Warmish colors are those countries we export walking-sticks and riding-crops to; coolish colors are those countries we import such items from. (The hyphens just make them so much classier, non?)
We export riding-crops to about 30 countries, but we import lots and lots of riding-crops from just a few countries: China (surprise!), Taiwan, Austria, and Germany. In fact, if not for those four countries, the U.S. would be a net exporter of riding-crops.
I don't know about anyone else, but I just love to wallow in data like these.
One of the things that gives Casa Fleck y Breen its distinctive tone is that we house what may well be the only set of hardcover-bound, gold-stamped Pogo books in existence. 
It's not a complete set; we only have "Pogo", "The Pogo Papers", and "The Incompleat Pogo" (very true to its title, missing 4 pages). We used to have "Uncle Pogo So-so Stories", but that was lost in the mists of time and too many cross-continent moves.
These books didn't start life as hardcovers; they were simple, ordinary trade paperbacks that my father picked up in grad school. They travelled around the globe with him, growing gradually more tattered, until he met an itinerant bookbinder in Rangoon. The bookbinder bound these and many other of the family paperbacks. He wasn't very familiar with English, so the gilt-stamped titles were sometimes a bit at variance with what the author intended – but the Pogo titles were simple enough to survive transcription.
Althouse's strip is from Pogo's hippy trippy early-seventies days; the excerpt above is from the far more political fiftes. We all know who "Simple J. Malarkey" is, right?
The topic is trade policy; you may start to see more stuff like this around here.
My family is starting to look at me funny, though that may just be projection and paranoia on my part. Then again, I'd love to be convinced that I was just turning into a paranoid crank about this stuff.For the record, I categorically deny looking at Moira funny. I can't speak for our daughter, though.
[...]
Over the last decade or so I've seen the cheerleaders for globalization and "free" trade transform their arguments, starting out like carnival barkers promising wealth for everybody and, more recently, furrowing their brows and switching to moral admonishments - how it's "our" moral duty to wave bye-bye to the middle class so the Third World can meet us somewhere south of the middle, wage-wise. (While one can see that there will be more competition for limited resources like oil, I have my suspicions that gutting the American middle class is not really the only way to raise living standards for Chinese and Indians. The easiest for the Chinese and Indians, and the most profitable for the geniuses of our short-term thinkin'/ADHD corporate class, yes. I figured that the adoption of the holy "moral duty" line was a veiled admission of the bankruptcy of the original arguments.) To summarize the change in the "sell" to the American worker:
First we get:
1) "The rising tide will raise all boats!"
Then:
2) "There's a pony in that shitpile for you somewhere! Really, there is! Just keep digging!"
Finally:
3) "Sucks to be you, loser!"
The "'our' moral duty" line I consider to be merely the more obfuscatory version of (3), above.
I was at the local gym, lifting weights. This is something I've been trying to do about twice a week since December, when we got a gym membership, and I'd been keeping up fairly well, though there were inevitable breaks in the routine, like running off to D.C. for a week-plus. Perhaps I should have reduced the weight a little after that break; anyway, I didn't, and just about at the end of the workout I suddenly felt just beat. Really, really exhausted, out of all proportion (I thought) to what I was doing. I stopped and went into the locker room, mostly just to find a place to sit down.
As I sat on the locker room bench, I started feeling worse – completely out of breath, and faint. Chartreuse-and-magenta flashes started to show up all over my field of vision. I put my head down, closed my eyes, and waited... the gym pipes music into the locker rooms, a cavalcade of pop hits of the 70's and 80's. Material Girl played, then I Love the Nightlife, making me feel even worse. Some of the other gym regulars had come in by then, and were asking, in their circumspect way, if I was all right.
"Ah, you okay, there?"
"Just really dizzy and out of breath. I think I'll be ok in a minute."
"Well, ok." One of the regulars handed me an orange juice (I think I told him I hadn't eaten anything yet). I thanked him for it and drank.
After about ten minutes, I did start to feel better, and in a few more minutes, pretty much normal. I got up, showered and dressed. As I left the gym, two of the patrons who'd been checking on me in the locker room were waiting by the door, making sure I hadn't collapsed somewhere.
"Now, you be sure you see your doctor. This could be something serious."
"Yes, I will." Actually, I had no intention of that; I felt pretty much ok, and really didn't want to spend any more time in the emergency room. I thanked them again for looking out for me, and headed to the car.
I started up the mighty Saturn, and as I was pulling out of the parking lot it occurred to me that something felt odd in my chest, like I had a whole bunch of butterflies caged in there. Hmm, that's odd, I thought. I checked my carotid pulse; there should be a slight, steady, rythymic THUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP thaTHUMP beneath the skin just below and medial to the angle of the jaw. What I felt was more like:
thump thump (pause) THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thump (pause) thump THUMPTHUMPTHUMP thumpthump
...so I drove straight to the hospital, and walked to the emergency room, where they wired me up to an ECG (again!). "You're in atrial fibrillation", the ER doctor told me. Sweet.
Not only that, but the combination of reduced blood to the ventricles and chaotic electrical signals bouncing around the heart caused my ventricles to beat much faster than usual – my pulse was racing up to about 160. I borrowed a phone and called Moira. "I'm in the hospital again."
They stuck an IV into me and started pumping in a drug to calm my jittery heart down. I asked the ER doctor what the general plan was in cases like this. "Well, we want to restore normal rythym. We'll try this drug for a while, and if that doesn't work, we'll try another drug, and if that doesn't work, we'll have to shock you."
This was the second time in less than three months that I managed to get myself into the emergency room because of cardiac weirdness. It's enough to make me question my overall state of healthiness, which back in December I would have classified as "excellent". Then, one bout of angina, ok, that's a fluke. Now, a good hearty workout lands me in the hospital; WTF? (I say again, "WTF?")
(More later.)
*Residents' and interns' slang for a patient in chronic ill health – "Piss-Poor Protoplasm Poorly Put Together."
**Maybe that term needs to be shortened for maximum punchiness – "Slogging", perhaps.
If offshore outsourcing is not the cause of sluggish job growth, what is? A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the economy is undergoing a structural transformation: jobs are disappearing from old sectors (such as manufacturing) and being created in new ones (such as mortgage brokering).(This was written back in 2004; emphasis added.) And maybe it's not fair to blame DD for cheering on the creative destruction that would herald the bright new dawn of a nation of mortgage brokers; it seems he was just passing on what the Fed told him.
Still, it does remind me that I read somewhere that we seem to have gotten into the habit of patching over the damage of financial bubbles by .... plunging into new financial bubbles.
Semi-related: it also reminds me of a day back in Oregon, back in 2001 or so, driving somewhere and listening to the local news on the radio... the state had come up with a plan to retrain all the out-of-work loggers so that they could become out-of-work IT guys. (Well, that wasn't how they put it – I just filled in a few extra steps for them.)
It's snowing as I type. Snowing. Again.
On the bright side, all those billions of snowflakes might keep those ornery college students from rioting:
No greater expectation of riot this year than in past, police say
Midwesterners! Who knew?
In an effort to increase Alien Corn's success-O-meter reading, perhaps I should turn my everyday predilictions and laziness into a hot new trend or phenomenon. I'm surfing the internet – but really slow! I'm writing a blog – but really slow! I'll need a catchy name to promote this new idea of mine, something that combines the idea of slow and the idea of blogging, something like ... wait, it's coming to me ... something like:
“Slow Blogging”
Oh, wait. Nevermind. Okay, so I wasn't first. But you can be certain that my "slow blog manifesto" will beat the crap out of their "slow blog manifesto", when I get around to writing it.
This could be interesting... perhaps we can use it to answer the burning question, "Do I/We Have a Successful Blog?"
The top ten are:
- 10) They don't hang around long enough.
- Well, we've got that one covered, at least. Progressive Reaction(aries)/Alien Corn has been hitting the streets since January 2005, according to our sidebar. And Inappropriate Response, Moira's old blog, was established during the inflationary epoch of the blogosphere, in 2001.
- 9) They don't post enough each day. On a typical day, there are 6 posts that amount to roughly 2500 words or so ... Most successful blogs churn out at least 1500 words a day and most of them do considerably more.
- Oh, yeah, we fail bigtime here. Each day? How about, oh, I don't know, each month? What, you people expect to be entertained, or something? Jebus, I got my own life.
- 8) They don't link out enough.
- Link . . . out. . ? Oh, you mean interacting with other blog-entities. No, I guess we don't do that a whole lot. We are busy people here, busy, and linking to stuff would require reading said stuff, and who has time to do that? We (and I'm using the royal we, here) are much more interested in presenting vignettes of our life and thought to the world – to you, dear reader; surely that is more important that discussing the petty, dreary concerns of others?
- 7) Doing their initial promos too early. This is a pet peeve of mine.
- ...."Pro .... mo"? What is that?
- 6) They're not consistent enough. They take days off...
- Oh, my, my aching sides! Days off? I was thrilled to see we actually had posts each month last year. See #9.
- 5) They don't promote their work.
- Promote this? I don't think so.
- 4) They don't network.
- Nope, none of that, either. Though in fairness, we have exchanged some e-mails with some nice people, once or twice.
- 3) They're not unique enough.
- Well, I can very much sympathise with this one*. There are way too many shrieky angry political blogs out there already. But I like to think that this particular near-random collection of scribblings is at least unusual, possibly unique. Rambling, boring, pointless, disjointed – but unique.
- 2) They don't cover interesting material.
- Oh, come now. How can my concerns and interests fail but to be of vital importance to the masses?
- 1) They're just not very good.
- Perhaps now we are approaching the crux of the biscuit. "Everybody has different talents and skills and some people just aren't very good writers. In the blogging world, people who can't write either tend to pump out dreck or do huge excerpts of other articles with a line or two of their own content attached. That sort of post has its place, of course, but if it's all you're doing, it's not a good sign." Guilty as charged? A judgement call, I guess.
Which raises the question: So what the hell are we trying to do? As I tell the daughter, "That's a very good question." Which, translated, means, "I haven't the faintest idea what the answer is." So I guess the answer is, We just are. Or something.
*Even as the word-usage Nazi within stirs.
**Not that our commenters aren't very, very, good, and we treasure each and every one of you, and would take you all home if we could!
