The Crash Et Al

The House voted down the bailout bill today and the stock market crashed c. 770 points--the biggest or second biggest drop in its history. Wachovia Bank went under. Pelosi caused the bill to be voted down by giving a very partisan speech that made the GOPs mad, or the bill was full of pork barrell addedintos, or yaddayadda. Drudge and the WSJ sites and all the news and opinion sites have the accounts of what happened. W is going to give a speech tomorrow morning. And 33 people got killed in Bagdad by a car bomb, and it got reported on the back page of our local paper. Saturday in Des Moines a guy got killed and his son injured when the truck they were driving behind blew a back tire which flew into their pickup. Big Bang Theory was funny tonight, as was 2.5 Men. Sheen and Cryer and good actors, whether I like the premise of the show or not. Am currently watching a late night cage fighting match from Sioux City, which seems to be the state capitol of cage fighting. McCaine is in town for the night to meet with some local business leaders tomorrow. A local yuppie bookstore went broke today in the new east side of downtown yuppie block. It is the 3rd or 4th upscale store to close in the area in the last year. The owner was blaming the big stores(Borders and Daltons), but the main reason may be that books have reached 40 bucks for a hardcover, and even the upscale folks cannot afford the prices. I guess this will be all for right now. The nation's economy is the main news and more expert people on the web can explain it better than I can, even with my brilliant knowledge of world affairs. Interesting that I keep mentioning websites for the news instead of print news. Must be the 21st century way of getting information. Di di mau!

Sad Saturday Night

The national money crisis is still not settled, and the Debate last night with JMc and BHO was not earth shaking--I thought. B seems to have kept giving his standard speech, and on foreign affairs kept talking about using 21st century diplomacy and not 20th century diplomacy--whatever he meant by that. Fifty years ago the Kennedys were going to start doing New things in the world, and not that old Ike stuff, and JFK ended up laying the ground for Nam. I was not too impressed with either candidate. Just my own opinion. Teddy Kennedy had a seizure yesterday; I assume he will die in the near future. Paul Newman has died. He was around acting for almost 50 years, and has been in our lives. Not a good sentence, but he was around for a big chunk of my life--and made a large bunch of classic movies I should some time rent to watch. The more movies I think of he made the more I start remembering, even if I have only seen a few of them. I left a message on another website about Newman method acting like crazy in The Left Handed Gun, in which he chewed up the screen as Billy the Kid. And there is my favorite Cool Hand Luke, and also Slap Shot. I should get out my video of Hud, which I have trouble watching cuz I snivvle when the cowboys have to shoot the old man's pet longhorns. I was brought up with cattle. This is going to be all for right now. I will blog more next time. You take care. Di di mau!

More stuff while awaiting the Crash

W and the Wise Ones in DC had their big meeting today to deal with the national money mess--and nothing got done, except for W making a brilliant statement about the Economy, "That sucker's gonna do down!" Hannity and Colmes and Anne Coulter and some "experts" had a real yelling brawl on H and C's show tonight. And I am just a little teeny disappointed that I could get across town to see the band that appeared at a local kids' music joint; the band was led by Pete Best, the early Beatles drummer who was kicked out(John could not stand Pete's mother) and replaced by Ringo. Maybe the paper tomorrow will tell us how many 60something Beatles fans jammed into the room to mingle with the 20somethings to see the 5th Beatle. He did get interviewed on local TV news. In Omaha some guy dumped ten of his kids(from 1 to 17) at a local hospital to be sheltered and then disappeared(he had 2 other kids he did dump at another shelter.) That is what is making the regional news. North of here on the Interstate a truck plowed into some road crew guys working along the road and killed 2 of them and injured several more. The news is sketchy on this tragedy. So far in this early a.m. there is no word on whether the O and Mac debate at Old Miss will be held tomorrow night. Why it was scheduled on everybody's football Friday night eludes me, but no one called me about the scheduling. There is a docu on TV Guide channel right now about Ozzy Osbourne, but I have the tube on mute. This will be all for right now. You take care and I hope we have Money for a few more days. Di di mau!

Waiting for the Crash

Since the last entry the USA economy seems to be waiting for the Big Crash. The Wise Ones in DC seem to be unable to decide what to do, and are holding hearings and hearings, but the big bailout package is still being worked on. I know that news followers are understanding all this more than I am, and I am supposedly educated. I have been going through GoogleEarth to look at the overhead views of the big cities of the world, and it is amazing how large burgs like Mumbai and Tokyo are. I found the view of Soc Trang Vietnam, and the town looks like it did 40 years ago, and the airfield where we were stationed is still there. The runway is the same one but the hootches are gone, and I could not tell if some the old French colonial buildings in the area are still around. Some of the big cities on Google are of poor overhead viewing. Lagos must have been photographed at night, and some other cities were cloud-covered. Maybe that is the way the earth is. The views of Paris is somewhat blurred. What is going on in Des Moines is a wave of murders. In the politics news there is now a blog binge about Biden having said that FDR was elected president in 1929, and gave his fireside chats on TV. And there is a rumor that OB will dump Biden soon and pick HRC as his running mate. Nejad came to the UN today and talked crazy(I think) and W showed up and gave a speech no one paid much attention to on the News. This is going to be all for right now. We are supposed to get thunderstorms but so far just rolling thunder(tater wagons). Will return soon. Di di mau!

What About the Money?

Yesterday was a Black Tuesday. Lehman Bros. crashed, and then AIG began crashing, and I need to look up what is going to happen to Merrill Lynch, and the money pundits were talking about Morgan Stanley being in big trouble, and I need to look into my Money websites to see what is going on. Are we heading toward another 1929? Gas is going back up at Quick Trip, and I noticed some 4 dollar bread at Hy Vee. And the Russian stock market crashed and has been closed for 2 days. Much much more money news to try to get into my head, but this is just a very short summary. The latest giggle news from the campaign is that Sarah when governor of Alaska bought(why is bought spelled with a gh?) herself a tanning bed. And a guy in a political blog I read called her Saraccuda Mooselini. Kinda clever; I am not a total devotee of the lady for various reasons. Someone's pet tiger was spotted on Galveston roaming loose trying to get something to eat. Everything in the Houston area is a mess, or reported as such; no food, no electricity, no water. Back on the financial crisis; I assume that the big money guys in NYC who screwed up their companies are old enough now(of my age) to have been Masters of the Universe yuppie MBAs 30 years ago, and look at how they ran High Finance. Limbaugh and the pundits this afternoon are holding that so many companies are wanting govt. bailouts that we are seeing the coming of Socialist Finance--the govt. controlling the financial markets. That is probably poor wording of what I am trying to say. On another topic, I have found Google Earth, and am now on a kick of finding the satellite views of places all over the world that I assume I will never visit in reality. Some really great overhead views of some cities, and some that are not that clear to see, but an education in human living. A lot of cities seem to consist of a city center, a residential area of jammed together blocks of hovels, a lake for city water, and soccer fields. I will probably blog more on googleearth in upcoming blogs. A new hobby I need to not get so obsessed with that I cannot get out into the open and out of my room. This is going to be all for right now. You take care. Di di mau!

After Ike

Hurrucane Ike hit Galveston and Houston yesterday and did a Job on both places. Houston is without water and power and the glass windows were blown out of a lot of downtown skyscrapers and the bill for all the damage may be 18 billion bucks, and many pages could be devoted to the wreckage from the storm. Not much of a blog writeup on such a mind boggling disaster, but at least I have noted that it happened. The web is full of news on the event. And yesterday 2 trains crashed into one another headon in LA and at least 25 people on the commuter train were killed, and the news tonight is that the commuter train engineer was text messaging right before the crash. It has been steamy and cloudy in Des Moines all weekend and the whole population seems to be in a bad mood as of now. I rented an old movie I had never seen before that seemed as if it might have some insights into Palin. The flik was Kisses for My President. Fred MacMurray was the First Husband when his wife Polly Bergen become the 1st woman president. Really cheap black and white movie that seemed like a 1964 TV movie, but it actually had some stuff in it that was a little like what has actually happened in the last few decades. Fred almost has an affair with an old girlfriend, and at the end of the movie Polly gets preggers in her middle age and resigns the presidency. Shades of Palin, Nixon, and Clinton, in a movie released in 1964. Nejad from Iran is supposedly coming back to New York for another visit. Considering all the natural and mechanical disasters that have occurred this weekend this is a very short blog entry, but all the reportage can be found on a whole bunch of professional news sites. so, this is going to be all for right now. You take care. Di di mau!

Wet Thursday Night on 9-11

It is pouring down rain tonight in the central USA--maybe caused by Hurricane Ike, which wrecked Cuba and Haiti, and is moving toward the coast of Texas tonight. Ike will not go away. I have not typed anything for a while because the puter was not working right, but has gotten fixed. It is amazing that one can get addicted to having the internet and seem lost without the thing. I lived many many years without having this invention and now I feel lost if I cannot turn it on to get information. Intellectuals keep moaning that the whole culture lives on the net and no one reads regular books or papers anymore and everyone is getting such a short attention span that no one can do normal reading. I think I am in that group, but the internet is such an amazing creation that I keep finding new interesting things on the web. I am devoted to the web and thank the powers that be that it is available for us. Enough of that. The news is dominated by the election campaign, which should go into history as a really interesting piece of History. A black guy beats out a white woman who thought she would be Crowned as a candidate or a president, and the Repubs select an old white guy who almost blew his campaign a year ago and beats the front runners and then picks a strange woman governor of Alaska as his veep, and she gets all the attention and she is either hated or worshipped. I am not totally sold on Sarah Palin, even if she does shoot mooses like Teddy Roosevelt. In an upcoming blog entry I may cut loose and give my full opinion on the whole campaign. The hurricane season has been a wild one. H Gustav was predicted to be so bad that the whole gulf coast in the New Orleans area was evacuated, and then Gustav turned out to be a big wind and rain storm instead of a total Katrina type hurricane. I am now watching Cspan show the ceremony at the Pentagon for 9-11 and am starting to get weepy as I sometimes do when I get emotional about the whole event, so I should pull myself together. I worked years ago with a lady whose husband was killed at the Towers when the towers fell on the Marriott hotel between the towers. I hope the candidates say some time during the next few weeks that This Will Never Happen Again. This is going to be all for right now. You take care and now that the computer is working again I may have more to type next time. Di di mau!