An Open Apology to My Neighbors

Hello, neighbors. Hope you all had a good holiday. You may have noticed a bunch of white stuff floating around the neighborhood lately. No, not the snow. This stuff:



See it there on the ground? Here it is a bit closer:



Yeah, that stuff. It's all over my lawn, and blowing downwind into yours as well. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was, until I noticed that one of the cushions on our porch furniture had been chewed open by some critter, and the stuffing had been pulled out. So I tossed the cushion, cleaned up the fluff on the lawn, and called it a day. That was a week or so again.

But the fluff keeps coming back. And I keep cleaning it up. And then it comes back again. And every time it comes back, it blows on down the street into your yard. Where the heck is it coming from?

Then yesterday I looked up and realized who had chewed through the cushion and where all the fluff was coming from. It's all up there:



See that white, fluffy-lined squirrel's nest? About 60 feet up in the tree? Yep, that's where it's coming from. I'm not about to climb 60 feet up a tree and do battle with a squirrel in the dead of winter over his warm nest lining. He can keep it. And I will try my best to pick it up as it continually blows back down. But in the meantime, my apologies for the inconvenience.

Then again, if it snows a lot, you may not even notice.

Deck The Halls...

A little musical interlude for everyone: Abra and Lily play a duet of Deck The Halls on the piano. Listen here.

Merry Christmas, all

The girls are in bed, dreaming of Santa. They left out treats for him, and carrots for all the reindeer except Blitzen. Blitzen gets a sprig of broccoli, since a few years back Santa left the girls a note saying that Blitzen was a big broccoli fan.

Anyway, presents are wrapped, stockings are hung, dog is walked (just before midnight, with sleigh bells ringing), and it's time for us to retire so Santa can come. And so the cats can mess around with all the wrapping on the presents while we sleep.

Have a wonderful Christmas, everyone.

Gingerbread Follies

Abra brought home a gingerbread house that she had made at school, and started working on some renovations. It was very cute, right down to the little marshmallow snowman and the shredded coconut that she used to make the snow around the house.

Healy was quite interested in helping Abra with her house:



Helpful cat. Raise your hand if you can see what's coming next.

In the middle of the night (3:11am, to be exact), we woke up to the ugly but common sound of a cat barfing up a hairball.

In the light of the morning, when we went in search of the hairball, we found it not to be a hairball but in fact a coconutball -- a small compactified blob of regurgitated shredded coconut. And the gingerbread house was... well... it wasn't pretty. Let's just hope the gingerbread family had full replacement coverage on their insurance.

Life with cats and kids.

My academic colleagues need a bit of help

So whenever I go visit another university to give a talk, one of the necessary stops is at their department administrator's desk to pick up the travel reimbursement forms. At that point, the person usually describes in incredible minutiae how to fill out these forms. I've always listened very politely to the description, the whole time thinking "It's a travel reimbursement form. You don't need to explain this. I've seen a million of these things, it's not exactly rocket science to fill them out."

And I would always fill them out, send them in, and get reimbursed. No problem.

I was amazed, however, at the response I got after filling in my reimbursement forms for a recent trip to another university. I got an email from their administrator which said:

Thanks for the great job filling out the report. You are my first speaker ... to complete it with no mistakes.

Really? REALLY? Come on, people, how hard is this? All these smart academic folks running around and none of you can properly fill out a travel reimbursement form? Yeesh.

The whole episode reminded me of this Far Side cartoon:

The cheapskate's guide to online Christmas shopping

OK, so it's time to do a little Christmas shopping, cheap-cheap-cheap style!

For about 5 years, I've been wanting a new jacket. Finally decided it was time (my current jacket which I've worn for at least 10 years now is not all that warm, the seams have frayed out, and just last night Tango peed on it while we were asleep). Since it's getting close to Christmas, I figure I can get the jacket and Brenna can give it to me for Christmas. I get the jacket I want, she doesn't have to shop, we all win.

We also need tights for the girls. Since even in the dead of winter they insist on wearing dresses, tights are a must. And as cheap as I am, even I understand the importance of actually getting decent quality tights -- the dime store ones wear out after 3 wearings...

So off to Land's End we go. This jacket looks pretty good:


It also came in a red/black combo which looked pretty nice, but that was way too close to Ohio State colors for me -- I imagine I will be wearing this jacket quite a bit in Michigan Stadium, and I don't want to be mistaken for some intellectually-challenged Ohio State "graduate". So blue and black it is.

Then off to the girl's tights section: white tights for each of them, plus a purple snowflake set of tights for Thalia and pink butterfly tights for Abra.

Hit "checkout" and the order comes out:

• Jacket: $99.50
  
• 4 pairs of tights: $38.00
• Tax: $8.12
• Shipping $13.95
• Total: $159.57

And now, time for the cheap magic!

• Jacket on sale: -$27.90
• Tights on sale: -$4.68
• Apply free shipping code: -$13.95
• Apply 3 Discover cashback bonus Land's End vouchers: -$79.57
• New total: $33.47

On top of that, by ordering via the ShopDiscover/Land'sEnd link, I should get another few bucks credited to my Cashback Bonus total next month, depending on how Discover does their convoluted accounting.

So we're looking at knocking a $160 order down to about $30. Boogie.

Update: when I fished my jacket out of the dryer just now after washing it as a result of the Tango-peeing incident, the zipper pull had broken off. So, yeah. Definitely looking forward to that new jacket....

The Misery Index

I have made a football misery index. Well, in principle it could be a happiness index, but right now it's not. It's definitely a misery index. So as most of you people reading this blog know, my happiness in the fall hinges largely on the success of the Washington Redskins and Michigan Wolverines. If my teams do well, I'm happy; if not, I'm crabby. Yes, this probably makes me a shallow and limited individual, but it is what it is.

This year has been rough for Michigan. Abysmally bad. No-bowl bad. Most-losses-ever bad. They've lost 5 in a row to Ohio State, and they've lost the last four games I've gone to. So naturally I've been cranky.

So I sat down to devise a way to measure my misery. Being a scientist and a numbers geek, this is what passes as an interesting diversion to me.

I started by simply averaging the winning percentages of the two teams. That's about as basic as you can get. But that doesn't quite capture things -- most importantly it doesn't quite capture expectation -- if a team has been consistently good, then a fall to 0.500 is bad; conversely, if a team has repeatedly stunk, winning half your games suddenly looks like a success.

So I revised it as follows: for each year, I calculate a running 10 year average and standard deviation of each team's record. Then I calculate the team's normalized deviation from the average, ie:

normdev = (win pct - average win pct)/stddev

For example, +1 is a one sigma good year, while -2 is a two sigma bad year (yes, yes, calculating a stddev from 10 data points which are almost certainly not distributed normally is a statistical no-no. Sue me. This isn't one of my scientific papers, this is a self-pity party.).

And then I average the two team's normalized deviation to get my net misery index.

So here it is, tabulated from 1987 (the year I got to Michigan) to today (click the image for a bigger view):

(if you think this is bad, you should see the other stupid charts that sit on my laptop...)

So what do we see?

1) THIS YEAR HAS BEEN MISERABLE! Yes, the misery index is at its lowest value in 21 years. I'm cranky. Michigan is off the charts (literally) bad, having a 6 sigma bad season.

2) The only time that things were close to this bad was in the early 90s, when the Redskins were suffering through back-to-back 3 and 4 win seasons. Ugh. That was awful, and got us the Heath Shuler era in Washington. The football gods truly hated the Redskins at that point.

3) I got out of that early 90s misery not by the Redskins becoming good again, but by them being consistently mediocre. "Consistently" being the key word here. After a while, you get used to being mediocre and the misery index isn't so bad. I would like that not to be Michigan's solution to the present misery issue.

4) There are good times there, too. In 1991, the Redskins won the Super Bowl and Michigan went to the Rose Bowl (and lost, of course. It was the next year that they won it). In 1997, Michigan had their undefeated season and won a share of the national championship.

5) Interestingly enough, the past few seasons Michigan and the Redskins have been see-sawing, keeping the misery index kind of flat. In 2005, Michigan had the (now superceded) "Year of Infinite Pain", but the Redskins returned to the playoffs for the first time in a while. The next year the Redskins collapsed again, while Michigan had a good season (with a lousy ending, but hey, it's Michigan). The year after that (i.e., last year), Michigan went through the Horror, and stumbled its way through through another down year, but the Redskins returned (briefly) to the playoffs.

6) Now, however, even though the Redskins are competing for a playoff spot, nothing can overcome Michigan's abysmal year. Sigh.

I hate football.

Thalia Reads

OK, this picture was just too darned cute to resist putting up. Thalia is reading, very carefully sounding out the words (wish I had an audio file to attach -- maybe next time) to her book "A Glob of Glue", while Wacko looks on.


Look at her little pink feet!

"Who's Bam-Bam?"

So today Brenna made the comment that Thalia was as strong as Bam-Bam. Thalia responded "Who's Bam-Bam?"

Upon hearing that, I immediately logged into the library's website and placed a reserve on a DVD of the first season of The Flintstones. The girls will watch every minute of that DVD.

Cultural illiteracy like that will not stand in my household.

Laundry

The concept of laundry sure has changed for me over the past two years.

As a bachelor, laundry was one of the things where you dumped clothes down the laundry chute, and then went down to the basement to do one load of laundry each week. Pretty simple stuff -- add laundry detergent, run washer, throw in dryer, fold, put away. Done for the week.

Now, oh my gosh. The whole weekend is spent on laundry -- Saturday and Sunday, full day job. And evidently there's this concept of sorting loads that needs to be done (to her credit, Brenna does not ask me to do this; however, I notice that the dirty laundry magically shows up in separate piles in the basement). There's pretreatment to be done on the I-really-don't-want-to-know-where-this-came-from-and-what-it-is stains on the girls' shirts. Some things have to be washed in hot, some in cold (this is actually important, as the hot water kills dust mites that give Thalia allergy issues). Dryer sheets have also suddenly become part of the process.

It's all very confusing to me. I think I need one of these things in the basement:


But what really has thrown me off stride is the folding and sorting. First of all, everytime I fold the underwear, and try to figure out whose is whose, I nervously look over my shoulder, sure that I'm about to be busted by the cops for pedophilia or lewd behavior or something like that for staring at little girls' underwear. (The first time I did this, it was in front of the living room picture window -- never again.) And then, well, I can't tell the difference half the time between Abra's clothes and Thalia's clothes, particularly since many of Thalia's clothes used to be Abra's clothes. So I'm constantly hearing "Daddy, why is Thalia's shirt in my drawer?" I solved this problem, though: now I just stack all their clean laundry folded but unsorted on their beds and say "Put it away, girls!"

Now if only I could get them to turn their tights right-side-out before throwing them down the laundry chute, I'd be in business....

Explaining the Electoral College

So on election night, I was trying to explain to Abra how the election results worked. At first she thought we would turn on the TV and they would announce immediately who had won. So I tried to explain to her that you win states, and that you get points for each state you win, and that the score would be changing throughout the night until somebody won.

She said to me "Oh you mean it's like a football game? Except not as important?"

That's my girl.

Halloween 2008

Halloween was low key this year. Abra went off to have a trick-or-treat sleepover at a friend's house, so it was just Thalia on the candy circuit tonight. Here she is in her pixie costume, ready to go.

Lily came over, which was nice since Abra was missing in action. Thalia and Lily posed for a minute...

...and then off they went, dashing down the street in search of CANDY!


After an hour or so of looting and pillaging the neighborhood (during which Thalia learned that if you are trick-or-treating at a house that displays a University of Michigan flag, when you say "Go Blue!" you get an extra handful of candy) we came back home when the pumpkin candy bag was too overloaded for Thalia to carry any more. At that point it was dark and we lit the pumpkins.


And then Thalia got to hand out the candy... with a little help from Mom.

Happy Halloween, all! I'll post a picture of Abra in her witch costume when she comes home in the morning....

Update: OK, here's the witch:

David Byrne - Then and Now

October 1983: I'm a college freshman. A friend of mine says that he's getting tickets for the Talking Heads show, do I want to go? I've heard a few songs, they sounded good, so sure. Off we go to Long Beach Arena, and... wow.



(from Jonathan Demme's movie Stop Making Sense)

I'm speechless after the show-- still one of the most amazing, fun, mind-opening shows I've ever seen. I'd never really heard music like that before, such a mix of rhythm, beat, and styles. It was so intricate and complex, and yet so wild and fun, and I was instantly and forever a Talking Heads fan.

October 2008: I'm a college professor. A friend of mine says that he's interested in getting tickets to a David Byrne show, do I want to go? I say probably not, sounds like fun, but too expensive and not sure I can make it up to Ann Arbor in time. He ignores my response and gets them anyway. Off we go to the Michigan Theater, and... wow.



(from a handheld camera -- not mine! -- somewhere in the Michigan Theater)


Where to start? First, the seats were spectacular: first row, we were leaning on the stage when we weren't dancing in the aisle. Watching Byrne play up close was a lot of fun -- I always had seen him through his videos and his onstage performances as an enigmatic persona, very different and strange. But he was very relaxed and chatty this night, laughing, interacting with the audience, he seemed like a guy who was having a lot of fun with the music.

And there was so much to watch. The show combined music and dance -- he had three dancers on stage much of the time, and three singers who were almost always in motion as well. The motion and music flowed together on stage much the same way as the Heads worked in that concert 25 years ago.

He played a lot of Talking Heads -- essentially the whole first side of Remain in Light. Here's the setlist, in fact. Crosseyed and Painless remains one of my all-time favorite Heads songs, and it was such a treat to see it again live. But it wasn't just Heads stuff, he did a number of songs from his work with Brian Eno as well, in particular Strange Overtones flowed beautifully throughout the concert hall.

So twenty five years has passed. I'm older and a heavier. David Byrne is older and white haired. The concert starts early for all us geezers. But other than that, it's every bit as intense and fun as it was back then. It's a spectacular show -- if the tour comes near you, go see it. You won't be sorry. And, Mark, thanks a million for ignoring me and getting the tickets anyway even after I said no...

Newspaper No More

So today I made a very momentous decision: I canceled my subscription to our morning newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I've always been a newspaper buff. I love waking up in the morning -- particularly on a Sunday morning -- getting the paper, and reading it while I drink my coffee. I grew up reading the Washington Post, the paper that will always set the standard in my opinion.

When I was a kid, I always started with the comics. Then when I got older, it was always the sports page to start. Eventually, I guess I matured enough that I moved on to starting with the front page, and then finally I started worrying about economics and investments, and that's when I moved to beginning my newspaper reading with the business section.

Even when newspapers put all their content on the internet, I still maintained my print subscription. Call me an old fogey, but I still read better (and enjoy reading much more) when I have a printed copy in front of me. I love the smell of newspaper, the texture of the newsprint, and just the act of reading the paper is a comforting ritual for me.

But now, over the past year or two, I've noticed something: I read less and less of it. In fact, I'm back to starting with reading the comics, and not much else.

So what happened? Two things, really.

The first is probably the obvious one: the Internet. As a national and international news vehicle, the daily newspaper is dead -- I get that news much faster, and from a much broader range of sources, using the Internet. So most of what I see in the morning paper is stuff that I knew the night before.

Still, though, there's much more to a newspaper than just breaking news. There's in-depth reporting in a way that just doesn't happen on TV, and again I grew up with a newspaper that (to this child of the 70s, anyway) defined investigative newspaper journalism.

And this brings me to the second reason I'm dropping the Plain Dealer: most of its in-depth national and international stories have the following by-lines: "The Washington Post", "The Los Angeles Times", etc. In other words, it's a reprint service, reprinting stories that I read several days or even a week earlier on the website of the Post or Times. Who needs that?

So I would open up the Plain Dealer, and immediately throw away 90% of it. What's the 10% that's left over? Comics, local news, and coupons. Do I need those?

Local news: yes, this is important. But the Plain Dealer has a website, and I can get all the news there.

Coupons: as cheap as I am, coupons are less and less useful. The coupons are generally for overpriced name brand items, so why don't I just skip them and buy store brand, which is just fine by me? Lately, I manage to find maybe $1-$2 worth of usable coupons in the Sunday paper. Spending $20/mo to get $6 in coupons is a losing proposition.

Comics: Those also are almost all online. Yes, they come out a few weeks or a month after the printed version, but after a month away from the newspaper, the ones online will be new to me every day.

Anyway, after wondering for a while whether or not I really need a subscription, this month the Plain Dealer upped their subscription price by about 25% and that was the final straw. So long, guys. It's been a nice run.

So what will I miss?

• the plastic bag it was delivered in: that made a great poop bag for dog walks
• the newspaper itself, which was useful for putting down next to the cat litterboxes
• the crossword puzzle. Crossword puzzles are meant to be done on newspaper stock. It's not the same printing them out on my printer. I'll survive, but I'll miss the newspaper's texture.

So throw out its use as a barrier against pet waste, and all I've got left to cling to is the way newsprint absorbs ink while doing the crossword. And that wasn't enough. So there you have it, an end of an era.

I am a bit worried that my mom's gonna yell at me for doing this, though.

Sisters

Abra is helping Thalia sound out the words in her library book. This was wonderful to listen to.

All the News that's Fit to Print...

OK, it's been a long time since I've updated, so here's a compendium of news.

It's certainly election season. Living in good old democratic Cleveland Heights, the yards around us are filled with Obama signs. But while walking Wacko a few weeks ago, I suddenly saw a McCain/Palin sign on a neighbor's yard. As we walked past it, Wacko looked at it, looked up at me, looked back at the sign, and then squatted right in front of it and took a big old dump. Good Boy!

Meanwhile, last week our ballots came in the mail. I filled mine out (getting a little liquored up first made it more interesting) and sent it back in, so I'm done with the election. Next week for all I care, Obama can be caught in bed with David Bowie, a baggie full of cocaine, and naked pictures of Jack Abramoff and Osama bin Laden, and he's still got my vote. Woo, early voting rocks!

But it has been a rough few weeks. Two weeks ago, I managed to nearly break my toe when it impacted a wall rather violently (this was about 16 seconds after the Redskins gave up a punt return touchdown to the Eagles, but I deny any evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two). After a week of hobbling around on it, and wondering if it actually was broken, it was starting to get better. But then I managed to drop a large freestanding freezer on the very same toe (well, in truth, Richard helped me drop the freezer!), and was sent back to square one of the healing process. I'm 90% sure it isn't broken, although I'm still kind of hobbling around on it.

Thalia's had a good week, though. She graduated to a new carseat -- she's outgrown the toddler carseat she's had for a while and is now in a brand new kid's booster seat. I drew the line at the pink seat with hearts on it, so we got her a gray carseat -- two in fact, one for each car. She was so excited by the new seat, and babbled away about it the whole time we drove to ballet the other night. Then she realized that she couldn't easily pull out the built-in cupholder and asked me if we could get her a new one. The disappointment of my "no" answer was tempered by...

...her reading her very first book! Yes, I got the book "Nell Gets a Pet" from the library last week (at the same time I got the "Grindhouse" DVD -- the librarian gave me a weird look about the juxtaposition of materials when I checked out), and last night Thalia climbed up into my lap and read the book to me. She needed help with a few words, but she sounded out many of the words she didn't know, and she read it from beginning to end (all 12 pages, heh). I was very proud of her. She later asked if she could go to work with me and read it to my students, and I told her that they would probably like that better than the usual class...

What else? Oh yeah, we are keeping our fingers crossed that we may have finally sold Brenna's house. We accepted an offer, it's passed inspection, and the buyers have had the final loan paperwork approved (I didn't think ANY loans were being approved). We're on schedule to close by the end of the month, and I'm just holding my breath waiting for those papers to finally be signed. Keep your fingers crossed. And if you are wondering, yes, we're taking a loss. *sigh*

We (well, Brenna) took care of Luca, the 3 month old neighbor baby, for an hour or so the other evening. The girls were very excited to have a little baby to play with... at first. Then Luca went on a crying fit, which totally freaked Thalia out. She didn't like that at all and wanted to take him back to his parents. Abra weathered it with a bit more patience. But later that night, over dinner, Abra commented about how loudly Luca cried, and asked me if that was why I waited until she and Thalia had gotten a little more grown up before I asked Brenna to marry me. I chose not to answer.

And finally, the HDTV went on the fritz last week -- wouldn't turn on. This happening during football season is a highest-threat-level alert in our house. The problem turned out to be the lamp, which needed replacing ($170! grumble, grumble). Now, those lamps are rated to last 6-8,000 hours, but a very generous estimate says this one only lasted about 3,000 hours. Gee, thanks Toshiba, you bums. So while we waited for the new lamp to be shipped, we used the TV that Mark and I bought 20 years ago when we were grad students, and it is still going strong. New technology is fancy and nice, but clearly the staying power needs improvement...

OK, that's all the news that's fit to print. For now, anyway.

Jigsaw Puzzle

A good friend told me today that she had gone out and bought Beggar's Banquet, one of my all-time favorite albums.

I instantly tossed it onto the player, and was reminded again about the perfect lyrics spelled out in Jigsaw Puzzle:

Me, I'm waiting so patiently
Lying on the floor
I'm just trying to do my jigsaw puzzle
Before it rains any more...

What life is, simply expressed, absolutely correct.

Readers

So this is a great sight to see:


Abra is lying on the couch, quietly reading a book (Junie B. Jones, First Grader). She's doing very well with her reading, and was very excited this morning to go to the library and get a Junie B book (they read them in school as well).

And Thalia, meanwhile, has suddenly taken off and started sounding out words. The age spread is perfect -- the spelling words that Abra brings home from school are about the right complexity for Thalia to learn to read them. So we can study together, Thalia on her reading and Abra on her spelling.

I'm not quite sure what triggered Thalia's reading -- it really started in earnest this past month, and I'm not sure if it's that she's just at the right age to start, or if it's because she's started preschool. Probably some of both. But she's exceedingly cute -- when she sounds out a word and "gets it", she jumps up and down and claps her hands.

We still read the girls stories each night, of course (we just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), but I often ask Abra to read the first few paragraphs before I take over, and Thalia will often interrupt and point to words that she can read. This reading stuff is really clicking for both of them...

Bailout, Revisited

OK, I've cooled off. Kind of.

So the Bailout post was clearly written in an irate moment. Do I really believe we should "let Rome burn?" *sigh* No. Obviously we can't do that.

It's kind of like when your stupid co-worker bungles a big assignment and leaves you holding the bag. You come home, and fantasize about all the things you could do to get back at them, all the things you'd really like to do to see them really get whacked for screwing you over like this. And then, you wake up the next morning, go to the office, take a deep breath, and try and fix things.

And that's where we are now. We've got to fix this thing. I don't know how, but I've been convinced by listening to enough people who know a lot more about economics than I ever will that some form of the bailout has to happen, or we will be in really, really bad shape.

So go fix it. Take my money. Give it to the irresponsible people who took on credit they couldn't afford, and to the greedy banks that bought those worthless loans. Clean up this mess. And then I'll start rebuilding my savings. And when you people screw up yet again, I'll still be here and you can come back for more. And you will -- mark my words. When you reward irresponsibility, you just ensure it will happen again.

*sigh*

Bailout

OK, I like to keep this blog lighthearted. But I'm just really really angry right now. So here's a warning:

If you don't like angry sanctimonious rants, leave now.
If you don't like potty words, leave now.
If you're just looking for cute pictures of the kids, leave now.

You're still here? OK, well, you've been warned.

So I'm really, really getting pissed about this whole financial bailout thing. I keep hearing "It's not just one thing that went wrong, there's plenty of blame to go around."

Well, you know what? That's bullshit. The blame doesn't go all around, and it certainly doesn't come here.

I didn't buy a house I couldn't afford.
I didn't take on revolving credit.
I didn't take out equity from my house for luxuries.
I didn't make stupid leveraged investments in narrow high-risk sectors to squeeze out an extra 3% in return.

People tease me about being cheap. Hell, I tease me about being cheap. But you know what being cheap has done? It's made it so that we can make our mortgage payments -- on both houses, including the one we can't sell because the housing market is so fucked up. It's made it so that we can pay the credit card bills IN FULL every month, so that we don't get deep into debt. It's made it so that we can save some for retirement, so that we won't have to live off our children when we get old -- I hope. And it's made it so that on top of all that we can save a little bit for college for the girls.

So what have we given up? Vacations, for one -- haven't been on one in years. I'd like to -- it would be nice to finally have a honeymoon, but not when we've got these expenses. Stuff, for another. The last time I bought a "toy" was in 2005, when I bought the HDTV. We don't have iPods, or fancy cellphones. We haven't decorated the house -- the appliances are old, the wallpaper's peeling, but everything is functional. The cars are beat up, but they run. There's no need to fix the cosmetic stuff. And there's no need to buy a flashy new car. I take my lunch to work, or just skip lunch. We buy generic. I pick up pennies I see on the sidewalk. What we can't afford, we do without.

Do I like it like this? Honestly, does it matter whether or not I like it? The important thing is that we live within our means. Thankfully, I've got a wife who fully agrees with this approach.

And because of all this, we've saved, we're not in debt, and we're not being foreclosed upon. Our reward? Bailing out the rest of the stupid motherfuckers in this country who didn't manage their finances responsibly.

Yeah you know what? I don't care that the banker told you you could refinance down the road. Buying more house than you can afford is stupid and reckless. Not knowing what you can afford is stupid and reckless.

I don't care that the credit card offered you a low interest rate. Taking on credit to pay for toys is stupid and reckless.

I don't care about what you "want". Yeah, I want things too. But a huge problem with society today is the inability to differentiate between "wants" and "needs". An HDTV is a luxury. A cell phone is a luxury. Yes, it really is. Eating out is a luxury. And there is no right to own a home. If you can't afford to buy, rent.

So I don't want to hear about "Main Street" being screwed by Wall Street. Main Street took out the loans and took on the credit. Main Street bought into this culture of consumerism and pretended they had money they didn't have.

So Main Street, eat it. You lived high off the hog off someone else's money, now you have to pay the bill. Don't lay it on me.

And of course, Wall Street is a bunch of crooks, too. They closed their eyes to the obviously fabricated loan applications. No, I take that back. They fabricated the applications themselves. They made stupid investments in sub-prime mortgages because they were greedy, and made even stupider investments to cover their losses on the stupid investments. They created and flourished in this ponzi scheme of debt. They pushed the culture of debt and convinced people that they needed more, more, and more. And it worked for a while, until finally people started noticing that, you know, they didn't actually HAVE that money that they'd been spending. And so that train just came crashing to a halt.

So Wall Street, eat it. You took the profits in years past, now you can take the loss. Don't lay it on me.

And politicos, left and right? Just stifle it. This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue. Both political sides closed their eyes to this problem, and indeed both sides made it worse. Sure you can point at one specific or another that one side did, or the other didn't do. But the bottom line is that this is a bipartisan fuckup of gigantuan proportions. Both sides have been in the pockets of corporate America. So spare me the political talk -- I'm just not buying it. Obama's not going to get us out of this, and neither is McCain.

This bailout nonsense is just that -- nonsense. I'm not inclined to bail out the companies that made this mess. Let them fail. Sure it would do awful things to the economy, but you know what? WE'RE ALREADY SCREWED. Yes, it could get worse. But I've seen nothing that makes me believe that this bailout is going to make things better. It's a band-aid. A huge, expensive flimsy band-aid that rewards the ones who fucked it all up to begin with.

And I'm not inclined to bailout the homeowners who are losing their houses, either. You chose to take on the mortgage that you couldn't afford. Don't come crying to me.

So those of us who lived within our means, didn't mismanage our finances, tried to actually save something for the future -- we're the ones who are now going to be called on to prop up the greedily criminal banks and investment houses, and to cover the mortgage payments of the irresponsible, ignorant people living in bigger houses than ours.

This isn't about rich vs poor, about haves vs have nots. It's about greed and irresponsibility, and the rest of us paying for it.

SCREW. THAT.

No bailout. Let Rome burn.