Category: Dollars and nonsense

Stimulate my package

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Don't leave home without it.
Don't leave home without it.

I’m not an economist. I don’t even play one on TV. So I don’t feel qualified to comment on the arcane machinations under way in Congress. But I do like this economic-stimulus proposal from Dan Newman, owner of a retail food store in Seattle: Send every U.S. taxpaper a $2,000 debit card.

Sure, the Repugs will call it socialism, a convenient catch-all phrase meaning “anything Rush Limbaugh doesn’t like.” But if I got me two large, I’m buyin’ something with it — goods, services or both — and someone has to provide them. Jobs, baby, jobs.

Case in point: Right now I’m not enjoying my usual week of “training camp”  at McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona, in part because of extended labor negotiations and in part because we just spent a ton of cash repairing Herself’s Subaru. But give me a debit card with a picture of Lady Liberty on it and I’m a gone dog, enriching gas stations, brewpubs, hotels, restaurants and campgrounds in three states.

New computer? Same old problem. This ol’ sumbitch limps worse than a three-legged hound with a butt full of buckshot, and I’d put it down in a New York minute if I had a brand-new one in line to replace it, but we seem to be short of simoleons in these parts. Where’s my ObamaCard®, honey? Whaddaya mean, there’s an elephant sitting on it? Well, shoot the fucker and at least we’ll have meat in the freezer!

Just 364 shopping days until Christmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

Are you out and about, greedily snapping up those post-Christmas deals? Me neither. And we have plenty of company, according to The New York Times. The dismal post-holiday buying follows a hideous pre-Christmas shopping season, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and passed along by Steve Benen at Political Animal, who is predicting widespread bankruptcies among retailers in the new year. Oh, goody.

I just took a drive through Bibleburg’s downtown after retrieving the Subie from Heuberger, and the sting in my wallet pocket failed to distract me from noting that Tejon Street wasn’t exactly rocking with shoppers. The malls may be doing a little better, but I’ll be damned if I’ll visit one to check it out. I hate those places. And anyway, I’m stony broke.

The eagle has landed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

The snowman lives. And the traditional O’Grady-family Christmas flick — Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” — is queued up for viewing just as soon as a certain wine-sipping hash-slinger finishes his pre-holiday cookery.

The posole is done, as are the Anasazi beans with chipotle chile and the pico de gallo, and the green-chile sauce is on deck. That leaves only the chicken breast to cook and shred, the corn tortillas to fry, the cheese to grate and the enchiladas to assemble and cook. Oh, yeah, and the potatoes to dice, toss with Chimayo red chile and chopped onion, and roast. And jeez, the chicken quesadillas. Can’t forget the appetizers.

Back in the kitchen. There’s chicken to cook and shred. If I wait to do the green chile until tomorrow, the house will smell like Santa Fe, but without all the silver and turquoise. Happy holidays to you and yours from the Zen Druid, who hugs the tree, even though he knows that it is an illusion.

Didja get any onya?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

The Decider has finally turned the money hose on Detroit, and don’t I wish I were standing nearby with a bucket. One of my paychecks has mysteriously gone walkabout again and Visa would like nothing better than to get me by the plums with a downhill pull.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the holiday season, there’s a fresh rant up at VeloNews.com. No charge. Think of it as my little gift to you this Zappadan.

Interesting concept, eh? I get paid (or don’t, as the case may be) to dash off my little online japes. The editors get paid to read and post it. And the publisher has to write the check (or not). But you, you lucky devils — you get off scot-free. Except for having to notice all those bloody ads for this and that in your peripheral vision, which does tax the eyeballs, does it not?

Not only is my stuff free to you, it’s easily accessible. Couple clicks of the mouse and there I am in all my pointless, content-free glory. It’s a pretty specialized delivery system, when you think about it. If all you care about is reading me, or Lennard Zinn, or Bob Mionske, you don’t have to thumb through a wad of other stuff to get to us. Click, click and off you go.

(More on this later. Herself is screeching that I look like a coconut and am in dire need of a haircut.)

OK, I’m freshly shaven and back to deep thought. I click the mouse for my national and international news, coverage of fringe sports like cycling, leftist political commentary and expert advice I can use to make my life richer (investment advice, recipes from elite chefs, and so on). I know where to go and how to get there.

I would like to read local news, too, and plenty of it, without having to wade through a wad of other stuff that is more easily available online: the aforementioned national and international news; pointless coverage of mainstream professional sports already covered to excess by TV; and the endless smelly pile of treacly features keyed to days of the week (Food, Life, Money, et al). But I can’t get local and regional news — not a lot of it, anyway, and certainly not reliably — with a click of the mouse.

If the Gazette were to do without all the trappings that defined the Newspaper v1.0 and become a strictly local news source, I might subscribe again. But if it keeps trying to be all things to all people, I’ll continue to withhold my pennies and watch it die a slow, lingering death.

Late update: Incidentally, if this post seems even more scatter-brained than usual, it may be because the cats were dancing on my head at 4 a.m. and set me to thinking creakily about some of the excellent comments in an earlier post.

Mmm, stimulus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

OK, who feels economically stimulated? Raise your hands, please. Eeeyeww, put ’em back in your laps, you filthy bastards, they’re all sticky.

The notion of going further into debt — credit cards, auto loans, what have you — leaves me feeling fiscally flaccid, frankly. I just don’t think I can get it up for buying a bunch of crap, no matter how shiny it is, if it means that in six months when VeloNews gets sold to Condé Nasty and Bicycle Retailer becomes a quarterly online newsletter some repo’ man name of Guido is gonna kick in the door of my refrigerator box down by Fountain Creek and take it all back.

Maybe I can get a job running off thousand-dollar bills at the Denver Mint. That seems to be where all the action is these days:

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.

Oh, goody. Make that a bicycle box down by Shook’s Run.

Meanwhile, my buddy Matt reminds me that the bailout so far amounts to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, according to Bloomberg. That’s enough money to pay off half the mortgages in the country, conduct nine times the warfare we’ve already laid on Iraq and Afghanistan, and build a gold-plated escalator to the International Space Station.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it sounds about as sensible as propping up an elite class of paper-hangers so they can hose us all over again once we dummy up and resume buying shit on credit.

But enough about our crumbling economy. We’ve got a real crisis right here — cops rousting body Nazis from Santa Monica’s medians. Oh, the humanity.