Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Turn to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

"One satisfactory answer to these questions is to use a table to show the numbers." - The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward R. Tufte

Tagged by retrobabble

From the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, 2008. At about 36 seconds in, you WILL start laughing...

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008.

West Coast Polls close, and put Obama over the top. 297 Electoral Votes.

I hugged my son. "Nathan, this is the world we're giving you."

So... forget the US. Forget Earth.

What's the election polling in the World of Warcraft?

Joe the Plumber:

Not licensed to practice his trade.
Not a member of the union he claims to be a member of.
Never served an apprenticeship.
Has an outstanding lien of over $1000 for back taxes.

Yep, just an honest, hardworking American trying to play by the rules.

A must-view.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/the-palin-debat.html

Is it just me, or does Katie Couric look at Sarah Palin the way a parent might look at a child in the midst of telling a huge whopper involving a broken vase?

Katie Interviews Sarah Palin

So, the events of the day.

First off, note that the McCain/Palin ticket is getting hammered in the polls.

Obama approached McCain, suggesting that the two of them issue a joint statement regarding priorities for addressing the financial crisis. During the call, McCain mentions the idea of postponing/cancelling Friday's debate, to which Obama responds that they should issue their joint statement, then talk about other items. Call ends.

McCain campaign announces that it's going to "suspend the campaign" so McCain can instead rush back to Washington to work on the bailout plan. This is the McCain who by his own admittance "doesn't know much about economics", and was saying that the "fundamentals of the economy are sound" back on Monday. Not only that, but the McCain campaign says that if a deal isn't hammered out by Friday, he won't go to the debate.

This is the debate that he's only been haphazardly preparing for, from all accounts, whereas Obama has been working hard to be ready. Expectations were that Obama would do well.

Obama's response? "This is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess. And I think that it is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."

The latest from the McCain campaign? Well, let's delay the debate until next Friday. Of course, next Friday is the schedule VP debate (Joe Biden and Sara "I haven't had a single press conference" Palin) - so let's just scrap that debate, hrm?

In the meantime, McCain is still granting interviews to folks like Katie Couric - and reports from the Hill say that a compromise bailout (including almost all the desired changes including oversight and homeowner relief) is 95% done.

This is McCain trying to duck out of a debate that he knows he'll look poor in. Failing that, he's trying to get his "game changing" VP pick out of her debate.

I used to have grudging respect for McCain.

Gone.

Hrm.

So we're going to give 700+ billion dollars to various banks and investment firms to buy out their investments in mortgages.

Why? Because the value of those mortgage assets is plummeting and taking down the financial community.

Why is the value dropping? Because homeowners are defaulting on their mortgages in record numbers.

Hrm.

Does giving 700+ billion to Wall Street put any of those homeowners back in their homes? Paying property taxes? Preventing banks from having to sell those foreclosed homes at fire sale prices thus further devaluing the home market?

No. It props Wall Street back up, but doesn't address the cause - mortgage devaluation based on foreclosures and a deflating housing bubble.

So perhaps this is a naive question. Rather than buy the devalued mortgage securities from the banks, why don't we instead spend money on stabilizing the housing market itself - use funds to provide homeowner mortgage assistance, renegotiate loans based on post-bubble value, refinance at reasonable terms, and take other steps to halt the dramatic foreclosure rate? Then the mortgage securities wouldn't be worthless. Hell, spend some of that money to buy up some of those "home gold rush" developments filled with empty homes and use them as low-cost housing. There are a lot of things we could do.

Granted - I'm a homeowner. I've taken careful, stogy steps. A simple 30-yr fixed mortgage. I never "bought to flip", I bought to live. I don't like the idea of rewarding anyone for making ill-considered, foolish decisions.

But if we're going to bail people out with taxpayer money, why don't we bail out the taxpayers?

From "The Tao of Pooh":

Now, being emperor in one of the most frantically Confucianist countries in the world [Japan] is not necessarily all that relaxing. From early morning until late at night, practically every minute of the emperor's time is filled in with meetings, audiences, tours, inspections, and who-knows-what. And through a day so tightly scheduled that it would make a stone wall seem open by comparison, the emperor must glide, like a great ship sailing in a steady breeze.

In the middle of a particularly busy day, the emperor was driven to a meeting hall for an appointment of some kind. But when he arrived, there was no one there. The emperor walked into the middle of the great hall, stood silently for a moment, then bowed to the empty space. He turned to his assistants, a large smile on his face. "We must schedule more appointments like this," he told them, "I haven't enjoyed myself so much in a long time."

* * *

Friends invited us over for dinner tonight, and I declined for sundry reasons. Jenni planned to go. I'd been planning on being home with the boy then evening but, in a surprise move, N decided to go with Jenni. I didn't discover this until I came home to an empty house, and a note on my desk.

I have the house to myself. Completely, entirely to myself. This is quite rare. As the end of a work week in which I've done much - but little that I planned - it's a welcome, if not outright necessary, respite from demands, interruptions, and peripheral cacophony.

I think that I understand, just a little, how Hirohito felt.

A co-worker gave me the keyboard from a diNovo Media Desktop (full set is a keyboard/mediapad/mouse bluetooth combo); but the keyboard had a broken "K" key.

Called up Logitech Support. Wound my way through customer support.

"Well, sir," said the reasonable fellow I finally reached, "we don't replace single keys. If you send us back the keyboard, just the keyboard, we'll send out a replacement Media Desktop set."

"Uhm... yes. Please."

We exchange addresses. He gives me a case number (RMA). Keyboard shipped.

Now to see if I can actually score a "new" $200 wireless keyboard/mouse combo simply by doing an RMA on a broken hand-me-down keyboard...

This morning, I received a Wrath of the Lich King beta key.

This afternoon, I dropped my car off at the mechanic to find out why I have to put the clutch all the way to the floor to shift. Transmission's fine - but the master and slave cylinder are both leaking fluid. Leaking fluid in a hydraulic system bad - eventually I would have been unable to shift gears at all.

The bill for diagnosis and replacement? $580.

Bleah.

Got a little email from Blizzard around lunchtime. Looks like Tuhan, my druid, is going to be taking a trip...

So, uhm... yeah.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog.



All 3 episodes, free. Until midnight Sunday.

Go watch.

Back when I lived in Ohio, I was part of a tabletop gaming group that met every other Saturday. They'd already been going for years when I joined in 1991, and they were still going when I left Ohio in July of 1999.

We mostly played D&D, although there was a long digression into Magic: The Gather during that game's heyday. From 1991 until 1995, we played a group of character who collectively called themselves The Company of the Keg. I played a bard named Bergil, and part of Bergil's contribution was a bi-weekly journal that I write (a bit haphazardly) and printed out for my fellow gamers.

When we restarted and re-rolled in early 1995, Beth Griese took over the journals (called The Jade Letters) and kept them on her website.

Earlier this week I received an email from someone who'd found and read the Jade Letters, and had tried to find Bergils's journals. The link was broken, however, and the journals hadn't been online in years.

I ended up sending her a zipped file of my archive... and spent a lot longer going through the old logs and journals of that gaming group. Can't help but enjoy the old memories.

"I scuff the pentagram..." Heh...

(A story from this weekend)

N had been relying on dessert a little too much, to the point of not eating part of his dinner - or negociating just how little of his dinner he could eat before dessert. Dessert being a small treat - a cookie, or even a bit of fruit. Trouble is that dinner's always N's problem meal, and this just made it worse as he tried to skip to dessert (and ended up still hungry afterwards). Enough with that, we stopped having dessert.

"What are we having for dessert?" (typical mid-dinner question)
"Tonight is not a dessert night."

After a week, he changed tactics.

"Is tonight a dessert night?"
"No, it is not."

A week or two more, he got a bit smarter.

"Is tonight a dessert night?"
"No, it is not."
"When will it be a dessert night?"
"When you eat your dinner and don't ask about dessert."

That one took a while. But finally, he ate his dinner (hamburger and corn on the cob) without being nagged to eat, and didn't ask about dessert. It was a warm sunny early evening, and so..

"Let's go get some ice cream."
"Yay!"

So we went to Dairy Queen. But DQ was mobbed - with a huge line inside and cars around the building. Jenni and I decided, then, to go to the grocery down the street and get a pint of ice cream and some cones. N was disappointed, with a little angry crying that we had to nip ("We could just not get any ice cream, if you want to be rude.") But we thought everything was copacetic when we parked the car and went to get out.

We were wrong. Arms crossed and a frown on his face, N refused to get out of his seat.

"Time to get out, bub. Let's go get some ice cream and cones."
"No!"
*both parents pause for a beat*
"Okay, we don't get ice cream."

As he wailed in protestation over his bluff called, we closed his door, got back in the car, and drove home.

He stomped off to the bathroom (which is where he goes when he wants privacy) and closed the door, and we heard much muttering and many imprecations. Our boy was fully in the grip of l'esprit d'escalier. After about 10 minutes he came out snuffling. and apologized. Hugs all around, and a good prep for bed and pleasant story-reading (the punishment for intransigence was No Ice Cream, after all - the event shouldn't affect anything else). In the end, all was well.

Save for one thing:

Jenni and I had really wanted ice cream.

/sigh