… and a temperature of -20 Celsius (with the wind chill factored in)?

The walk around my neighbourhood that da missus takes me on, that’s what. Me darlin’ wife has a regular walking partner from down the road. Lately, that lady hasn’t been feeling up to going so my wife takes me as a partially willing second choice. Tonight, I decided to put a pedometer on to measure the distance in paces and it came to, you guessed it, 8900 steps.

Can you guess how cold it was?

Explanation of how “Derivative Markets” destroyed the World Economy…

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Detroit .

By providing her customers’ freedom from immediate payment demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since, Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Heidi’s bar.

Now, do you understand?

(Thanks Jack!)

Uhm, ok. So, I’ve been told. My good buddy Kevin, who apparently is a dedicated fan of my website, is sick and tired of my occasional “writer’s block” posting. By “sick and tired” I mean he took the time to write a lengthy comment on the subject and by “occasional” I mean every other post.

For your convenience, I’ve included his comment below. I’ve taken a couple of liberties and corrected Kevin’s occasional fat-finger misspellings.

I don’t know if this is actually a post.

It is, on the other hand, an affirmation of neglect to the site, of which I am a fan, and now that you’ve undoubtedly found a calculator to do the math, maybe we could continue in the same vein and figure out how long you’re gonna take before you realize that there may be more like me out there, waiting, biting at the bit, for a little or a lot more than you’ve given us. Producing and maintaining a site like this takes on another role of responsibility than that of it’s upkeep. The responsibility is to the readership and or viewership, whichever you prefer, of the site. The poor sod, not unlike myself, who routinely takes the time to check in is more often then not, eager to become involved in the antics and happenstance of what the latest post has to offer. Whether it be biting satire, the odd run-in with the local public at large, the ongoing and sometimes heated exchanges between “wifey and the other half or third”, or maybe an observation to ponder or make fun of. Any of these are relished and sought after day in and day out but to initiate a post in the name of how long it’s been since the last one, is merely taking a breath and informing your awaiting public that it will be longer still before anything of valuable substance appears to satisfy our insatiable appetites. Calculators aside, we sometimes have a right to demand more, after all, you did start us on this road turning quickly into the habit that is our bane to carry; likewise it’s your duty not to cut the cord but to make sure the content is as strong and entertaining or thought provoking as it has always been. Other than that, how’s your day going?

How’s my day? Fine… just freaking fine, until somebody volunteered to be my conscience. Thanks a bunch Kevin. You’re a pal.

In a related news story, doctors have found that one may cure erectile dysfunction by simply looking the afflicted person directly in the eye and yelling “No excuses, mister! Just get it up! NOW!!“

For more than twenty five years I’ve carted around boxes of old LPs. It’s been at least 12 years since I’ve listened to the crackle and hiss of a tune played on a turntable. Yet, I continued to move boxes of this dead weight around from province to province, city to city, house to house.

I learned to appreciate this music format more than 30 years ago. My older brother, Gary, went to Alberta to work in the oilfields and brought back several albums… Aldo Nova, Meatloaf, Supertramp, Greg Kihn, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller. He took good care of his albums and I adopted his approach. The more carefully you handled the vinyl the purer the sound remained. Somehow when my brother moved on again I inherited his record collection. Soon, I began to add to that collection with my own additions. Eventually, my collection grew to more than 300 albums. I skipped the cassette format altogether and vowed not to purchase CDs until you could record onto them. When it became clear that you would never be able to record onto CDs, I caved and started collecting CDs instead of LPs. Even though I duplicated much of my collection, I still kept the old faithful LPs. My turntable became orphaned from my stereo and started gathering dust on a shelf. Eventually, my CD collection fell out of date and fell in preference behind MP3s. Assorted tapes and CDs (yes… news flash. You can record onto CDs now!!!) have taken second place to MP3 players and FM transmitters.

Still, I kept my record collection. I didn’t know exactly why though. I never had any grand illusions that my Prince albums would fund my retirement. I mean, Raspberry Beret is a pretty good song, but… Then this past weekend I answered an ad from someone looking to buy old LPs. They guy came out to my house and quickly looked through my collection. Of the 300 albums he said he was only interested in 30 of them and he’d give me $60 whether or not I gave him just the 30 or all 300. Apparently Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister are marketable, but Randy Travis and Roy Clarke are not. I talked him up to 75 bucks and then realized that I had this sick feeling in my stomach. My music collection was a very personal thing… it had sentimental value. If the guy had given me $500 I would have felt the same way. Yet… I purged the vinyl out of my basement and pocketed the 75 smackers and swallowed the feeling that I had somehow let an important part of my youth disappear into the back of a minivan headed for the nearest flea market.

There’s no real point to this post other than to blab about how much these LPs meant to me. I hadn’t even realized it, but they were mementos of my musical past, a chronicle of my youth and transition into adulthood. And I pawned it off for 75 bucks!

Don’t worry Mom. I kept the Elvis picture disk along with the other Elvis albums and Nan’s Slim Whitman and Liberace albums. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

Not only is this trick shot amazing, it’s funny too!

This is the best thing since Chinese Arm Wrestling!

Thanks Deb!

We bought a new four-wheeler last year, and so began my hard-learned lessons about how not to ride them.

We took the quad to Newfoundland last year when we went there for vacation. One one of our trips into the wilderness, we crossed a very watery bog. There were three machines, two adults, one teenager, and three kids. Each machine took its turn getting stuck which was promptly resolved by one of the other machines hooking up and quickly towing it out. At one such incident, I was riding my new machine, which had less than 500 kms on the odometer, behind the other two. The first one went through a particularly water-soaked section of bog, but got through. The second machine went through in the same track, digging the ruts a little deeper. I decided that I wouldn’t follow in the same track. I figured that it I straddled a little to the side, I’d have an easier time of it. Boy, was I wrong! My right hand side stayed on solid bog but… what I thought was marshy moss under my left wheels was simply moss floating on top of a fairly deep water gully. The quad promptly sunk and sunk good. I had to remain leaning off the right side of the machine so it wouldn’t roll right over. Check out the short video below showing how deep I was.

Did you notice that the exhaust was bubbling out from under water at the back of the bike?

Well… it took us a fairly long time getting my machine out of this mess. We were about 45 minutes ride from the nearest help, so I was pretty anxious to get it out on our own. We tried all the conventional methods, but we eventually achieved success by letting the winches out on all three machines and hooking them to each other. Then, we all drew the winches back in. At the same time, the other two machines had their machines in reverse while I used four-wheel, locked-in-low to drive forward. The video below is edited down to shorten the duration, but it does give you an idea of the struggle we had getting out. It still makes me nervous watching it!