Not a lot I can add to this video because you really have to see it to believe it. In case you don’t watch the whole thing I will tell you that at the end they reveal that this kid, who’s 11 and in the fifth grade, can run the mile in 4 minutes and 50 seconds and is expected to break the world record for his age when he’s officially timed. BTW, the majority of the video is about his mad hoop skills.
I have a perfect example of why I don’t consider myself a very good writer. Last week I spent lots of bytes trying to explain why I thought that the bailout proposal should be questioned because the administration, a.k.a. The Powers That Be, has spent the last eight years submarining the public trust in America. Well, if I wrote worth a damn I’d have come up with a paragraph similar to The Cunning Realist’s:
Part of the
public’s skepticism is a natural reaction to the now-transparent
language of deception and hysteria. When you’ve trafficked in mushroom
clouds and Persian Hitlers for eight years, "imminent financial
Armageddon" loses a bit of its edge. Hearing the administration and its
media flacks suddenly and in concert (almost as if a memo went out,
eh?) warn of a latter-day Great Depression and push this as "it’s not a
bailout, it’s a buy-in" sets off alarm bells for anyone who’s been
sentient in recent years. Orwell’s revenge, maybe. Also, I don’t think
the plan’s Goldilocks-invoking supporters help their cause by trying to
convince the public it doesn’t understand the financial system well
enough to know what’s at stake. Somehow they had faith that people were
"smart enough to reject the pessimists" on the way up.
Hat tip to Ed Cone for the link.
From the Freakonomics blog:
Would you rather donate $100 to a charity you believe in, or spend $50 in your favorite shop?
That’s the crux of an offer
SunTrust bank is making to people who open new checking accounts with
the bank between now and the end of the year: receive a $50 gift card,
or have SunTrust donate $100 to the charity of your choice.
I hope that at some point Suntrust will reveal the results of this promo. It would be very interesting to learn what people chose to do, especially in these tough economic times. Here’s an interesting comment they received:
I think the likelihood people would want the $100 donated to charity is greater than if it was thus:
Your account has a $50 annual fee. Alternatively, SunTrust can deduct $100 and donate it to the charity of your choice.
The net to the customer is the same, but I think people are much
more willing to sacrifice a $50 gift for charity than to double a $50
expense for charity.— Posted by MikeM
The commenter is absolutely right. I’m more likely to donate the money that I see as "found money" which is what the promotion would be, versus money being deducted from my account even though the end result is the same: $50 out of my pocket.
As I wrote a couple of posts ago I recently managed to damage my index finger while assembling an incredibly easy to put together piece of furniture. As a result I’m under doctors orders to keep the damaged finger clean, dry and splinted in order to speed the healing. Since the finger is on my right (dominant) hand I’ve discovered that’s it’s a royal pain in the butt to live one’s life with your finger in the air.
First of all it’s almost impossible to do anything quickly. Ever tried to brush your teeth with your off hand? It ain’t easy. I tried to use my right hand to do it while keeping my finger in the air, but poking myself in the eye at 6:00 a.m. cured me of that. I won’t discuss another, uh, grooming matter that’s difficult to do with your off hand, but suffice it to say that it sets one off kilter if you know what I mean.
While I was struggling with my personal grooming it occurred to me that I should have forced myself to live left handed for a week when my kids were toddlers. I would have been SO much more sympathetic to their efforts at brushing, wiping and dressing. I remember being very impatient with them and it never dawned on me that maybe they were so much slower than I wanted them to be because they’d had about 1/1000th the experience I had and their little muscles weren’t exactly coordinated yet. I’m thinking that maybe one of the things they should teach expecting parents at those God awful birthing classes is that when the kids enter the toddler stage the parents should spend a minimum of a week living without use of their dominant hands so that they can be empathetic with their children.
I’ve also been pondering my finger as a metaphor. If my life has slowed down with my finger literally stuck in the air, then it stands to reason that I am slowed down when I constantly keep my finger in the air figuratively speaking. Does it really matter who said what about which presidential candidate? Do I really need to pay attention to all the windbags out there telling me that the end of the world is ‘nigh? Really I don’t. Always trying to see which way the prevailing winds of public opinion are blowing is a suckers bet, and I think I’ve tended to take that bet too often. I’m thinking that the time has come to tune out the noise and concentrate on what matters; family, friends, job, community. If I do that then the rest should take care of itself. Besides, I need all my concentration to learn how to live left handed.
One of the advantages of working at home is that when I take a lunch break I can whip up a quick bite to eat in my own kitchen and then plunk myself down and read the paper or watch the news on TV. Today I took a late lunch around 1:40 and snapped on CNBC to see what was going on in the market and with the government bailout. What I saw was fascinating on multiple levels.
First, I saw the bailout vote appear to fail which caused the DJIA to plummet 300 points in about five minutes. It was nuts and it was something I’ve never seen before, but I was even more interested in watching and listening to the Wall Street pundits react.
What became apparent very quickly is that as smart as these people were about markets they were equally dense in the ways of Washington. They had no clue how Congressional votes worked. Luckily they had a reporter that could explain what it meant to leave the vote open and how it was possible for votes to change even after they’d been cast. That news caused the Dow to recover a couple of hundred points.
Then it got really good. They decided to listen to the House vote live and they came in just as a member of the House asked a parliamentary question and asked the Chair for guidance. Well I think that caused the commentators’ heads to spin off because when the vote was actually closed a few moments later and the House moved on to another bill they didn’t realize it. They had to wait for an explanation from the reporter and once they got it and relayed it to the audience at large and the Dow and other equity markets took an instant plunge.
I don’t expect people who normally don’t cover government to know every intricate detail or parliamentary procedure, but if I knew I was going to be covering one of the most important stories of the day as it affects my area of expertise I’d make sure I understood at least the fundamentals of how things proceed on the Hill. It’s pretty obvious that didn’t happen in this case.
I don’t want to be too critical of the financial pundits. Their day-to-day existence requires they be highly versed in finance, not in government. However, I do find it interesting that they were temporarily flummoxed by things they should have learned in high school civics class.
For what it’s worth I’ve found CNBC to be some of the best television news going these days. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest of the "news" channels. Watching CNN gives me nausea, MSNBC and Fox should drop any reference to news since they’re essentially televised versions of the Daily News, and the networks are pretty much DOA. I like public television for the overall news, but CNBC seems to be the best for business and finance.
I received an email today that tickled me pink because it included me in a group the author described as the "Creative Cluster". Very cool! Anyway, the email was a forward of a call for submissions for an event titled Creativity: Worlds in the Making that is being put on by the Wake Forest University Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts and the Program for Creativity and Innovation. Here’s the overview from the submission page:
This interactive symposium is designed to position creative engagement
as a core literacy in today’s global environment and to model fresh,
critical perspectives for creative research, collaboration and
outcomes, between and among diverse disciplines and communities. The
objective of the symposium is to stimulate new thinking about what
creativity is, how it is practiced across cultural domains and what its
potential applications can be, especially in relation to humane and
sustainable outcomes and impact. Diverse perspectives from the arts,
humanities, sciences and entrepreneurship will pose questions and
challenges about the role that creativity plays in higher education and
in society through its capacity to shape dynamic and interdependent
future ‘worlds’. The interactive format of “Creativity: Worlds in the
Making” combines keynote speakers, traditional panel presentations,
innovative performance and exhibitions with participatory working
sessions.
If you can get your head around that then I encourage you to submit. Deadline for submissions is October 15, 2008 and the actual event is scheduled for March 18-20, 2009.
Saturday Night Live has been pretty bad for a few years now. It’s gotten so bad that we’ve pretty much stopped watching it in our house over the last few years. However, they’ve struck gold with Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin impressions. Last night’s opening, which featured a parody of Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric last week were a great example. As Ed Cone wrote, it’s almost not funny considering how close to reality the parody was. See for yourself below:
Yesterday my wife had wakened in the pre-dawn hours, packed up the youngest and headed to Virginia for our niece’s baptism. I stayed home with the oldest two kids because they had various things scheduled for the weekend, including my daughter’s soccer game. Well we had torrential rains so the game ended up being cancelled which left me with something I’m not accustomed to: a Saturday afternoon with nothing scheduled. I decided to take the opportunity to get some things off of my to-do list.
First up was assembling the dresser we’d purchased for the youngest’s room. We bought it from God-forsaken Wal-Mart almost a month ago, but I hadn’t had the chance to put it together and it was weighing on me. I opened up the box and was pleasantly surprised to find instructions that informed me that I’d need exactly one tool for the job, a hammer. “Whoa,” I thought, “this is a job even I can handle!”
I continued unpacking the box and neatly aligning all the pieces, found my hammer, and set to work. I had the first three pieces together in no time and was trying to get the fourth piece on when I messed up. I misaligned the male metal bracket of one piece with the female metal bracket of the other and they got stuck. So I pulled and tugged and finally got them to separate with a real hard yank. Unfortunately my index finger got in the way and one of the brackets opened it up right nicely with an inch long gash that was deep enough that you could see things you ought not to be able to see.
I went into the kitchen to rinse it out and realized that I might need to get it looked at, especially when I couldn’t get my hand to stop shaking. Honestly it didn’t hurt, but it looked nasty and I figured the shaking was my body’s way of telling me I’d royally screwed up. So I recruited the oldest to help me bandage everything in place and then headed to see the folks at Davie Hospital.
We use Davie regularly because even though it’s twice the distance than either Forsyth or Baptist it is never crowded and you can usually be in and out in under an hour. Since it was a Saturday they were busier than usual, but I was out of there in about 90 minutes. They had a med student look at me and she wasn’t sure if I needed stitches or if we could get away with glueing it so she recruited a full-fledged doctor to look at it. His judgment was I just needed cleaning, steri-strips and a tetanus shot. So a student nurse gave me the shot and cleaned out the gash, and then the doctor returned to show the student how to steri-strip it, all the while engaging me in a cynical discussion of the impending economic doom being foreshadowed in Washington. It was a lot of fun.
The doctor also put a splint on the finger to prevent bending, and thus reopening the wound. They sent me on my way with instructions to keep my finger clean and dry which seemed contradictory to me. I’m still trying to figure it out, but I figure if I get “stinky finger” I’ll know I need to do something about it.
Once I got home I recruited the oldest to help me finish the dresser. It took about an hour, which wasn’t bad considering I was greatly hampered by the mangled finger. Pictures of the dresser and finger below.
When I was growing up my mother forbade me and my brother from having toy guns lest we grow up to be card carrying members of the NRA, or even worse, hunters. I once asked her why she hated hunting so much since we regularly enjoyed meat products in our home and she confessed that it wasn’t the hunting that bothered her as much as the idea that we might actually bring home something that she’d have to clean. Obviously she’d never seen me shoot and had disregarded my lack of desire to freeze my butt off while waiting for an animal to wander within three feet of me, which was my effective range of accuracy.
Of course her toy gun ban simply caused us to continue a proud American tradition of turning any inanimate object into a weapon with which we proceeded to slaughter each other and our friends in continuous mock battles loosely predicated on our abyssmal knowledge of great American wars. You can be sure that we would have given anything, and I mean years’ worth of 50 cent weekly allowances, to possess the rubber band gun featured below. Heck we thought our Daniel Boone replica rubber band guns were cool, so this thing would have been revered.
Thank God we only have a little more than a month until "Decision 08" as the tee-vee folks have dubbed this year’s election. That said I think there might be some interesting developments in two of North Carolina’s Congressional districts this year.
I’m beginning to believe that populist Democrat Roy Carter might have a chance at taking out Virginia Foxx. She’s having a hard time painting him as a typical dirty-word-liberal, and her close ties to the Bush administration aren’t helping her. I’m not sure how the whole Wall Street bailout thing is going to work for her, because the last I heard she might be one of the House Republicans against the deal. It might end up being a plus for her to be able to say she fought against bailing out the "fat cats on Wall Street", but on the other hand she might be too closely associated with the folks that got the country into this mess.
Over in the NC-4 Democratic incumbent David Price should be a lock in that district, but I’m getting the sense that challenger BJ Lawson might give Price a tougher run than people would imagine. If nothing else I think Lawson is providing a lesson to other candidates in how to use the web as a campaign tool. He has a very good blog while Price has a website that looks like something straight out of 1999 without any real substance. A perfect example of how much stronger Lawson’s online presence is, check out his extensive blog post about the government bailout versus the absolute lack of information on Price’s site. Price doesn’t even have the typical, lame press release which of course makes his site uber-lame.
BTW, the only reason I found Lawson’s blog was because of the bailout post, which showed up in today in one of my Google Alert updates. Google’s love of blogs is in and of itself a great reason for any candidate to have a blog. Others would include the ability to communicate directly with constituents, the ability to frame an agenda without relying on mass media, and looking a little less out of it to the increasingly influential Millenial voters.
Back over in my home district I just found Virginia Foxx’s updated web presence which includes a blog and links to online video and pictures. My hat’s off to her and her campaign, because it’s a vast improvement on her old site. She’s only posted twice to her blog, but hopefully that will change as we enter the last month of the campaign. She should check out her fellow Republican over in the NC-4 for a look at how it’s done. Foxx’s opponent doesn’t have a blog, but he also has online video and links to Facebook and MySpace where he has profiles that look like they need to be fed and watered.
Befuddled 