See you soon

How do you deal with a dibs violator?

I’ve been wondering: What if someone steals my parking spot?

Do I call police? Hurl a brick through the offender’s window?

Call police, sure, but I think they’ll just laugh. Bricks? Too permanent, violent.

Someone suggested breaking off side mirrors.

Yeah… but wouldn’t it be more fun to soap obnoxious things all over the car?

“I’m the kind of a$@hole who steals other people’s parking”

“I violated dibs.”

“I’m a big jerk.” “I stole a lady’s parking spot.” “I have no regard for society and its rules.”

Etc.

So far, no need. The chairs are working. Noone’s touched my handiwork nor my craptacular plastic lawn furniture.

I won’t have to soap any windows after all.

Gooney birds, or what I learned today

Fact-checking some stuff a guy told me in a story I’m trying to finish today. Among them: He saw the gooney birds on Midway Island, he said.

The what?

The gooney birds. Big birds that live on Midway Island in the South Pacific.

Real birds?

Yes.

Oh, I say, vowing to look them up.

Here. No wonder they merited a mention. Now I want to go see this silly too.

 

Warning!

Knocking on a front door today, it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t your typical security company posted on the shield-shaped sticker:

For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
Warning: This property protected by ANGELS.

Warning!

Old guy voice

I’ve got one, an old guy voice.

Usually I pick up the phone in a low tone: “Newsroom.” Sometimes I add my name.

Then it’s clear who’s calling.

Everything in my voice changes. The tone brightens. The pace slows. The politesse intensifies.

An oldster’s on the line.

It happened again this afternoon with a kindly octogenarian who must have forgotten we already spoke this morning. The detail he recalled was a good one. I was glad to take the call.

I apologize again to all who sit around me.

Fun with language, robot translations

Found this comment on this Soldiers Own Words post. It just appeared, got flagged as spam. The links in fact appear to be spam. But I like the prose. Reads like a robot translation, like, say, my own written French.

I have interpret a insufficient of the articles on your website at this very moment, and I extremely like your tastefulness of blogging. I added it to my favorites trap stage list and last will and testament be checking assist soon. Please contain out of order my put as well and let me conscious what you think. Thanks.

We are still here

A small town
Puts up a small sign
In a huge gesture
Here and now in these United States
In Nebraska.

I love this writing, Mr. Dan Barry:

HOOPER, Neb. — A few years ago, the Nebraska Department of Roads rolled out a highway bypass to hasten the already-hurried everyday pace. Motorists rushing north to Norfolk, or south to Omaha, no longer had to slow to 40 miles an hour through a blink-and-miss-it place called Hooper.

No longer did travelers have to pass the Hooper ice cream parlor, or the Hooper grain elevator, or the ancient railroad cars sitting on discontinued tracks, or the decades-old neon marquee, long past glowing, that welcomed travelers to a downtown from the late 19th century.

The people of Hooper – population 827, more or less – knew what this meant. The small green sign planted beside the new highway barely whispered their town’s name. And in the flat terrain of rural Nebraska, the eye can see far into the distance, yet miss so much. They feared being missed. Bypassed.

Another community might have resigned itself to this subtle humiliation, enduring the slight on behalf of rural America as just one more nudge toward oblivion. But Hooper was determined to raise its collective hand somehow, and say to the busy world:

We are still here.

It’s a story about a new sign on a highway in Nebraska, right?

No. It’s so much more.

I can now imagine a dozen more ways to think this way about writing in these Chicago suburbs.

They make tiny gestures all the time that mean much to them, that follow grand themes.

“Breaking” news: it’s a recession

UPDATE: Site working. Here’s the link to NBER’s release.

Oh really? Economic turmoil is all of a sudden news? 

I tried to click on the NBER web site to see what they are reporting. As of noon-ish Dec. 1, the server’s down. Guess most of America had the same idea as me — who in heck are these people that just figured it out now?

December 1, 2008 

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The NBER – a private, nonprofit research organization — said its group of academic economists who determine business cycles met and decided that the U.S. recession began last December.

The White House commented on the news that a second downturn has officially begun on President George W. Bush’s watch without ever actually using the word ”recession,” a term the president and his aides have repeatedly avoided. Instead, spokesman Tony Fratto remarked upon the fact that NBER ”determines the start and end dates of business cycles.”

”What’s important is what is being done about it,” Fratto said. ”The most important things we can do for the economy right now are to return the financial and credit markets to normal, and to continue to make progress in housing, and that’s where we’ll continue to focus.”

Many economists believe the current downturn will last until the middle of 2009, and will be the most severe slump since the 1981-82 recession.

By one benchmark, a recession occurs whenever the gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services, declines for two consecutive quarters. However, the NBER’s dating committee uses broader and more precise measures.

The GDP did contract by 0.2 percent at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2007. However, that drop was followed by a 0.9 percent rate of increase in the first quarter and a 2.8 percent spurt in the second quarter, when the economy was boosted by the distribution of millions of economic stimulus payments.

However, employment, one of the measurements tracked by the NBER, has been falling since January.

The GDP turned negative again in the July-September quarter of this year, falling at an annual rate of 0.5 percent. Many economists believe the GDP is falling in the current quarter at an even sharper rate of 4 percent, and that the economy won’t begin to rebound until late 2009.

In a news release, the NBER said its cycle dating committee held a telephone conference call on Friday and made the determination on when the recession began. Founded in 1920, the NBER has more than 1,000 university professors and researchers who act as bureau associates, studying how the economy works

The NBER decision means that the economic expansion lasted from November 2001 until December 2007. Economic expansions peak and recessions begin in the same month, according to the NBER’s dating methods.

The decision on the recession means that during the eight years that Bush has been in office, the country has seen two recessions. The first downturn lasted from March 2001 until November of that year.