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.

Beer

You'll thank me for this later, I know. I discovered today that if you have a beer that doesn't have a twist-top (and the Peroni pictured here is a perfect example, given that it's exactly the beer I had in my hand when I made this discovery) and you can't find a bottle-opener, you can use a kickstand from a kids' bicycle.

Perfect!