought it anyway.

We took Wilbur the pig home and registered him on webkinz.com.  It was cute.  We were mildly amused and Katie found that she was unable to do most of the activities on the site.  But she liked decorating the rooms and watching Wilbur take classes at the Kinzville Academy.  We logged on daily and puttered.  Then, a strange thing happened.  We found a website called webkinzinsider.com.  They had information on stuff we never dreamed of.  There were gems to be searched for, rare items to collect, kinz kash to earn.  We could play games, search through the forest for charms, and a host of other things.  There were people on that site who had in excess of 200 webbies and lots of people who had a ton of trophies.  There were room galleries showcasing their design talents.

It’s all my fault for being so damned competetive.  I was hooked.

We bought more webbies, bought some trading cards, bought figurines and clothing and carriers and bookmarks and….we were totally addicted.  I posted pics of our rooms, of our pets in their clothes, of trophies we’d won.

Does Katie enjoy this as much as I do?  I’m not sure.  She has a good time doing it and we have fun being together.  But I’m not sure that she is quite as driven as I am.  She doesn’t freak out at 4PM if we have to be somewhere and Arte has the Aztec Calendar at the Curio Shop.  But she loves the plushies and she adores the searches and achievements.

We have like 75 webbies now, plus about 40 rooms in our webkinz mansion.  We even staged a wedding in the fairy chapel for our hippos, whose baby was actually present at the wedding.  We’re geeks, we’re nerds, we’re addicts, we’re people without lives.  We live in a place where the only recreation is eating and the local gathering spot is Food Lion.  It’s sad.  So, webkinz world gives us the illusion of having a real life, even though it is lived out in the guise of a few pixels splattered across a screen, controlled by our mouse, and bought at the expense of…well…great expense.

If they came out with a Mr. Spock webby who liked to crochet and collect Breyer horses, I’d be in heaven.

Webkinz World is like Second Life without the trolls.  It’s sweet and innocent and completely stress free.  They don’t tax our Kinz Kash, they don’t foreclose on our webkinz mansion.  And when we go there, EVERYone is glad to see us.  What could be more perfect (or addicting) than that?

Trish

One of the most agonizing things in the world is to have your computer crash.  You back up your files, put your ducks in a row, use every known virus protection, and still things slip through the cracks.  When my computer crashed, it died completely, taking every single file with it.  Some of them were recovered from a back-up drive….most were not.  One of the things I lost was the crochet font I had hand made, painstakingly.  Anyone who’s ever created a font from scratch knows just how tedious a task it is.  I’m no font genius, I’ll tell you that.  But the font I had created was workable…if not perfect.

And now, after several months of rebuilding, I have put together another crochet font which, I hope, is at least as good as the first, if not better.  It’s a true type font.  Sorry, Mac users, I don’t play dat.  Click on the link and save the file to your computer, then install it in your fonts director of windows.  This particular font uses only all the capital letters, plus small letters a-k.  Go get it!

http://www.danceswithwools.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/crochetfont.ttf

Well, the election is finally almost over.  Thank God.  I’m sick of hearing about all of it, particularly the local races.  I’m also really sick of hearing about how our elected officials are scum, they all need to be replaced.  Then the voters turn right around and re-elect the scum they were just complaining about.

The single most annoying thing about this election has been the cold-calls.  The phone rings, you run like hell for it, thinking maybe your kid is sick at school or something, then when you get there, you hear some stupid recorded message asking you to vote for whoever.  Really?  Has anybody ever voted for a candidate because of a robotic phone call?  Remember, these freaking brain-trusts are the people who lead our country.  And these morons are exempt from the Do Not Call Registry.  Really?  How is that fair?  Everybody else on the planet who breaks that list open and calls you has to pay a $10,000 per infraction fine.  But not political candidates?  Are they even paying attention?  If they were, they’d know that there was exactly ONE voting person in this house who hasn’t voted.  And they might even find a little asterisk by my name declaring my propensity for screaming obscenities at idiotic robot phone machines.

It doesn’t matter who wins anyway.  You heard me.  IT….DOESN’T…MATTER!  Obama.  McCain.  Whatever.  It’s the president and the president can’t do squat without approval of congress, etc.  And he isn’t all that smart.  He might be smart enough to appoint a well-rounded and learned cabinet, but on his own, the prez ain’t got diddly.  Take Reagan for example.  I loved Reagan.  Now, he wasn’t an economic genius and his diplomacy skills weren’t on a super-human level.  But that man knew how to put together the finest experts, combine them into a cabinet, and then talk down his detractors until they walked away loving him.  Now THAT was a president.  Without that cabinet, though, none of the great things he accomplished would have been possible.

So, it doesn’t matter who becomes president, after all.  If he tries to do anything really worthwhile, he’ll be stopped by the senate.  Or congress.  Or even the American people.  I’m not entirely sure the American people are smart enough to elect their own leaders anymore.  Seriously.  We vote the same incompetent clods into office term after term, bitch about them, then don’t have the brains to vote them out.

And if you don’t believe that’s true, just consider the fact that they voted Bush in not once, but twice.

As for me, I’m just glad the whole mess is over.  I can go back to watching cat food commercials and my phone can stop ringing.  Maybe I can even see the theater signs now that the campaign signs will be gone.  Aside from that, nothing else will change.

And just because I hate the search engines almost as much as I hate the robot calls: Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin John McCain John McCain McPalin Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Barrack Obama Sarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCainSarah Palin John McCain

Chew on THAT, Google!

When I was a kid, the one sure way to know that the holidays were coming was to look in the TV Guide.  Once you saw “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” listed, you knew for sure the holiday season had started.  So, you planned your week around that one night.  Your best friend HAD to be there, as well as all your fringe friends.  Holiday specials are best watched in groups, especially considering the fact that your parents had no more understanding of their vast importance than they did of how to play hopscotch.  With friends gathered and snack foods unwrapped, you glued your eyes to the TV from the first tinkling notes of Beethoven to the last.

Nowadays, we have DVD and Blue Ray and holiday specials aren’t special anymore.  You can watch them any time you want…with friends or without.  They are no longer a reason for celebration, their impact lost and diluted by the frequency of their play on that silly DVD machine.

Baby Boomers like me have children, grandchildren, a second and third generation with whom to share that idyllic childhood moment.  Only problem is, they aren’t idyllic anymore and the kids flat out don’t care.

“Let’s watch Charlie Brown tonight,” you say to them.

“Charlie Brown?  Why?”  They blink at you like you’ve suddenly sprouted a second head.

“It’s almost Christmas.  Come on!  We HAVE to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas.”

“We can watch that any time.  Besides, it’s old.”

“No it’s not it’s…” and suddenly you realize that it IS old…and you are old…and that old holiday joy slips away.

In the end, you search Ebay frantically to see if you can find a newly mastered hi def version and you bribe those little stinkers with some hot cocoa and sticky candy to get them to watch with you.  You can’t watch it alone, ya know?  You’d look silly, a post-menopausal testament to round-screened TVs and post-war, pre-video childhood joy.

Even if they DO watch with you, it’s not special anymore.  It’s not the same and you finally accept that…along with the fact that YOU are not the same.  Like Charlie Brown, you’re older now, out of step with the times.  Your film is grainy and your audio sounds a bit weak and single-channel.

Maybe if Lucy got a tramp stamp.

Or Linus could trade his blanket for bling.

Maybe YOU could get a facelift and a little botox.

Maybe Schroeder needs to trade his piano for a nice synthesizer.

Naw!  Like Lucy, Linus and Schroeder, we’re classics.  There’s a reason classics survive all those years.  They’re perfect just the way they are and so are we.  A little rough around the edges, a little old-school, but filled with wisdom and warmth and a touch of irony.

Time to watch the Great Pumpkin again.  45th time for me.  Time to remember why it’s so important, so classic, so…well….special.  Time to make the kids remember too.

Have a Happy Halloween,

Trish

This year has seen some of the greatest financial failures since money was invented.  A lot of people are standing by, wondering how in the hell this all happened.  The rest are ducking and covering, hoping to avoid moral and legal prosecution.

Not to blow my own horn, but I predicted this whole mess way back in 2003.  I’m no financial guru, but I spent a decade in the Ginnie Mae market, in real estate, writing mortgage paper when interest rates were 18%.  I know a thing or two.

Following the tragedy of 9-11, the geniuses that run our economic behemoth here in the good ol’ US of A decided that it would be a good idea to drop interest rates, to forestall what they perceived was a huge economic threat.  And once done, it’s hard to get off that mortgage rate train.  It worked a bit…for awhile…and so the fed kept dropping rates.  Effectively, they forced people to buy houses?  How could you not?  Interests rates had never been that low in most our lifetimes.  It was a no-brainer.

What most people failed to realize, and what the geniuses failed to tell us, is that whatever goes down…must go up again.  Eventually, interest rates would go back up, the desperate grabbing up of real estate would stop, and we would be facing a crisis.

Back in the good old days, you couldn’t write a mortgage for more than 90% of a property’s value.  But mortgage brokers and bankers alike found ways around that, eager for their piece of the pie.  If someone wanted to borrow $200,000 on a house worth $180,000, the mortgage people just had the appraiser list the value as $220,000.  That way, the buyer was borrowing the real full value of a house, and the prices were driven up.  Doomed to collapse.

And once things started to slow, people stopped buying, and houses stopped leaping in value, the bankers were stuck.  It all defaults to an old financial term of OPM…Other People’s Money.  Banks were lending THEIR money, they were lending money based on loans they took out.  They were holding $14 billion in outstanding loans, but that was okay, cuz they had borrowed $30 billion from somebody else.  Except now, people were holding a $300,000 mortgage on a house that was only worth $200,000.  They couldn’t sell it for the value of the mortgage.  They had no equity.  They had nothing.  Families did the only thing they could do…they walked away.

And so, we saw the failure of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae…and their subsequent buy-out.  Wall street took a hit.  The government bailed them out and we pressed on.  Lehman failed, and AIG.  Lehman was gobbled up by Bank of America, AIG was bailed out.  Now, if you owned a corporation and it failed, would anyone step in and bail YOU out?  Not a chance.  But now, suddenly, the government regulators who hadn’t been paying attention, were paying keen attention.

Remember, this OUR money they’re bailed the banks out with.

It all boils down to greed.  All the financial geniuses who worked for those failed financial institutions drew MILLIONS of dollars in salaries over their tenure.  They don’t really care if the institution fails or not.  They’ve got their pie.

But what of the rest of us?  Well, we’ve got the FDIC, after all.  We’re safe.  Not true.  At the financial apex of this country, there has only ever been enough money in the FDIC to pay back  one third of the country’s depositors.  That means that if your bank goes down and you have $60,000 in that bank, you’ll get back $20,000.  Do you like the landscape I’ve painted here?  Thought not.

So, how do we fix it?  Obama says he will.  McCain says he will.  But if the financial gurus and regulators who have been running this store for so long don’t have a clue, how could they?

First of all, we have to strangle the hell out of mortgage markets.  Yes, I know, real estate is already in the crapper.  But think of this: if we go on writing paper, even good paper, based on money that has been borrowed from the borrowers, eventually the borrowers will fall into a giant circle-jerk of financial doom.  ALL the banks will fail.  Everywhere.  So, interest rates must be raised…and they will be.  There’s no way to stop it.  First of all, the failure of so many banks and the devaluation of Wall Street has made foreign investors and banks leery of us.  Remember now, that those are the people whom the federal government borrows money from.  You know that big deficit we’re always talking about?  Well, we owe that money to foreign banks and they quite literally own us.

So, if they’re leery, they’re going to charge the US government a higher rate to borrow their money.  They will have to charge banks more, and the fed will raise the rates.  How much? A  little at first, to test the waters.  After all, we don’t want to panic people.  Then a bit more and more and more…I think it will probably top out at 16% before it stabalizes, but it could be as high as 18%.

So, mortgage money is hard to find, the real estate prices will drop.  And drop…and finally end up back where they SHOULD be…where they were before the real estate boom that killed us.  Wall street has been over-valued for nearly 20 years.  There’s no way the dow should be around 10K.  It ought to be half of that.  And we will see a correction.  We’re seeing a bit of it now.  The safeguards installed on the computerized models that all run Wall Street, will kick in…but it won’t save the stock market.  It has to drop.  There’s a saying…when interest is high, stocks will die.  When interest is low, stocks will grow.  There’s no formula for that.  But it’s true.

The stock market has also been affected more and more by the price of oil.  If oil is high, stocks will die.  And Vice versa.  With those two things working against it — the price of oil WILL drop after the election — the stock market doesn’t have a chance.

How do you survive?  You don’t.  We’re all going to take a hit, and we’ll be taking it for about another 20 years as we fight to fix this, and to repay the enormous amounts of money that the US gov has borrowed to fund our current crisis, coupled with the Iraq debacle.  But if you’re smart, you’ll pull back every dime you’ve got, get it out of the stock market, and out of American banks.  Putting it in Switzerland is the safest place…but a Canadian bank is nearly as good.  Those two countries have financial systems which seem to be more stable and less affected by foreign trends.

Bank of America just bought up Lehman and a huge amount of debt along with it.  They are going to be struggling for a long while to fix that…if they can.  If not, they’ll be the next casualty.  There are more hits that the stock market has to dodge.

More than anything, we have to tighten regulation on our financial system.  And we have to go after those who put us in this situation to begin with.  Prosecute a few oil speculators and see how fast the price of gas drops.  Prosecute a few of those financial geniuses who talked us all into sub-prime mortgages and see if we don’t see a lot of mortgage brokers fired.  And for the love of God, force some of those CEOs and CFOs to cough up their billions to bail out the financial institutions that made them their fortunes.  or beat them with big sticks in the streets.  Either way is good.

So, hold onto your hats, boys and girls, the end is not nearly here.  And if you think we’re in the financial crapper now, you ain’t seen NOTHIN’ yet!

You heard it here first.

Crack Man came back today.  He was sporting a brand new toilet and even more butt crack than he had before.  He seems to be particularly proud of it.  At one point, I walked into the kitchen (adjacent to the offending bathroom).  Crack Man was putting the new wax seal onto the pipe and the toilet was sitting sort of halfway our the doorway.  No seat, of course.  But Crack Man was sitting on the toilet, leaning WAY over to install this seal.  I caught just a glimpse before I fled for my life, choking back my lunch with every step.  I warned the girls.  Don’t go into the kitchen.  It ain’t pretty.

For all of his flaws, Crack Man gave us a new toilet.  It’s a grand jobby too.  One of those low-water, turbo flush dealies.   I swear to God, when you flush it, you can feel the air whoosh out of the room.  The whole procedure is over in about 10 seconds and you’re on your way.  Thank you, Crack Man!

We even dodged the rotten floor bullet, so we didn’t need to call the carpenter to replace the sub floor.  We love the carpenter.  He’s hard-working, highly skilled, and he never once sported an ounce of butt-crack the whole month he worked on our roof.  He’s one of our favorite contractors.

That tragedy now behind us (and hopefully Crack Man, too) we can move on to other things.  School starts a week from Wednesday.  Supplies are bought, tuition will be paid, and I will send my first born off to her senior year.  I dread it.  I cry at ALL the graduations.  What in God’s name is going to get me through this one?  Maybe a sedative.  Maybe a prayer.  Maybe an entire box of tissues.  I must be strong.  At least I’ll still have two kids at home.  And she will come back to visit.  I’ll drive out to Columbia U and get her if I have to, but she WILL come visit, dammit!

So, senior year, here we come.  And Sophomore year for Bill.  Katie is still at home for another year.  But at least we’ll get to do all this with a working toilet and at least part of our sanity.

Laters!

So, our toilet broke.  This isn’t the first toilet we’ve had that’s broken, but this one broke in just about every way a toilet can break.  The handle broke.  No prob, because we attached a nice red cable tie to the flushy thing.  I use the term “flushy thing” because toilets no longer use ballcocks and the like.  It’s a float valve or some such.  Whatever.  The toilet also began to leak a good deal of water from underneath….or behind….somewhere.  It was quite a lot of water actually.

Things always break when you don’t have the money to fix them.  We have another bathroom, we could let it go except for the fact that David’s mother lives with us and she can’t keep walking up the stairs to get to the bathroom.  So, I call the plumber.

With the garage needing painting and the front porch trim needing painting and Katie’s room needing painting….I had to sit my butt around waiting for the plumber to show up.  He finally did…at 4:30.  A day wasted.  But it would be worth it if the toilet got fixed.

So, in walks the plumber.  While he’s still standing, he sports a solid four inches of butt crack.  I snicker and look away, continue to explain to him about the toilet as I lead him to the offending room.  He bends down.  I peak in to indicate exactly where the water is pooling and….BAM!  There’s pure unadulterated redneck ass staring me in the face.  Not a little of it.  A lot.  His draws (as they say here) have slipped all the way to his thighs.  I choke back my lunch and turn away.

Crack Man says there’s no problem.  He’ll git that wax seal put ri’ in dere.  Really, Crack Man?  Really?  The toilet is OLD.  Like I told Lude Lady on the phone (so named because she apparently downs a handful of Qualudes for lunch and thus talks about as fast as a snail under general anesthesia) the toilet needs replacing.

Crack Man stands up and shrugs.  “When will the toilet be here?” he asks.  “Soon as you git ‘er off’n da truck,” I tell him.  I’m fluent in redneck.  I can’t look the guy in the face.  He looks like he’s in the road company from Deliverance.  He proceeds to tell me that the office didn’t tell him he would be replacing the toilet, just the wax seal.  Of course they did.  Otherwise, how could I be expected to waste an entire day for no good reason.

Well, Crack Man will be back on Monday.  As a quick fix, dude shut off the toilet so it wouldn’t leak anymore.  *snork*  I turned it back on because, leak or not, Granny HAS to pee.

On an up note, my security system is fixed.  I can’t tell you how because I was sworn to secrecy, but it is fixed and it doesn’t beep me awake at 5:30 in the morning anymore.

I’ll let you know how Crack Man works out on Monday.  Anybody got any anti-crack glasses?  Perhaps a pair that have those pixelated portions like they use on TV when they don’t want you to see something?  Help me.  Please.