LIFE.

via ttam, I present a perfect visual metaphor for, well, everything lately.

more ether, george

I awoke in a black depression this morning, only to be jollied into a fit of giggling by the Aardvark's Curious George Culture Wars post.

The other day we had discussed the difference between "cripes" and "yeesh", both of which she uses as tags for posts on del.icio.us. It was my opinion that "cripes" could be used for any type of fucked-up situation, but that "yeesh" indicated not only that things were really jacked, but that someone was being a total lamer.

This is why the government needs to track us on the Internet, because the difference between a cripes and a yeesh is just the kind of subtle code that our biowarfare sleeper cell the terrorists use to signal their cohorts.

gaucho gaucho

Maciej Ceglowski's blog popped up new stuff in my rss reader today. Of particular interest are:

• One hell of a bank robbery in Argentina
  
  
• Serious penguin action

Good stuff, good stuff.

Buying a house? Watch out for paradigms

torgo_x forwarded the most clear and forceful explanation of how really bad mortgage ideas work, and why the current situation can't end well. Math is hard, and optimism is easy. I'd guess a lot of the people who do this think of themselves as risk-takers who are going to win. I wish them all luck tripling their incomes in the next five years.

I wonder what the impact of a really bad housing crash would have in Orange County. Not only is real estate development a big local industry, but that whole slimy subprime mortgage business is mostly here too. So much so that we refer to big-spending young guys who party hard as "mortgage bro's".

If there's no more money for the next swathe of terra cotta boxes in Temecula, and no more spiffs for selling predatory refi's to hicks, and no more interest-only ARM crazy home loans to sell, that's a big chunk of the local wealth just flat fucking gone. It could be as bad as the Great Defense Slump of the 1970s, which was a carnival of suicidal dads, boarded up ranch-style homes, and 40 year old draftsmen lining up for government aid and retraining programs. Oh by the way, those are gone now because we didn't need them in the New Economy. Whoo boy.

yo, johari.

I like this idea even though it's a THING on the LIVEJOURNAL that everyone is doing.

THIS IS MY JOHARI WINDOW

So you pick adjectives that describe the person and then the person sees what adjectives others pick. The idea is that you get some clue which things about your personal self assessment make sense to others and vice versa.

honk.