Overheard

At the Under-11s cricket this morning, someone shouted out "Who put pretzels in my pants?". And it wasn't me.

Jamie does what?

You'd think that with this financial crisis - and the talk about him being the next Secretary of the Treasury - that Jamie Dimon would be a busy man. (For those of you hand-knitting organic yoghurt as you read this, he's the CEO of JPMorgan Chase). But, at least according to the Telegraph, he's got time on his hands.

Headline reads "JP Morgan Chase chief Dimon sent death threats". I was afraid to read the article. He's supposed to be saving the world's financial system, not sending nasty notes to people.

Helen from Hurstville

There's a daily giveaway newspaper here, the Mx, and if I get the train home from work I often grab a copy to read. My train journey is one stop, it takes about two minutes, but that's usually enough.

There's a letter in there today, from Helen, who (if she exists) lives in Hurstville. That's a suburb of Sydney that's about as appealing as it sounds. She writes:

VOTERS don't care who former Secretary of State Colin Powell is going to vote for, or who former Secretary of State Colin Powell thinks voters should vote for. Voters choose who they want, not who former Secretary of State Colin Powell wants them to vote for. That type of pressuring should be illegal.

I'm trying to put myself in her shoes here, and it's not easy. Let's assume this is a real mail from a real person - Helen, who lives in Hurstville. As opposed to a university student with too much time on his hands. Somehow she's managed to get very upset about Colin Powell endorsing Obama, and I do notice that each of the three times she mentions Powell she calls him 'former Secretary of State Colin Powell', which is nice, at least. If a little clumsy.

She starts with "Voters don't care..", and then there's "voters choose...". By which I'm guessing she means that she doesn't care, and she's happy to generalise from there. (But of course the whole point is that she does care, otherwise she wouldn't be writing this, surely.) And which voters is she talking about exactly? The ones in her street? Other people stuck in Hurstville? More worryingly, is she under the impression that she and her neighbors are going to be voting in the US Presidential Election?

And then the final desperate flourish. "That type of pressuring should be illegal." She's seen a 15-second thing on the TV news about Powell endorsing Obama and she's feeling like she's being pressured. (I'm discounting here the possibility that Powell showed up at her house and kept badgering her about her voting intentions in some inappropriate way.)

Speaking of the US Presidential election, my sons will both be eligible to vote in 8 years time. So look out.

Nothing

There's a horrifying interview with Levi Johnston (father of Bristol Palin's daughter). First the good bit. He talks about the pressure of appearing at the republican convention, and says

"At first, I was nervous," he said. "Then I was like, ' Whatever'."

This is brilliant, of course. Superb use of 'whatever'. But then the bad bit. They ask him about Barack Obama. He says...

"I don't know anything about him. He seems like a good guy. I like him."

Yes, read it again, carefully. He doesn't know anything about Barack Obama.

Croc

Great headline in the Australian today "Human remains inside crocodile". Well he would, wouldn't he?

Bailout

There's an article in today's NYT about how the bailout's shifting towards direct capital injections into banks. So far so good, and it is interesting how the focus of the bailout has changed over the last week or so. It's a nice, lucid overview piece. And then it has this...

"Industry executives .... also begged Mr. Paulson not to impose tough restrictions on executive pay and golden-parachute deals for executives who are fired." Well they would, wouldn't they?

Your

I was browing some profiles on a personals site - purely for research purposes - and I found a real gem. A woman goes on and on about the sort of man she wants and then she finishes off with:

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF BLOCKED ITS NOT MY FAULT YOUR ILLITERATE

Their fault

There's been an interesting theme in The Australian the last couple of days. Bit of background: the government (it's since lost power) changed the tax laws so that there was a window of opportunity where people who were cashed-up could put unusually large amounts of money into superannuation schemes (like a pension, or a 401k). It was a one-time deal, a temporary increase in the amount of money that could be put aside in a tax-efficient way.

Many people did this, and if I had had a decent amount of cash I would have too. Between April and June last year people put $15billion aside like this. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight this probably wasn't a great time to put money into the market. But that's only with the benefit of hindsight - at the time it seemed like a good idea, especially because everyone else was.

So what's happened? Well, the market's gone down. It does that - it goes up sometimes, it goes down sometimes. In today's Australian, on page 2, there's an interview with a bloke who put $900,000 aside in this fashion. He's lost just over a quarter of it, which isn't that unusual.

What I love about this is that he's blaming the government for giving him the tax incentives in the first place. "Mark Amdur.. was among the thousands of Australians who ploughed $15billion into superannuation between April and June last year to reap the Howard government's generous tax concessions" (I query the use of 'reap' here, but that's a separate issue.)

He goes on to say "I took advantage of the tax concession, realising it was a one-off thing, a sop to the electorate before the 2007 election. I've since lost a bit of money but that's the way it goes... the market's down, everyone's down."

No, of course I'm making that up. The interviewer says (and I so wish this was a direct quote) that he said he thought it was what the government wanted him to do. So in other words, he wasn't doing it because he thought he could make money by squirreling away assets in a favorable tax environment, he was doing it because the government wanted him to. And now that it's all gone a bit wrong, it's their fault for leading him on.

So there. I don't want to sound mean, and I have a great deal of sympathy for people like Mr Amdur. I've lost money too, and I don't like it either. But I'm not going to blame it on voices in my head.

You put what in what?

Another kitchen-related whinge. I was making breakfast this morning for my kids, cooking up porridge (or oatmeal, if you prefer). Number 2 son was having cereal, which he was going to follow up with a bowl of porridge. He takes after me.

The porridge smelled a little strange. I'd noticed this at one point last week, I thought it had smelled a bit fishy; number 2 son differed, he thought it was chicken-y. This happened two days in a row, then I noticed the oatmeal was about a year past its use-by date and I threw it out and bought some new stuff. I appreciate that oatmeal might get stale, but how would it get fishy? A mystery. All was fine for a few days.

Then this morning I went to the supermarket early with number 2 daughter, we'd run out of milk. I sent her to get it while I bought some fruit. I noticed that she'd come back with what was advertised as "kids' milk", which, judging from the label is regular milk that's been boosted with omega-3. I didn't care.

So this morning I noticed a vaguely fishy smell to the porridge as I was cooking it. Then number 2 said his cereal tasted strange. Then I realised. They had put fish-oil in the f&*cking milk.

Toaster

I'm staying in my ex-wife's house this week and I'm going to have a whinge about the toaster. Yes, that's what I'm reduced to. I know you're doing that rolling-your-eyes thing but bear with me.

We got this toaster as a wedding present (I think) which is fine. You'll notice it's quite wide (or maybe long, depending on how you look at it). It's quite a lot wider than, say, a slice of bread. So it looks as though it was designed to toast two slices of bread at once. NO! It's not quite wide enough. If you put two normal-sized slices of bread in it they jam together in the middle, and when you push the lever thingy to make then go down they get all jammed together in a very disagreeable way.

When I use it, I try to imagine what the process was like for designing it. Did they deliberately create a toaster that was designed to toast something that's long, but not quite as long as two slices of bread placed next to each other? What would that thing be? And why not give it, say, an extra inch of width while they were at it? In my mind's eye I see a meeting at the toaster company, the young edgy guys from design are showing off this new model that's designed to toast longer bread, and some been-around-the-traps executive (in my revisionist toaster fantasy it's ME) waves his hands to shut them up and tells them to lengthen it just a little bit more. They're struck dumb, his wisdom is so obvious, so humbling.

Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. More likely it was just all a bit haphazard, the toaster's an evolutionary backwater. On the other hand the toaster's worked fine for 14 years, which is longer than the marriage.