So, another $2 billion for the Bonfire of the Ford Explorers. Girolamo Savonarola is alive and well, and he's pretending to be a deep ecology Watermelon.

I guess one could say that President Obama cares less about the poor than a used-car salesman does.

Now, I don't think that's exactly fair - Cash for Clunkers is as much or more of a Congressional horror as it is a creature of the Administration. But the White House has made the decision to defer to Congress & enthusiastically supports, prepares, and serves for supper the monstrosities that careless blind giant vomits out upon the national kitchen table. Obama's minions are fully committed to this destruction of wealth, to this assault upon the resources of the industrious poor. It is a welfare program which transfers government funds to those who can *almost* afford new cars, while wasting marginal & distressed assets which would otherwise populate the purchasable stock for those with the time and skills to maintain creaky old vehicles who also are without the funds to buy new cars, even with a 4.5k helping hand by the government.

Frex - a guy here at work bought a new F150, a bigger truck, with a handshake deal with a third party who was going to buy his six-year-old extended-bed Ranger. That third party's planned financing fell through, and for a while this guy had two trucks (and two truck payments!) on his hands. The third party eventually re-negotiated a less generous financing plan, but my co-worker was stuck with the additional cost of carrying that payment for an extra month. Cash for Clunkers encourages people like my co-worker to buy, oh, I don't know, some hypothetical hybrid truck with miracle gas mileage, and destroy the Ranger. The struggling third-party buyer, who could barely wrangle financing for a six-year-old Ranger, would then be utterly SOL.

Update: This guy has a clever, if nasty, idea, but I rather think that if the Cash for Clunkers thing runs out, and many people follow his particular scam, that the resale value of CfC vehicles will be artificially depressed by the drug of his fellow scammers' assets on the market. Using assets to launder money tends to reduce the price of the asset in question in a manner roughly related to the convenience and difficulties of cleaning and the easiness of the unearned profit. In short, the transaction costs will consume some of the 4.5k, the final end-user will claim her share of the 4.5k, and a certain portion of the windfall will simply be a dead loss lost to the friction of the scam.

This is somewhat related to how my exploit of the first-time home buyer credit of this season will not be fully captured in value by yours truly, because I expect the asset I just bought was partially inflated by the prospect of the credit in the market. When December rolls around & the tax credit window closes, I expect that inflation will drain out of the market as well, thus reducing the apparent value of my asset. A certain part of that inflation was not real, but rather a temporary artificial fluctuation in response to the government incentive. The seller captured that portion of the value, insofar as I was willing to pay the premium. Now, it wasn't the full 8,000, because qualified first-time buyers are not the whole of the buying public - they aren't even a majority, although they might be a slight plurality. In weighing the advantages and disadvantages of this, I had to take into account the natural and direct governmental components in future inflationary trends, which *won't* disappear in December with the expiration of the first-time buyer tax credit.

Also, 8,000 is 8,000. I was willing to pay what I paid to get the house then. It was the reasonable cost of the asset, and if I can recapture some portion of that after the fact, great! But I don't expect to cash in on my place like a short-time investment. For one thing, I've committed to living in it for the medium-to-long term. I was living in the same rented apartment for nine years. I don't have happy feet.

Why does this chaos sound like a sheet metal postmodern reenactment of FDR's old herd slaughters? With the wrecking yards refusing to take economically ruined scrap cars, are they going to end up burying the 'clunkers' in mass graves in already half-regulated-to-death landfills?

Unintended Consequences, thy name is 'Efficiency by Diktat'!

I've made some progress this weekend - did some painting, got most of it done, although it looks like I will need to re-do the edging in the living room. I'm not so good with the paint brush, I'm afraid. I'm going to go ahead and schedule a steam-cleaning company for the first floor's carpets, to see if we can kill that cat-smell. Then, hopefully, start seriously moving this weekend coming up.

Well, I'm a homeowner.

Now's the time for me to bumble about & run into sharp-edged things in the dark, I suppose. My shampooing attempt on the downstairs carpet seems to have come up short on the "must and cat-smell" front. I've had someone recommend getting a steam-cleaning outfit in to take care of it. Meanwhile, I'm going to work on spackling & wallpainting this weekend. Am I going to get any dry weather?

Poll question: I need to change my voter registration to reflect my new address - I *think* I'm moving into a new ward. Should I change parties while I'm at it? I've been tactically Democratic since February 2003, but I get more conservative and culturally Republican by the week. Should I re-register *tactically* or *culturally*?

'Endless Eight' finally gets to Hitler. This is easily the least political use I've seen of the Downfall clip.

h/t

A guy here at work is getting married. I observed that he had just bought a house & wondered why they had waited until now. Apparently there's a serious income gap in the mortgage terms available to couples and singles, and we tend to fall into it here at work. They're holding the wedding after the grace period allowed by the terms of his mortgage financing. I had wondered about that one-year ban on cohabitating in my mortgage application.

But he was grousing about one of the places they were getting registered with. They assigned them a sales rep who was trying to get them to put every white elephant and overpriced geegaw in the inventory on their registry. It never occurred to me that these registry things could be opportunities for high-pressure sales offensives. After all, it isn't "your money", so it's a chance to hit a couple where they're weakest - somebody else's wallet. The end result is a lot of unnecessary fancy plate & silver utensils collecting dust in one of those display cabinets like the one my former landlord was trying to get me to buy last weekend when I wandered into his distressed-antiques furniture place & mentioned that I was setting up housekeeping, of a sort.

I threw out most of my MSiA toys on Sunday, after pulling down a toy-model of the Albion from Gundam 0083 off of the top of a shelf & discovering that it had turned *brown*. The MSiA toys were mostly cast from a foul, cheap sort of rubbery plastic, especially the stuff made for the North American market. It wilts, changes color, and generally doesn't hold up well. I saved a couple of the sturdier pieces which shouldn't look like crap on a shelf, and tossed the rest of the box into the trash. In retrospect that particular hobby was a waste of money, although disassembling them and putting them back together gave me something to do with my hands while talking on the phone to particularly annoying HighQ customers back in the day.

So, I found a friend with a burn-barrel and we destroyed my excess personal papers, which had accumulated to the point where I wasn't willing to haul it with to me to a new domicile. An overflowing paper-case whose overflow filled three plastic disposable shopping bag, it took about an hour or so to incinerate the lot. Mostly ten years' worth of phone & electic bills & banking statements, but there was an awful lot of health insurance rubbish, and a fair amount of old Otakon paperwork - floor plans, hotel proposals, decorators' proposals, that sort of thing. My old passport - used once, expired eight years ago. Into the fire, all of it. Well, except a few things which just didn't need to go up in flames. That all will go into the trash - no personal information or old confidential Otakorp stuff.

I should mostly be ready to move by Thursday, which is the closing. After that, I may need to take a day or so to figure out what I should take care of before moving anything in - I have a toilet to fix, a ceiling-crack to do something with - spackle? I dunno - and assess the paint in the family/TV room on the first floor - should I give it a new coat of paint before moving anything into it?

Oh, man. Kyoto Animation's apparently collectively decided to become the otaku Andy Warhol. The same damn episode, re-animated, re-recorded and slightly modified - not just four times, not six, but - what, eight is the current guess?

Lunatics.

And now I'm embarrassed, because someone else has already had this epiphany.

You don't get much more badass than this. Girl Genius just keeps getting better & better.

Dresden Codak may operate at a higher artistic level, but it's also a once-a-month sort of operation, and is almost openly hostile to linear narrative. The Foglios crank out three color pages a week like atomic clockwork, with an exceptional narrative flow. Order of the Stick has a similar fidelity to strong, well-written narrative, but Burlew's art style is just less demanding than the Foglios', and he's not nearly as reliable, albeit not bad by online standards; also, the fake-RPG story and subcreation is clever but doesn't even pretend to originality.

Perhaps the closest competitor to Girl Genius is Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary, which has long since outgrown its original crap art & comic-sociopathy humor for a polished style & intricate space-opera plotting. But in the end, Schlock Mercenary is a *strip*, while Girl Genius is a graphic-novel serial. The Foglios are operating under a different and more demanding set of artistic constraints than Tayler. Also? Schlock Mercenary is a comedy which pulled a Cerebus, while Girl Genius has always been a serious story with a wide streak of comedic relief-style humor.

Man, I love Dresden Codak. Even though I only get about one joke in three, googling the references usually causes a follow-on snicker.

I was down visiting in Pittsburgh last weekend. I spent the weekend pestering my great-aunt - who's terribly shaky on her pins & keeps wobbling around without her cane saying that she's fine so long as she can balance herself on the walls or furniture in her house - to always carry her cane around & to be more careful of falls.

Karma took notice of this, and as I was packing up my stuff and walking out of her guest room with arms full of a bulky overnight bag, my toe caught on a stool she keeps in her hallway. I took a full-on face-fault header into the floor, right in front of her. Luckily I didn't bring her down with me, so no harm no foul, but boy was that embarrassing. Much to her credit, she didn't burst out laughing like I would have if I were in her shoes.

Hopefully I've used up all the bad-fall luck in that house for the next couple weeks.

Watching (and reading) a lot of Ranma 1/2 th' last week or so. The TV series ends fairly strongly, in an episodic, unfinished fashion, but that unfinished character suits an episodic series - a heck of a lot better than the way they (didn't) end Inuyasha, a shounen quest show if I ever saw one. I'm taking the OAVs slowly, as it's now high summer & walking season. Better to be out and about than cooped up inside with a TV & DVD player.

But I really liked Nodoka as a character, more than I thought I would from the descriptions I'd heard over the years. She's quite sweet & even-tempered, not at all the sort of fool who you'd expect would marry someone as monstrous and worthless as Genma Saotome. Only a walking catastrophe like Genma could take someone like that & turn her into an aspiring familicide. By the end of the TV series, I had come to hate Genma Saotome with the fire of a burning sun. The heck with harmless old Happosai, with his lechery, petty larceny and fire-bombs - Genma is the true villain of the story.

Everything wretched, or wrong, or mis-aligned in the world of the Tendo household was wrecked upon it by the will of Genma Saotome. That first trip to the Cursed Springs? Genma. Ranma's serial fiancees? Genma, again and again and again. Ranma's pugnacity, inarticulateness, and incapacity to effectively display emotion? Genma's insistence on raising him without a mother. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Soun & Genma's original apprenticeship to Happosai was somehow Genma's fault.

OK, OK, it's hard to blame the evils of the Kunou family on Genma. But I'm working on it. He *did* once affiance Ranma to Kodachi, so there's that...

Well, it looks like I'll be a homeowner come August. I was holding off until the inspections on account of last month's failed attempt, what with the foundations and the carpenter ants and the maintenance and the HEY LADY!

Ahem.

This one went much more smoothly. It's a split-level condominium in a modest little six-unit in the borough, on Crawford Lane at the top of the hill in the southwest ward. They're putting in a new roof on the units, and it sounds like they'll be working on that while I'll be moving in. There's some minor stuff to fix, but every place has its quirks. I'll be in the market for furniture, though. I don't have nearly enough stuff for a place this size, and a lot of what I do have ought to go right into the trash. You accumulate a lot of rubbish furniture unworthy of a decent home, renting as long as I have.

But hey, you know, I'm going to successfully shift from creditor to debtor status. With the dollar about to go over the falls, I figure it's the proper posture. Even if they surprise me & stave off the hyperinflation to come, I'll still have a decent place to hang my figurative hat.

Oh, crap. It's Cruise weekend. I guess I better leave my car up here at work.

It's going to be damned loud. If I'm lucky, it'll rain constantly... That'll keep the street noise down.

I see that they're talking about banning smoking in Tallyrand Park. In a *park*. In the *open*. Schmucks.

You can buy cheap washers and dryers from amazon.com, but the shipping charges will eat you alive. $192 each!

How did Mark Levin get such a big radio following? He's got a voice made for print.

Daemones Diogenissimus

Restless I was born
And searching even in the womb
Quickly my path worn
And back and forth and back and forth
Like a shuttlecock across the loom
To find that thing they call
“Understanding” or “knowledge” or “God”
But most often truth.

Diogenes they called me
And damned the light of my lamp
And avoided my footsteps
As I hove into view.

I was searching
For my first honest man
And after a time
For any honest man
Or woman, or god, or book,
Or mythical beast,
And still, the most mythical
Of them all
The honest man
Far more rare than
Two-headed amphibians
Or chimerical monstrous
Combinative horrors
Is that rare beast,
Whom I have yet to find
The honest man.

He was not among the Italian cult
Whoring their intellect in the
Geometric Temple.
He was not arguing
In the Athenian mob
He was not to be found
With the wise men
Masons and fishwives.
He was not driving slaves
Or helots or peasants
Nor a brother of the Spartan lords.
No, he was not found in any of those places.

But artists? Truth and wisdom,
If you exist,
I tell to you and the
Unhearing troubled heavens
If you exist to be troubled,
Troubled you are by the
Omnipresent
Odoriferous
Abominations of the artist.

Everywhere I went, I found them.
Daubing the fields in false and frivolous colors,
I found the painters plying their trade.
Flattering the rich and powerful,
I found the poets planning their praise
I found them again, called
Demogogues and sophists and tribunes
Bragging of their telling
Of truth to power,
Meaning that truth that is a means
And a way to power.
Again I found them, with instruments
Flattering women
And the love of women
And the love of the love of women
Or boys, or sheep, or whatever
Desires
Best paid for the lacquer on their lutes
And the fat on their bones.
Singing! Oh, the singing,
Lie upon lie upon lie
Flattering half-falsehoods at best
Utter tripe in the main
And such an unplumbed
Obstructed
Main it was
Stinking to the much-abused
Much-maligned
Much-polluted heavens,
Rising along with the sacrifice-fires
Of the hypocrite priests
And the alchemist-cheats
And the vaporous oracles
With their vaguities so much worse
Than pure simple musical lies.

All the hours and days of my life
I walked by the light
Of my flickering lamp
And not one glimpse
Did I gain of my prey,
And not one word
Did I hear which led
Me anywhere but through
The same sodding muck
Of human delusion
Derision
And lying despair.

Thus did I come
To my dishonored grave
And within the tomb
They laid my
False foul flesh
For not even in myself
Did I find the honesty
Or understanding of truth.

From that putrid space
Burst what I have become
Restless still
And deathless with hunger.
The lamp burns
Now without oil to fuel
And through the darkened hours
I stalk my honest man.

Well should they fear
The liars and cheats
The light of my lamp
That splits the stillness of the night.

Even in darkness
With no-one to hear
Not one of the artists
Will tell me the truth
And those who knowing
The lies they sell
Those I destroy
For the sound of their demolition
For the sake of rage and despair.

Some trying to save
Their lying souls
Will offer long-winded stories
And beautiful songs
And marvels and wonders
And glorious prose
And some I will grant license
And some I will spare
In experimental hope that
Terror and awe
Might forge from artistry,
Fear and trembling
Some semblance of truth
Or a guide-post
But each essay and trial
Dare disappoint my hope
That subject I shall leave hanging
Strung up by the rope
I had lent him before.

Mitch Hagmaier
6/5/2005
(Heavily edited & revised, 6/17/09)

I've just been in a mood recently. The weather's been dreary, or I've been under the weather, or both in conspiracy with each other have been at me at once, and the sum and total of current existence is the monocloud, looming, over a landscape of overpriced, ill-kept real-estate. In the financial news, the sucker's rally is in full roar, and summer's long static roar looks to be even longer and even louder than is its usual wont. It's very likely that I'll miss the interest rate sweet spot, as nothing's reaching out & grabbing me after last month's pricy mis-fire.

I can't help but think that on a purely utilitarian basis that I don't belong in an owned house, by myself. Houses are for families, not for unmotivated solitary men. I had thought about getting a cheap house in Phillipsburg, but the long miserable commute and the uninspiring nature of that hill-town just made all of my ambition curl up and die a shameful, slovenly death in a roadside ditch halfway down the Allegheny Front.

While I was walking a suburb of that town, I encountered an honest-to-God "Here, Hold My Beer" moment, in which a pair of hicks in black wife-beaters had clearly gotten tired of chopping down a thick tree by the side of an attached garage, having taken chips out of each side of the trunk without seriously cutting into the heartwood. They had wrapped a narrow little cable around the trunk about eight feet up from the roots, and attached it to a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and one of the wife-beaters was revving the Jeep, trying to pull the tree down by main force. They were probably lucky that the cable gave way before the root system, because I figured about even odds that it would have pulled down the garage wall along with the trunk if they had succeeded. Meanwhile, the narrow little cable snapped at a join, and went whipping about. I had kept my distance expecting this to happen, and luckily, none of the other onlookers got caught in the rebound. But geez, that really didn't strike me as the sort of neighborhood I needed to be a part of.