2009 February

	2009, FEBRUARY

February 24: Waits & Measures

Papa John is currently advertising a pizza “30% bigger than our regular large.” Regular large? What kind of measuring system is this?

I suppose it’s perfectly rational, considering. Since we never managed to sell the American people on the metric system, we are stuck with what we got.

Whatever that may be.

A pint of beer is 16 ounces. A pint of strawberries is 8 ounces. If you puree a pint of strawberries, you have something less than a half-pint of slush. Who’s idea was that? Two pints make a quart. Eight quarts make a peck of strawberries, but if it’s beer, eight quarts make a party. Four pecks make a bushel, except in England where you would need another 69 cubic inches to get a bushel.

Sixteen ounces is also a pound. Unless you are a pharmacist or you’re weighing gold, in which case twelve ounces make a pound. But pharmacists’ ounces are bigger and jewelers’ pounds are smaller, so it all works out in the end. Sort of. In England a pound is about a buck and a half at the moment.

Then there’s the short hundredweight, which is a perfectly logical 100 pounds. And the long hundredweight, which is 112. There are also short and long tons, which only require you to multiply by 20.

A mile is 5,280 feet. Unless it’s in water, in which case it’s 6,080 feet, give or take. On the ocean there are also geographical miles, mathematical miles, telegraph miles, marine miles, and glider miles. All different, but not by much. While we’re at sea, a fathom was originally defined as the length of the king’s outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, and then standardized at six feet. Why they used feet to measure arms is beyond me. A foot is a couple of inches longer than my foot, but substantially shorter than Shaquille O’Neal’s. A board foot, on the other hand, is 12x12x1 inches unless you are buying boards. In that case, the lumberyard defines an inch as 3/4 of an inch and a foot as what you would have had before they trimmed it, so a board foot is some indefinite amount smaller than a board foot.

Four quarts make a gallon, which is why they are called quarts. Unless you are in England or some (not all, but some) Commonwealth nations, in which case a gallon is 46.4 cubic inches larger.

England’s billions are bigger, too. In fact, a thousand times bigger than ours. That’s why the British economic disaster sounds less disastrous than ours.

Dollars don’t really belong in a discussion about measures, unless you are trying to figure out what they’re worth. A U.S. dollar is worth maybe 30 cents, but a Canadian dollar is worth .84 dollars. That may seem a bit loonie, but not compared to the Zimbabwean dollar. You would need 876 of those to get one greenback, and that’s only after they lopped off 10 zeros from the old ZWD. And at the present rate, our dollar will be worth 1000 of the ones with Mugabe’s picture by tomorrow. (ed. note: 5 days later, the USD is listed at 15454.545 ZWD on one exchange, 9221.5 on another, and 3584.47 on a third. I don’t know what this means, but I have a feeling there is money to be made….) Hong Kong also uses dollars, worth 13 cents apiece.

Try to keep them straight, or I’ll start in on cubits. One equatorial meridian is 86,400,000 egyptian cubits, or 87,552 statute cubits…. This is getting a little far afield.

Speaking of fields, a hectare (from the French for “100 acres”) is a little under 2 1/2 acres. That is 10,000 square meters, or one square hectometer. It should not be confused with a hectacre, which would be 100 acres if it existed, since “hecto-“ means “hundred.” A hectacre could easily be confused with a hectare, since Wikipedia says they are the same thing and everybody else thinks I made them up. But then, WikiAnswers thinks a hectacre is 10 acres. This is giving me a headace (2 1/2, 10, or 100 headaches). I think I’ll go lie down on my bed, which is a California King, either four inches longer and four inches narrower or four inches shorter and four inches wider than a King size. Go figure.

February 21: Air pollution

News today is that Congress has decided to delay the final conversion to digital TV another four months. Seems two years notice was not enough, and there is a fear that some people might be cut off. Besides, the coupon program providing rebates for the converter boxes has run out of money, so the laggards might not get reimbursed. Like nobody thought of that before. Like the program will suddenly get an influx of money from some part of the government stimulus/bailout package in the next few months.

The same afternoon, later news says the congress voted down the delay…

Some time later, the lege changed its alleged mind again and except for a few areas like Santa Barbara and San Diego, which are barging ahead this week and damn the consequences, the official deadline for conversion will now be June 12. They say it’s to give you another chance to run out and get a converter box, but I think the plan is for everybody to take their stimulus check to Best Buy and get a new TV.

I’m ahead of the game. I got a new TV and also a converter box for the old one. Both are hooked up to rabbit ears. The picture on the new TV looked great except when the signal disappeared, which was often enough to make me want to throw large and heavy objects at the screen. My solution was to invest in a bigger rabbit. It worked pretty well. The new antenna, which looks disturbingly like the starship Enterprise, has its own remote, and you can set it to rotate to the optimum position for each channel. Without even getting off the bed.

We get a lot more channels now, which got me to thinking. How many different signals are floating out there waiting for me to tune them in? And every one on a different carrier wave. There are hundreds of them, just for TV. Hey! They’re waves! I just figured out why they call it “channel surfing”! Then there’s satellite radio, which has another million separate broadcasts including, I’m told, one for classical music. And that’s not to mention the bazillion different cell phone calls, wireless internet connections, who knows what all else, all buzzing invisibly around my head at once, all trying to (or trying not to) occupy the same space at the same time. I guess waves can do that, but I don’t see why they don’t interfere with each other.

Talk about air pollution. The particulates in the air, the stuff you can see and smell, are the least of it. Mark my words, no good will come of this.

February 18

The California Public Utilities Commission is voting on which of the two proposals submitted by Southern California Edison to approve. The PUC’s “consumer watchdog” division thinks they need a 4% increase, so SCE has asked for 20% in what would be the state’s “first major increase since it was revealed last month that the economy is in its worst shape since the Great Depression."

But that’s not so bad. The Goldern (that’s another one of those typos that seems oddly appropriate, so I’m leaving it in. My psychiatrist always said there were no accidents.) (sometimes called the Golden) State Water Company is in line for a 30% increase next year, with smaller increases over the next few years to keep up with their “authorized” profit margin. Why can’t I get an authorized profit margin? And when did authorized become synonymous with guaranteed?

February 14: Where are the new fogeys?

Life is like jumping off a building in the dark of night without knowing how tall the building is. You know what’s going to happen, you just don’t know when. I have now plummeted past 66 windows: so far, so good.

Having passed so many windows, I have finally caught up to Social Security. It hasn’t collapsed before my time (as I always expected it would), and the administration hasn’t “borrowed” all of the money to pay for wars and other foolish things. They raised the age of eligibility, but not as fast as I raised my own age, so I have finally caught up. My first check arrived today. Not a moment too soon, either.

I was going to frame it and hang it on the wall, but there’s no place left on the wall so I decided to put it in the bank. Then I thought, since the U.S. Treasury is now the majority shareholder in my bank, that would be like giving it back. So then I thought I would cash it while I could. Then I realized that the bank would just give me some of that green paper that’s basically an IOU from the very same U.S.Treasury. So I spent it on a week at the beach. The best economic stimulus package is the realization that your money is worthless so you might as well trade it in on something you can actually use before everybody else figures it out.

Anyway, Social Security: in honor of this momentous occasion, I present my personal list of ways You Know You’re Old.

You know you’re old…

…when the produce guy at the supermarket calls you “young man.”

…when your hairbrush has more hair than you have.

…when your barber starts trimming your ears.

…when your friends are flying to the south of France, but you’d rather stay home than get on a plane.

…when you decide to grow a beard and nothing happens.

…when you start thinking of your vintage rather than your age.

…when you can’t remember if you said that, or just thought it.

…when you can’t remember if you thought that, or just said it.

…when you’re the only person on the beach in long pants.

…when you don’t recognize the kid on your driver’s license.

…when you think you look good in a hat.

…when you no longer sleep with your teeth.

…when you eat the bruised cherries out of a sense of kinship.

…when you have so many pills to take with breakfast they are your breakfast.

…when you hurt in only two places: your back and your front.

…when you can’t remember whether your memory used to be better.

…when someone asks how you felt about the 2008 election and you thought he said “erection.”

…when you start making lists of how you know you’re old.

February 12

Have you noticed that you never have to buy new shoelaces any more? The shoes wear out before the laces. I don’t know if they are making the laces better or the shoes worse.

Which brings up the question of security at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Spokesman Kevin Roark reported that they have lost 69 computers, but stressed that “no classified information has been lost.”

That would be reassuring if he hadn’t chosen his words so carefully. The problem is not that they have lost the information—it’s still on the 70th computer, which they still have—but that everybody else has it, too.

February 10

Remember AIG? The insurance giant that Henry Paulson decided needed 150 billion dollars because it was too big to fail? Yeah, that AIG. The reason they were in trouble is because of the credit default swaps and other “securities” that their Derivatives Department got them into. That division alone lost $34 billion. Now if you or I lost $34 billion, we’d probably be in line at the soup kitchen. But that’s not how AIG operates. You recall, I’m sure, the half-million dollar party they threw themselves days after Paulson came through with the government’s largesse. Fortunately they still had $450 million left to offer “retention” bonuses to those nice folks in the Derivatives Department. They were afraid some of them might quit and go get a better job at Citibank? They needed to retain them because, um, because…wait a minute. I guess it’s a good thing these guys aren’t running around loose. They should be harmless enough behind the walls of AIG, an institution into which no one in his right mind would put money. This will eventually cause AIG to fail, or to collect another 100 billion or so from the newest financial genius on the block, Tim Geithner. You remember ol’ Tim, the guy who used TurboTax to cheat on his taxes because he was too cheap to hire a decent crooked accountant.

I think for any institution that is “too big to fail” failure should not be an option, it should be mandatory. It will be painful, but it’s going to happen eventually anyway and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner we can get on with our recovery. I’m thinking that might be the best course of action for the economy in general, too. We can throw a trillion or so dollars that don’t actually exist at the problem, but the depression is going to happen anyway. The global economy is rearranging itself. We might as well accept the inevitable and hope we have something left at the other end.

February 6. Fool’s Gold:

The hopes of American chefs are once again up in smoke, as a Norwegian cook has won the biennial Bocuse d’Or in Lyon, France. Not that it came as a great surprise—the honor has gone to either a Frenchman or a Norwegian ever since chef Paul Bocuse initiated the competition in 1987—but it was still a major disappointment for the folks at the French Laundry. If you are not a foodie, you should know that the French Laundry is neither French nor laundry, but a sublimely expensive restaurant in northern California. They supported their sous chef’s training for a year and sent him and his lovely young assistant, whose title of sous sous chef is only whispered into their palms by associates, to Lyon in hopes of finally bringing the gold to America. I understand that they left the rat home, which was probably their undoing. Or it may have been the beef cheeks.

I could have told him it was hopeless when I heard he was preparing beef cheeks. I don’t like the idea of eating something that was eating before I got there.

The Bocuse d’Or is regarded as the Nobel Prize of chefery. The winner receives a saucepan full of Euros and a gold bust of the father of French nouvelle cuisine, none other than Bocuse himself. Can you imagine the ego of a man who recognizes the (second) best chef in the world with a golden ME? I’ve known surgeons who weren’t that narcissistic.

I can think of better more appropriate subjects for the statuette. For French cuisine, why not an icon of the truffle-sniffer, the Cochon d’Or? I was myself honored many years ago with the Golden Urinal, but it’s a story I’m not really in the mood to tell.

February 1 or maybe 2 or three, whatever. I'm on vacation.

Not about the Superbowl.

The Senate confirmed Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary despite some concern about how he managed to “forget” to pay $34,000 in taxes. The former chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says he used TurboTax, and it failed to remind him he had to pay tax for Social Security and Medicare.

As with all cabinet appointees, he released his financial statement, indicating a net worth of somewhere between $740,000 and $1.7 million.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to let a guy who was head of the NY Federal Reserve Bank but still used TurboTax to do his own return and isn’t worth more than a million bucks making major financial decisions for the nation.

Think about it. He neglected $34,000 in taxes. If you can overlook a sum like that, your total tax bill has to be somewhere on the order of magnitude of what he claims as his total net worth. Maybe he has a lot of bills. Or a lot of deductions. Is that funny smell is coming from the direction of Denmark?

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

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