By Booker B on 7/19/2009 8:55 AM

Something's been bugging me since the ALA show, and I think I finally have my finger on what it is.

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By Booker B on 5/27/2009 6:08 PM

The once-wife emails me regularly about the yahoos, notably no. 3 who lives with her. She has my name in her email under the name I use here and with friends, which just irritates the piss outta me.

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By Booker B on 5/18/2009 7:20 PM

I'm thinking about when sociability becomes an obligation. Someone is friendly, and it's only 'natural' to respond in kind with a friendly smile or chat or whatever. Everyone has experienced situations where that became too much and a stranger, or worse some distant uncle operating under the color of family expectation, just talks your leg off and you simply can't escape. It's usually presented as a joke, but during the experience it's awkward as hell.

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By Booker B on 3/15/2009 7:27 PM

These lines get quoted all the time. Lots of posters have been printed and whatnot. The words are widely known, frequently quoted with approval, and just about universally ignored. It's a sad sentiment, I guess. It's true enough on the face of it, and quoted often enough, that it could be dismissed as a platitude. But that would be a mistake, I think. It talks about a place of acceptance that's maybe easy to understand (sort of) and real in a quite direct way. It's one of those plain truths that need elaboration, if at all, only in their effects, but not in the reasons behind them.

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By Booker B on 2/11/2009 9:15 PM

It's weird how opportunities are problems, just as problems are problems. Both sit there demanding responses, and both subject us to strain -- decisions clamor to be made, choices to be chosen to the exclusion & abandonment of other choices. Alternatives are always vague to some degree, and any option involves the risk that another would have been something called better. So genuine problems to be solved and new possibilites to be realized  both plunge us into anxiety of pretty much the same type.

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By Booker B on 9/30/2008 11:16 AM

Blogosphere

I mean blog already sucks six kinds of ass as a name, and that's even before it's repeated like some kind of stinky mantra by every clueless dork who wants to pretend to hipness. Then they compound the horror by amending that contraction/compression/crumple zone of a word with the fakey-ass reference to environmental science. I nearly puke up a kidney every time I read that Frankensteinian abomination, and hearing it spoken is many times worse.

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By Booker B on 5/7/2008 5:11 PM

Just don't ask me to pay for somebody else's healthcare.

People like to take that potshot at proposals for a government role in expanding health care coverage. But you know, that's what all insurance is. We all pool our needs and we pool our funds, and somebody takes a cut for handling the paperwork. That is insurance 101, right? The lucky ones pay more than they take out; the poor bastards with health problems soak up some of the difference left after the paper shufflers pocket their share.

So pooling cost and pooling payments is happening now, and it will continue. The question is what's the best way?

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By Booker B on 4/13/2008 7:24 PM

if you get a chance to see Martin McDonagh's feckin' play The Lieutenant of Inishmore, do not feckin' hesitate. Nevermind the 6 gallons of feckin' fake blood or the 30+ gunshots. It's feckin' hilarious, as are the other McDonagh shows I've seen, but it goes way beyond those. He's known as a crazy feckin' feck, and this seems to be him saying to himself "What, they think THOSE were the work of a feckin' feck? Well THIS will feckin' show them!!"

Warning, though: Cat lovers will be simultaneously fascinated and repulsed.

By Booker B on 3/29/2008 7:51 PM

I can just hear the planning meeting: "Great concept! We'll need to get a spot for it that's got HUGE traffic so it gets the exposure it deserves."

By Booker B on 3/17/2008 7:48 PM

News: The Fed gives up trying to stick its finger further and further into the dike and resorts to frantic bailing. Diesel powered bilge pumps are on order, but running them on $4 a gallon fuel is going to hurt.

Views: So how will our economic regulators -- [Hmmmm? Snicker or barf? Snicker or barf? I can't decide which is the right reaction to that term.] -- anyway, how will they affect incentives for market participants in the long term by placing this floor under their downside risk? Not saying intervention is bad or unneeded. When Bear Stearns is at risk, something pretty dramatic needs to happen. But it just about has to encourage ever wilder speculation if the traders know they'll be allowed to fall only so far before being rescued for the good of the markets as a whole. In effect, I suspect it'll erase the last traces of difference between investment and speculation -- if any still existed anywhere but in my imagination.

...

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