Headlines

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I’m no grammarian so please keep that in mind as you read the following.  I’ve noticed lately that I have to re-read headlines to make sure I understand what the author is trying to say.  I understand that headline writers are dealing with very limited space, but sometimes I think they need to be edited a little more closely.

Here’s one I found today on WXII’s website: Woman in Court Accused of Killing Daughter.  Uh, is the court accused of killing the daughter or is the woman?  Can a court kill a daughter? Wouldn’t a better headline be Woman Accused of Killing Daughter is in Court? I mean you’re adding two letters and a total of four spaces and it’s a website for goodness sake so space isn’t that precious.

There’s this headline found on the Winston-Salem Journal’s website, although the article originally appeared in the LA Times: Features of New $5 Bill Aim at Thwarting Counterfeiters.  Can features aim?  At a minimum wouldn’t it read better if it was written as "aimed"?  Or how about New Features of $5 Bill Intended to Thwart Counterfeiters.

I understand that the idea is to convey the main thrust of the story in a few words, and I don’t think that you can always do it and be grammatically correct at the same time.  But if the idea is to get the point across quickly then I don’t think it’s a good headline if it causes the readers to say, "huh?" when they read it.  So with that criteria I think the first headline is pretty bad, while the second headline doesn’t really get in the way of understanding what the article is about. 

Maybe I’m just being picky because, you know, these people are supposedly paid to write and edit well.  All I know is it bugs the hell out of me when I read these things.   

Pucker Up

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First there were the deep fried Twinkies and now we have these: Pickle Sickles.  From the story in the Washington Post:

An ice pop made of frozen pickle juice doesn’t sound like something
people would be clamoring for. Then again, in an era when candy
companies compete for bragging rights over whose flavor is the sourest,
perhaps the appeal of a little pucker power makes sense.

Sure enough, Pickle Sickles are selling at the rate of about 20,000 a month, mostly through the Internet. Who knew?

John Howard
knew, but that’s because he created them. Though the degree of
popularity has surprised him, Howard, 43, knew he was on to something
when he began freezing leftover jarred pickle juice at his roller
skating rink and arcade in Seguin, Texas, a year ago.

You could have given me a million years and I never would have thought of Pickle Sickles.  What next, frozen mayonnaise?  I shall never again make fun of the seemingly odd cuisine found in places like China. Puppy on a stick anyone?

links for 2008-03-12

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Annoy-a-tron. Oh, the Fun I Could Have

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Esbee sent me the link to the Annoy-a-tron so you can thank her if your ears are tortured any time in the near future. Here’s the description:

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name)
beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time
‘timing’ the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in
intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically
annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody,
select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight
‘electronic noise’ built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown
Admin wonder where his packets are.

Applications I’m considering for this ingenious device:

  1. Next PTA meeting.
  2. Car dealership show room, sales area.
  3. Forsyth County Commissioners meeting, behind the commissioners’ table.  Set for loudest setting during the sectarian invocation.
  4. Anywhere that teenagers gather en masse; they bug the hell out of me all the time so I think I’m due some payback.
  5. Anywhere that pompous, self-important blowhards congregate en masse; see reasoning in item 5. (Yes I’m aware that this could be considered redundant to item 3).

Yes, yes, yes.  Much fun.

More on the FDIC

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A trusted source, someone who shall remain anonymous lest I kill his business by letting people know he’s connected to me, sent me an email after reading yesterday’s post on banking woes.  His email did not lighten my mood:

A little info on FDIC. They have about $1.28 on reserve for every $100 they
insure. The last time they went broke was in 1992 during the S&L crisis
which was R/E related (mostly commercial). Tax payers bailed out the system.
Banks now pay higher fees into the system (but still not enough) and is a
significant reason for lower CD rates and higher loan rates. Cycles tend to
repeat. R/E’s cycle is about 12 to15 years. Scary isn’t it.

Scary enough that I’m thinking about stuffing my mattress.  It’s kind of lumpy anyway, so what’s the harm?

Lovin’ Backyard Burgers

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My son left his super-duper calculator that he uses for geometry at home today and needed it because his homework was stored on it.  Like I said, it’s a super-duper calculator.  When I was in H.S. in the early 80s we thought it was cool that calculators could work on solar power and sometimes even do more than add, subtract, multiply or divide.  His does all kinds of crap I can’t even understand well enough to describe, and I get insanely jealous every time I think about all the calculations and graphing I had to do by hand when I took geometry. Any way, he needed someone to bring his calculator to school.

Celeste and I ran it over to him at lunch time and then on the way home stopped at Backyard Burgers right off of 421 on Lewisville-Clemmons Road.  If you live anywhere in the Southeast then you simply must hit a Backyard Burgers.  It’s fast food, but the folks at Backyard treat it much better than that.  The burgers are very well made and the sides are always well cooked.  For instance if you opt for a baked potato instead of fries in your combo meal it will cost you about ten cents extra and the potato is invariably fresh, not a shriveled piece of mush that tastes like it was cooked a year ago.  And then there’s dessert.

I indulged myself with a baked raspberry cobbler and created my own a la mode by ordering a scoop of vanilla ice cream that I summarily plopped on the cobbler when it arrived at my table.  Oh, that’s right I forgot to mention that after you order you sit down and they bring your food to you.  Take that Wendy’s!

Combo meals will run you about $6.00 and include a sandwich, fries (or a replacement side) and a soda.  We ate at the height of the lunch hour and even though the place was packed we had our food in about five minutes.  On the way out of the restaurant Celeste noticed a sign on the door that says if it’s raining you can ask a teller to set you up with umbrella service and they’ll have an employee walk you to the car.  I’m telling you, it’s one of the best fast food operations going.

links for 2008-03-11

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Da Banking Bidness

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Fec linked to several stories related to potential bank failures in the US. This bit from the US News & World Report really caught my attention:

“It’s our view that regulators are expecting 100 to 200 banks to fail”
over the next 12 to 24 months, says Jaret Seiberg, a research analyst
for the Stanford Group. Seiberg expects those failures to occur
predominantly in states like Ohio, Michigan, California, and
Georgia—where the construction lending market, which includes
residential real estate, is expected to weaken dramatically…

Washington Mutual lost $1.87 billion in the fourth quarter, hit by
mortgage defaults, write-downs and a substantial increase in the amount
it set aside for bad loans.

That got me to thinking about the FDIC.  My understanding is that it insures checking and savings accounts up to $100,000 per depositor and up to $250,000 per IRA account, so if these banks fail won’t it be on the hook to insure all those accounts?  How much moolah are we talking here?

When I set my fingers to typing this post I was going to ask "How much of the taxpayers money is at risk here?" but upon doing a little reading I discovered that the FDIC is funded by insurance payments from the banking institutions themselves.  So unless something catastrophic happens then taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be at risk right?  Something about this sounds spookily familiar.

Oh, yeah.  Right when I was getting out of college and beginning my life in the working world (that would be 1989) there was this little thing called the savings and loan crisis that I didn’t really understand, but seemed to have all the real adults spooked.  It happened to coincide with a real estate bust and a fairly decent recession, and it resulted in the birth of this new institution called Resolution Trust CorporationFrom the Wikipedia entry on RTC comes this: that ended up employing lots of people in DC to do something really important: bailing out the S&Ls and the morons who broke them on the shoals of a booming-busting real estate market.

According to Joseph E. Stiglitz in his book, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics, page 243, the real reason behind the need of this company was to allow the United States government to subsidize the banking
sector in a way that wasn’t very transparent and therefore avoid the
possible resistance. This is supported by the fact that the banks had
better information related to the loans than the RTC.

So pardon me if I don’t swallow whole the idea that taxpayer dollars may not come to the rescue of the current crop of morons who are breaking their banks on the shoals of the latest booming-busting real estate market.  Somehow the pinstripes always find a way to dump their problems on the denim crowd.

Update: Ed Cone links to an article about the feds getting ready to help out. From the article: The Federal Reserve, struggling to
contain a crisis of confidence in credit markets, plans to lend
up to $200 billion in exchange for mortgage-backed securities…it will hold
auctions of Treasuries in exchange for debt including AAA rated
mortgage securities sold by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and by
banks.  Ed then says, "I’ve made some rotten investments in my lifetime, it
would be nice if someone would swap me some Treasuries for them. "

That didn’t take long.