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Pennsylvania's tourist bureau made these ads to promote cycle touring:
It's like The Office of cycling, and I'm pretty sure the sidekick is another Schrute cousin. The people who made it have watched a lot of cycling interviews. I've seen guys just like these in more than a few documentaries.

Part 2 is here.

OK, they're not technically public service announcements, but they're close enough.

Food aid, emergency tents, and inflatable hospitals may be a short short term priority for Haiti, but will never be the basis for rebuilding the country. You need a functional economy for that.

One thing that the government could do to help that along is to drop the trade restrictions on sugar imported from Haiti. Without the barriers imposed by government, Haitian farmers would have a viable export market for sugar, which would generate income to pay for domestic and imported supplies and capital goods.

This would have the added benefit for US consumers in lower prices for sugar, as well as less of the Florida everglades used for marginal sugar production.

But that's pitting Haitian farmers, US consumers and environmentalists against the major US sugar and corn syrup producers who benefit from the tariffs. Guess who will win...

Rebecca Solomon, a 22 year old student was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.

After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.

A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.

Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on - the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

She remembers his words: "Where did you get it?"

Two thoughts came to her in a jumble: A terrorist was using her to sneak bomb-detonating materials on the plane. Or a drug dealer had made her an unwitting mule, planting coke or some other trouble in her bag while she wasn't looking.

She'd left her carry-on by her feet as she handed her license and boarding pass to a security agent at the beginning of the line.

Answer truthfully, the TSA worker informed her, and everything will be OK.

Solomon, 5-foot-3 and traveling alone, looked up at the man in the black shirt and fought back tears.

Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn't.

Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.

Just kidding, he said. He waved the baggie. It was his.


Man, those TSA guys love jokes, so much that they didn't fire the guy until public pressure demanded it.

Unlike this guy who asked an inappropriate question to a tinstar and got arrested for it.

Thank God Bush isn't President anymore, when members of his administration would tell people to shut the fuck up about civil rights and such. Things like this:

[The Director of National Intelligence] also said criteria for adding people to the government's "no fly" list was too legalistic and rigid. And he said that in recent years there has been pressure to shrink rather than expand the list because of a cascade of complaints from people getting "hassled" by authorities. "Why are you searching grandmothers?" was a too-common refrain, he said.

"Shame on us for giving in to that pressure," he said.

or that we should just round up people we don't like and send them off to the testicle electrocution department, instead of using due process habeas corpus and other bullshit:

[The DNI] suggested the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, also known as HIG, should have questioned the Nigerian airline bomb incident suspect before any decisions were made on whether to place him in the civilian court system.

But all that changed a year ago today, when Obama swept the evil out of DC...
Wait, what?
That was Obama's Director of National Intelligence, just this morning?

Oh, well, never mind. Happy Anniversary to "Change"

When the government and banks are trying to convince you to do something because it's "responsible" you can bet that it's a bad deal for you.

Faced with people defaulting on their mortgages because it's the sensible thing to do financially, mortgage bankers and the Obama administration are telling people to do the "responsible" thing and pay their mortgage, even if the house backing it will likely be a loss for the rest of the borrower's life.

Doing the "responsible" thing may make sense if the lender was your friend, or George Bailey from Bailey Building and Loan saved you from the clutches of Mr. Potter. But I'd bet that your experience was something like mine, where your mortgage was originated by one company, then you got a letter telling you that another bank was servicing the mortgage (collecting payments and making tax and insurance payments). The loan was sold to people unknown, maybe another bank, a group of investors, or chopped up into Mortgage Backed Securities. Not exactly a personal relationship.

Moreover, as the NY Times piece above notes, banks themselves have been walking away from properties that they don't expect to generate any returns.

Homeowners should give up emotional attachments to their houses (lenders like to use the term "homes" instead of "houses" emphasize the emotional attachment to an object), and look at the economics of homeownership. You have to act as though you are a landlord to yourself.
Calculate the potential capital gains from eventually selling the house minus the total cost of paying the mortgage and the associated costs of owning a house. Then calculate what you'd have after of renting and and investing any savings by renting versus owning (e.g. renter's insurance is cheaper than homeowner's insurance, the landlord is responsible for repairs). If you expect to wind up with more by renting, then walk away from the mortgage.

If you're paying a mortgage leaves you unable to move, and worse off than renting, the house owns you. There's no reason to be stuck in that situation because a banker wants you to be "responsible."

It's strange that the Obama administration is echoing the bankers exhortation. Unless there is a wave of defaults, lenders have little incentive to negotiate loan modifications with borrowers, a goal Obama's stated several times.

Also, judges have begun throwing out foreclosures when the "lenders" have been unable to prove that they legally own the notes. To some extent, it seems like losing on a technicality. I'd like to think that a judge wouldn't allow a foreclosure if the borrower mailed the payment to the wrong address at the bank, and it seem crazy to lose hundreds of thousands on some paperwork. On the other hand, there is a whole industry of lawyers and clerks whose only job is file the paperwork. My company's major service is clearing and custody of securities, and even a minor oversight that leads to legal liability is a career limiting (or ending) move. So I don't have much sympathy for the banks.

Edit: Apparently I'm not alone in having little sympathy for the firms that failed to properly document their claim to mortgage notes. Yves Smith at naked capitalism, who also worked in the securities industry, made many of the same points about executing the process as the most important job in originating securities.

Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby and Davey and Goliath died yesterday.


There was some interesting trivia in the Reuters obit:

Clokey... grew up making mud figures on his grandparents' Michigan farm, the Los Angeles Times said, citing his son Joseph. "He always had this in him," Joseph told the Times.
...
Clokey has said he based Gumby's sloping head and hair on a picture of his father, who died in a car accident when the filmmaker was 8 years old.

Clokey was later adopted by music teacher and composer Joseph W. Clokey, who taught him the arts and took his new son on adventures in Mexico and Canada.

Joseph Clokey told the Times that those journeys and Clokey's love of fossil hunting helped inspire Gumby's own adventures.

Eddie Murphy brought a surge in Gumby's popularity in the 1980s with his send-up of the character on "Saturday Night Live" as a cigar-smoking show business primadonna.

Clokey said he enjoyed Murphy's profane Gumby.

"Gumby can laugh at himself," Clokey told the Tribune.

Murphy's Gumby brought new toy sales and eventually led to a new syndicated series starting in 1988.

It was only then that Clokey started seeing serious financial returns on his creation.

"It took 40 years," he said.

Check out this video on Detroit, the UAW, and decades of federal "support"


And this story from the NY Times. It's about how the UAW is working to "save" GM
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/business/06uaw.html
Mentioned in a "let bygones be bygones" way is that the UAW workers actively tried to destroy the cars on the line, and were largely responsible for the crappy reputation of GM products.
United Automobile Workers' leaders in Lordstown, Detroit and other cities where clashes with management were once common said they have since decided that their only chance to survive in a global economy is to work with, not against, their employers.
Completely unmentioned is that the UAW is now part-owner of GM. Do you think that might have something to do with the turnaround of UAW attitude?

Driving out to Lancaster, mizerychick and I pass a rather decrepit water park. It looks like a place Scooby & the gang would explore and find a guy in a rubber mask scaring visitors.
Seriously, check out an overhead view.

Driving past it this year, we saw that it was up for sale. We thought we should buy it and rename it "Traction Park." We also found that it has a website.


Now I'm no marketing expert, but I think the last thing you'd want on the top of a page for a waterpark is a local weather link with an animated lightning bolt on it.

a guy stops purse thieves on a scooter by hurling a bike at them.

that you see what you really wanted to get from Santa.
Now I realize that I really wanted was this hilarious paining

It's like the illustrated guide to the Bible-thumping fringe of the Republican Party.
I would provide comments on it, but clicking on the link above gives you a guide to all of the figures on it.

However, you can play "Where's Waldo" with it... Try to find someone with a yarmulke on it.

Yeah, NYC has the most famous Christmas tree, but only NJ can proudly claim a Christmas tree made from the flare stack of an oil refinery.

If you had gone down to the River Lot at Stevens to get your car (or, more likely, went down to the River lot to examine the hole in the pier where your car used to be) you probably noticed train tracks in River Street (now Sinatra Drive). I had always figured these were old streetcar tracks, but they are actually freight tracks.
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Back in July, I posted about an off-duty firefighter who shot a cyclist, because the firefighter thought the cyclist was endangering his child by riding on a road.

The charges were reduced by a grand jury to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, and he recently pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 120 days in jail anger management classes, another 12-24 months of a suspended sentence, and ordered to pay $1,200 in restitution. The fire department fired him after he was indicted.

State sentencing guidelines are 20-39 months in prison, but the judge found that mitigating factors included that he served in the military and was a fireman. One would think that a military veteran would understand the lethal power of a firearm, and would have had enough practice with one to not hit someone with a "warning shot" as he claimed.

On the same day, a man was sentenced to 14 years and a $200,000 fine for selling LSD at a concert in Asheville. No one claimed to be injured by the substances he sold. The seller apparently was not a fireman or military veteran.

Back in June, the story of 2 kids in Connecticut killed in a traffic accident made some headlines, because the other car was a police cruiser, and the kids' car was so severely mangled.

After Freedom of Information requests and threats of lawsuits, the video was finally released.

The police officer was driving an estimated 94 MPH on a 40 MPH road without lights or siren (and full throttle up to 0.6sec before impact), and wasn't responding to a call. The victims' lawyer contends that the officer was racing with the probationary officer driving the cruiser that recorded the collision.

The police officer has been charged with two counts of second-degree manslaughter. The host of the party the kids had attended has been charged with serving alcohol to minors. The officer faces a year in prison if convicted; the host of the party faces 18 months.

The Times had a piece today on various services you can buy to avoid getting personal information stolen while shopping online.

A few of them seem like they have some features beyond what you can do yourself, like seeing if your info shows up on sites that criminals use to trade IDs. OTOH, some of them seem to present as much risk as they remove, like Shop Shield that consolidates all of your online accounts in a juicy target.

Instead of a service like Shop Shield, you can avoid keyloggers yourself. Keep your name & shipping address on your address book program or in a text file. When you need to fill out a form, you can cut & paste them into the forms with the right-click menu & avoid using the keyboard at all.

Obviously, you can't do the same with credit card #s, but your bank may offer disposable numbers through a web app.

Be thankful that "they don't make them like they used to"

check out what happens to the passenger compartments in the 1959 and 2009 (0:45 to 1:15 on the video)

Bless you, automotive engineers, for what you've done to protect passengers in lighter and lighter cars. Now get to work on figuring out how to protect people outside of the cars in collisions.

mizerychick's mother wants to give her brother a new bike for Christmas. He lives in Philly, so a shiny new bike will attract more attention than is good for keeping it. I'd rather restore an older bike and make it as nondescript as possible.

Does anyone have an old bike in their garage? Ideally, I'm looking for an 1980s-era mountain bike or older road bike. I really don't know enough about fixing suspension forks or checking aluminum frames to handle anything newer.

We'll use eBay to figure out what it's worth.

So now, were up to 14 people indicted for insider trading related to the Galleon hedge fund.

Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Friedman, made millions of dollars by buying Goldman Sachs stock after the bailout of AIG was ordered (by Friedman and Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner) but before it was publicly known how much of that bailout would flow through to Goldman Sachs.

So Friedman is going to face trial for insider trading, right? Of course not, prosecutions are for people without connections. He resigned as Chairman of the NY FRB, and that was it.

Matt Taibbi has the sordid story, including how Goldman made a bigger profit by engineering AIG into a government bailout, here.

From the set of Red Dawn

A bubble-blowing "tailpipe" for your bike that spreads seeds, too.

It's just a design experiment, though.