Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Ignoring the obvious.

If I ever get arrested for a heinous crime, I'm definitely going to trial.

Rodney King, O.J. and now this Casey Anthony trial. Apparently if you can get 12 average Americans in a room and drown them in extraneous information, you can get them to ignore the obvious.

Roger Clemens probably has a pretty good chance.

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According to the Bulletin, no arrests for fireworks. Only warnings?

We had a cop car come roaring down our street, and stop about a block away, and urgent calls to "get out of the car!" And then another cop car, and another, and another. Seven cop cars in all.

Must have been some warning.

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I manage to read all the New York Times Sunday, except the magazine. Apparently, the magazine is a bridge too far. The articles are interesting, but not quite interesting enough.

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Last three gardening sessions started out as just wandering the garden and then starting to do something simple and then before I know it, 3 hours have gone by.

Problem is, I'm wearing my street clothes, t-shirt, shorts, sandals, and I'm covered in scratches and scraps and slivers and...I just about itched myself to death last night.

I also drank some diet cola left over from the 4th. I used to be addicted to soda -- I mean, really, really addicted -- but I managed to wean myself off. Except the occasional treat. But drinking caffeine at 9:00 at night isn't a good idea for me anymore.

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Had an old customer who only comes into the store every 8 months or so, exclaim, "You look healthy!" Thing is, he said almost the same thing last time he was in.

He remembers me during the dog years -- the years when I was working every day for 7 years straight, and even when I wasn't, I was scrambling to make a deposit every day just to cover the ongoing checks.

So, the stress is off a little nowadays. That, plus I think I've let myself hit my "natural" weight, which is about 15 pounds over what I fought to keep down for years and years, and I've been outdoors a lot this year.

But mostly the stress.

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I've decided to read one small chapter of A Manual for Living by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, per day. Same chapter in the morning and in the evening and cogitate about it.

I thought of blogging it, but I don't think my thoughts are deep enough. Maybe I'll do it, with fair warning.

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A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, the 5th book in The Song of Ice and Fire, is coming out on the 13th. It's a $35.00 book.

I was just starting to carry new books when the last Harry Potter book came out in hardcover, and I still managed to sell 3 or 4 copies -- despite it being half price just about everywhere else.

I also managed to sell some hard copies of the last two Robert Jordan books, as well as the Patrick Rothfuss's first two fantasies.

I was going to order five, with the idea of reordering immediately if I needed to (I'm only a few days at any time from getting a shipment.) Cameron, who was working, suggested 2, I settled on 3 in my mind, and then ordered 4 -- knowing that I'll always be able to take one home if they don't all sell.

Also, busts my budget a little.

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Speaking of the obvious. The Bulletin has an article saying that "Defaults drop 25% in Deschutes"

Fair enough, but I have a bit of a problem with the sub-title: "Opinions differ whether change represents waning of foreclosure crisis."

When you read the article, it's pretty clear that no one believes the foreclosure crisis is "waning". The foreclosures are being held back for procedural and legal reasons. Instead of the 581 bump in April being an outlier, I suspect it's more like the number it would really be if the banks let loose.

Pretend and extend.

7 comments:

Andy Z said...

Hey, Duncan, I don't suppose you signed up for this?

http://www.darkhorse.com/Blog/428/digital-exclusives-brick-mortar-retailers

Anonymous said...

had OJ not got off I would have lost my faith in the US dollar and US legal system,...

who gives a fuck about anthony, never paid any fucking attention to this 'show trial' of the decade,

+90% of US senators are lawyers, and so for congress, and most prez,...

judges have to be lawyers, enough said,

the legal system, ...

strasse got off by hiring the best private eyes in the world and finding dirt about his accuser, ... and the case has been dropped,

if money could not get you off a charge, then what good would money be in the USA??? the fact is this is why money is good, because you can get away with 'murder'

but who cares, in the end, the legal system via 'civil lawsuits' wiped out OJ, because in the end the LS ( US legal system ), will get ALL YOUR MONEY, ... such is the nature,

then like baby-jeebuz said "Whose face is on the fucking coin?", give unto caesar that what is caesar's, caesar of course if the US Legal System, polytickians&lawyers

"The MORE LAWS the more corrupt a Nation". ...

Anonymous said...

yes the pending foreclosures in Bend are huge, being held back and waiting, ...

all hoping that things PICK-UP...

HELOC/5-1 ARM resets don't end until late 2012, and then add in Bend-Lag, and that is just the worse,... now still early 2011, so at least 3 more dark years at the least,

But this idea that masses will come to bend, ... impossible, peak-oil, loss of social security, with so many old folks BendBroke(tm), its essential to understand that the future will see most oldsters live in poverty in big city's, only a lucky few can live in a 'resort town' like Bend, only a few have managed to 'keep' their saving's.

Slow motion 'grapes of wrath' is bend, in ten years when all these houses have to be destroyed because of SUN damage, some will say, why didn't they just auction them in 2011? The answer of course is that OREO has made it economically MOST attractive for banks to turn houses over to 'trustees', and wait, the entire basis of the US strategy is to KEEP 'dark matter' housing off the market to support prices. If the prices were to collapse, then even more people would WALK AWAY.

Thus Bend today is really a DIKE, a BIG DIKE with lots of wholes, but as more&more people leave, there will be fewer left to support the holes, and thus the prices will collapse to below $100k median, and then even MORE will walk away. Stay for what? Property taxes will cost more than rent, this is the ORYGUN trend. Most homes are under-water forever, ...
Bend homes built post 1988 only had a 10-15 year life, thus most of these homes will start falling apart by 2015, and nobody will have the maintenance cash, what's the point of putting good money into a bad house?

Anonymous said...

If you do not believe that America is in bad shape, just read the list below. The following are 20 not so good categories that the United States leads the world in....

#1 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe.

#2 According to NationMaster.com, the United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.

#3 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.


#4 The United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.

#5 The United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.

#6 There are more car thefts in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world by far.

#7 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#8 There are more reported murders in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#9 There are more total crimes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#10 The United States also has more police officers than anywhere else in the world.

#11 The United States spends much more on health care as a percentage of GDP than any other nation on the face of the earth.

#12 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.

#13 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

#14 Americans have more student loan debt than anyone else in the world.

#15 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe. 89 percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.

#16 The United States has the largest trade deficit in the world every single year. Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.

#17 The United States spends 7 times more on the military than any other nation on the planet does. In fact, U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.

#18 The United States has far more foreign military bases than any other country does.

#19 The United States has the most complicated tax system in the entire world.

#20 The U.S. has accumulated the biggest national debt that the world has ever seen and it is rapidly getting worse. Right now, U.S. government debt is expanding at a rate of $40,000 per second.

The truth is that America has changed. literally falling to pieces.

Does anyone have any ideas about why this could be happening? It's so fucking Bend. Why pray tell? Because the USA citzenry are evil to the bone.

H. Bruce Miller said...

"A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, the 5th book in The Song of Ice and Fire, is coming out on the 13th. It's a $35.00 book."

I'll wait for the e-book.

Or I might not get it at all. I just launched into the third volume and, frankly, it seems to be getting a little repetitious and tedious. Trying to keep all the characters and family trees straight is a hassle; it seems to me that Martin proliferates characters needlessly. By the third volume the novel is overpopulated.

H. Bruce Miller said...

"Does anyone have any ideas about why this could be happening? It's so fucking Bend. Why pray tell? Because the USA citzenry are evil to the bone."

Ridiculous to claim that 307 million people are all "evil to the bone." The problem is ignorance. Americans know next to nothing about the world beyond their borders and thus are easily persuaded to swallow the "this is the greatest country in the world" Kool-Aid. They know next to nothing about their own history, political system or current events, so they're easy marks for demagogues and crackpot ideologies.

Add to those factors the existence of a vast, pervasive, well-funded disinformation machine spewing right-wing propaganda into the atmosphere 24/7 and it's not hard to see how we got so fucked up.

Anonymous said...

I don't see how the headline is inconsistent with what you witnessed. Were they lighting fireworks off inside the car? If not, perhaps the cops were pulling the car over for reasons other than fireworks.