How the Credit Crunch Affects Britain

HT: GN

Mixing the Old and the New: Birkett's Radio Shop, Lincolnshire

The shop does not have email because:

he replied in all seriousness 'what is wrong with morse code?'.

From an American Blog: What The Hell Just Happened In Canada?

What The Hell Just Happened In Canada?

The three opposition parties look like they may form a coalition government and oust the conservatives. Frum thinks whoever wins is committing political suicide.

HT: AS

Calling the Pirates

He dialled the number. A pirate answered. "I'm sorry," he barked in Somali, "the boss pirate is sleeping. He was very busy last night keeping watch for possible attackers, night time, you know, is the busiest time for us. Call back in two hours."

From the Beeb.

Florence Nightingale Graphing Deaths from the Crimean War

So as to explain the horror to Queen Victoria. Article here.

A Recipe During the Seige of Leningrad

Soup from pets and domesticated animals
Meat is ranked by taste in the following order: dog, guinea pig, cat, rat. Gut the carcass, wash well and place in cold water. Add salt. Cook for one to three hours. For aroma: bay leaf, pepper, any sort of herbs, and, if available, grain.


Harper's story here, but you gotta pay.

Retro-Decrypting

Here's a modern take on the decryption of a World War II coded transmission that just happened to have sprung from the Time Life picture archive. The internet, really, is an amazing thing, and not just for porn.

From Today's Onion????

WASHINGTON—President Bush collapsed in the Oval Office after spontaneously expelling a 3-pound kidney stone from his bladder, sources reported Tuesday. According to witnesses, the president was attending his daily Iraq War briefing when he suddenly began shrieking loudly and clutching his abdomen, a mixture of blood and urine pooling rapidly around his feet. Bush was able to maintain consciousness through more than 20 minutes of excruciating pain, even after the jagged, grapefruit-sized crystal aggregation shredded his urethra and dropped from his left pant leg, finally rolling to a stop on the presidential seal in the middle of the Oval Office carpet. Bush is resting comfortably at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Real Estate Downfall

This is the fourth time I have seen this clip with 4 different set of subtitles. The first was from the German, the second was in regard to Hitler losing his Xbox live privileges, the next concerned Hilary, and now this. Bloody brilliant!!!

Watch out for Bug Eyed Monsters

BBC ARCHIVE
WRITTEN DOCUMENT 1962

Page 3 of 3

[Continued from previous page]


Title: Pictures Don't Lie
by Datherine Maclean [sic - this should be Kathleen Maclean]
Published Best SF by Faber & Faber Copyright 1951 by World Editions Inc.

Synopsis: Contact has been established with intelligent beings from another
world, who are kindly disposed towards the inhabitants of Earth and are about
to make a landing in a space ship. All communications have been achieved by
means of speeding up video and audio signals currently in existence on Earth
and transmitting them as very short pulses. (This is quite possible and
logical). Using this communication plus a translating machine, the space ship
is guided to its destination, reports a landing on the airfield, and then
immediately runs into trouble. It is clearly landing in a swamp full of
fantastic monsters, the atmosphere of the Earth is to the inhabitants of the
space ship, opaque; furthermore, despite messages and the assistance of
direction finding equipment, it would appear impossible for the ship to have
landed since it is nowhere in sight. Only then does the realisation dawn upon
Earth that the speeded up messages which are decodable by the aliens, do in
fact represent their natural pace of living. It means therefore that their size
is microscopic. They have indeed landed on the airfield and at the moment they
are sinking through and dying in the rapidly drying puddle out on the tarmac.

The whole thing is absolutely possible and logical.


Title: No Woman Born
by C.I Moore
Copyright 1944 Street & itnith, Publications Inc.
Pub. Best SF


Synopsis: This is an exception to our rule about robots. The central character
is a humanoid robot, but it is inhabited by a live human brain, salvaged from
the body of a world famous entertainer and ballet dancer. Her personality is
still intact, she is a woman of great determination and she decides to make a
comeback in the world of entertainment. This she does with riotous success — the
success is heightened by the realisation of the audience that she is indeed more
than human. With this however, comes the psychological problem. "I'm afraid it
isn't unhappiness, Maltzer, it's fear, I don't want to draw away from the human
race, I wish I needn't, that's why I'm going back on the stage, to keep in touch
with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me — I'm — I'm
lonely, Maltzer".




ABOUT THE BBC ARCHIVE
The BBC Archive - sharing pictures, documents and programmes from the last
75 years of the BBC's broadcasting history. To find out more visit the
BBC Archive portal.
www.bbc.co.uk/archive

I Know I Have Been Neglecting My 3 or 4 Readers. I Will Endeavour to do Better

Palin Flowchart:

From Adennak<

How Interesting Were The Debates Last Night? See Page 8 in the Globe.

CNN Laughs It Up Over Sarah Palin Interview - Word For Word

Palin On Foreign Policy - Some Stuff Even the Onion Can't Make Up

Ahmadinejad on Jews - Larry King

I love this guy.
You would think he might want to mince his words, but no...

Your Urgent Help Needed

Your Urgent Help Needed

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a
transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had
crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion
dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most
profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my
replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may
know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the
1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds
as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names
of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family
lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person
who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account
numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to
wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for
this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with
detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the
funds.
Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

HT: Angry Bear

Playing Poker with Lewis

Look on the Bright Side
By michael.lewis


One of life's rules is that there's bad in good and good in bad. The total collapse of the U.S. financial system is no exception. Even in the midst of the current financial despair we can look around and identify many collateral benefits.

A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.)

And so as Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack [2] blasts short sellers for his problems, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein [3] swans around pretending to be above this little panic, we ought to step back and enjoy the positives.

To wit:

1) We finally get to see what's inside these big Wall Street firms.

We've just witnessed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and we know neither the inciting incident (though there is speculation that sovereign wealth funds decided to stop lending to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.), nor the deep cause. But there's now a pile of assets and liabilities [4]smoldering in New York awaiting inspection.

The assets include subprime mortgage-backed bonds and no doubt many other things that aren't worth as much as Lehman hoped they might be worth. But it's the liabilities that are most intriguing, as they include more than $700 billion in notional derivatives contracts. Some of that is insurance sold by Lehman, against the risk of other companies defaulting.

The entire pile might be benign, but somehow I doubt it. We may well find out that Lehman Brothers, in liquidation, has a negative value of hundreds of billions of dollars. In that case the natural question will be: How much better could things be inside Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, both of which were engaged in the same lines of business?

2) We are creating the financial leaders of tomorrow.

Remember when everyone believed in Alan Greenspan [5]? When John McCain [6], running for president in 2000, said that if Greenspan died he'd have him stuffed and propped up against the wall at the Federal Reserve, where he'd remain chairman?

No sooner did Greenspan shuffle off the stage and sell his memoir than the financial system he helped shape fell apart.

He's left not only a mess but a void. No matter how well- educated we become in our financial affairs, we still need public officials to look up to, unthinkingly.

And there's nothing like a government bailout to create new public-sector heroes. Hank Paulson [7], 62, is probably too old; in any case, he's tarred by his association with both George Bush [8] and Goldman Sachs. But 47-year-old Tim Geithner [9] at the New York Fed is perfectly positioned to make Americans feel as if their financial system is in good hands for many years to come.

I have no real idea if Geithner knows what he's doing and he may not either. (``Bail out that one. No! Not that one -- the other one!'') It doesn't matter. He's in the middle of great events and should, by the end of them, know more about what happened than anyone.

Whatever happens to the U.S. financial system someone is bound to get the credit for something even worse not happening and, as no one really understands what Geithner does, he's the obvious choice.

3) Ordinary Americans get a lesson in low finance.

It's been expensive but, then, so is kindergarten.

Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street's brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people giving out financial advice than should be giving out financial advice.

Thanks to the current panic many Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are, at best, fools. Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. [10] and all the rest persuaded their most valuable customers to buy auction-rate bonds, telling them the securities were as good as cash.

Those customers will now think twice before they listen to their brokers ever again.

Many, I'm sure, are just waiting to get their money back from their brokers before they race for the exits and introduce themselves to Charles Schwab.

Bank of America Corp. will soon discover that the relationship between Merrill Lynch and its customers isn't what it used to be, but Bank of America's loss is America's gain.

4) We have lots of new houses [11].

Not all of them have people [12] in them, sadly, but that's a minor detail. Even better, no one has had to pay for them, and probably never will. I'm betting that the U.S. government will soon have no choice but to take the final step and guarantee every bad mortgage loan ever made by Wall Street.

I can hear you thinking: Doesn't that mean the taxpayer foots the bill? That's so negative! Sure, one day some taxpayer will foot the bill but if the government does what it does best, and continues to borrow huge sums from foreigners, it doesn't have to be you or me.

5) Huge numbers of Wall Street executives will have the time to raise their children.

For years now Wall Street has been far too lucrative for a certain kind of energetic and ambitious person to justify anything but the most perfunctory personal life. Now that the market for his services has collapsed, he has time to go home and figure out which of the children roaming around the mansion are actually his.

In time, he will learn to love them and they him, and they will gain the benefit of his wisdom and experience. Perhaps one day they will put it to use as traders and investment bankers, on the Wall Street of the future, where they will report to those exalted creatures of high finance: loan officers.

There, slowly, they can earn the money they will need to pay off the mortgages defaulted upon by their forebears.

The Magi of the Fed Speaks (in 2005)

“Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending.”

--The Magi of the Fed

Rogers Blocking Google?

Lately, when I go to use a Google ap or page I often get a 404. However, if I mistype a URL I get sent to a Yahoo/Rogers page. I've done some clicking around but I haven't seen it written anywhere.
Is anyone else finding this?