House of the rising Moonglum

If you happen to be an Egyptian National, studying in Florida, I have a suggestion for you. Don’t speed across state lines while transporting fireworks. Just a suggestion.

One of the duties of our overseas consular offices is to check in on Americans in Jail and make sure that they are being treated OK. I don’t know if the Egyptian consular offices provide a similar service, but I would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation if they do. “You did What? WHERE?!”

Even if they really were just being stupid, I foresee a long jail stay for them. And I’d have to believe they will loose that TA position.

The FCB on Clark street was the scene of an attempted robbery yesterday. I was pouring through the articles on it, but had a bit of a hard time putting it all together. Fortunately RPB makes everything clear. Oddly, aside from the snide remarks about the current power structure, I’m guessing his take is closer to what really happened than the news services.

The NYT did an interesting piece on the current (and ongoing) drop in median home prices in the US. Everyone knew that there was a downturn in the market coming, but this is going to be the worst one since they started tracking these numbers in the 50s. If you adjust for inflation, there already is a drop, but not yet if you don’t adjust (I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t when looking at financial numbers, but apparently that is common in the housing market.) The more interesting thing is that it is country wide. Normally dips happen regionally, but the midwest which generally misses out on the booms misses out on the busts as well. The most interesting chart to look at is the one that shows the adjusted for inflation housing trends. CONSTANT until the 90s. Then it starts going up for about a decade or so.

Then I buy a house. It is kind of funny, I told my real estate agent that I was buying a place to live, not an investment. This was important because my last foray into investing was at the end of the dot com boom. (Note that that investment has finally started making money for me, five or so years later. Any investing is a waiting game.) I am starting to think that people should watch what I am doing financially and short on whatever I am putting money into. OTOH, I am going to live here for a while, so hopefully this will turn around by the time I need to sell, but given that run up home price bump in the 90s I am not so sure.

It appears that general food prices are on the rise. In particular the beeb has an article on the causes in the rise of grain prices in the UK. It stems from many things, including drought in Australia, and poor growing seasons in Canada, but one item which they blow by is that rising gas prices mean rising everything else prices. Dairy and Meat will be the first foodstuffs to get much more expensive because they rely more extensively on rapid cooled transport. Then of course there are biofuels. I’m still not sure that having food and energy compete is a good idea.

In any case: decentralized food production people! Unfortunately the most recent farm bill doesn’t really touch on this. It does have some cops to more healthy crops, but the bulk still goes to the big five, four of which are nitrogen leaches. The farm bill is probably the single most important piece of legislation in the US and nobody even looks at it.

I love the treehouse animal shelter.  I occasionally give them some money.  In return they send me tons of junk mail telling me what they are up to.  One thing they are particularly proud of is their trap-neuter-return program.  This is a way of containing the feral cat population and keeping it reasonably healthy.  Pretty cool over all, but my lovely wife just pointed out that it would be disconcerting to wake up woozy after being kidnapped, wondering where your balls got to.  Now all I can think of are BALL THIEVES!

Of course this is not an urban legend!  Beware the ball thieves!  Man, I’m never going as a cat for Halloween again.