From a Wall Street Journal article on excessive lender processing fees:
An application fee? Charges for document preparation? An “administration” fee? They even want you to pay their postage. I’m surprised lenders aren’t charging for in-office backrubs for overworked loan officers.
Ho Ho!
Actually, the mortgage bank I work with does subsidize 50 percent of the cost of in-office massages . . .
In October 1989, I was in the Bay Area for the USC-Cal football game. We saw the game on Saturday, flew home Sunday afternoon, then on Monday, Oct. 18, at 5:04 PM, a 6.9 earthquake killed 63 people, injured 3,757 and caused around $6 billion in property damage, including the collapse of a section of the Oakland Bay Bridge.
Shortly after my return from a recent trip to Disney World, Hurricane Charley swept across Florida, causing an estimated $7 to 14 billion in damage, and ripping the roof off of three terminal buildings at Orlando International Airport.
I’m a harbinger of disaster . . .
Today’s the day
We’ll say “I do”
And we’ll never be lonely anymore.
For decades, I thought this was just a happy, sappy little ditty . . . now I wonder if it isn’t one of the most bitterly ironic songs ever written.
We’ll love until
The end of time
And we’ll never be lonely anymore . . .
From Netcraft:
The LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco is the center of the Linux universe this week, celebrating the best Linux apps and advancing the cause of Linux in business. If you can’t be at the Moscone Center, you can read the latest conference news at the LinuxWorld Expo web site, which naturally is powered by … Windows Server 2003.
Linux enthusiasts are not alone in finding their “World” running on Microsoft software, as the Mac World Expo is also hosted on Windows Server 2003.
On this date in 1884, the cornerstone was laid for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. (We got the statue for free — the pedestal we had to pay for.)
One of the most historic fundraisers was the Pedestal Art Loan Exhibition, to which Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and others donated manuscripts for auction.
Emma Lazarus donated a poem called “The New Colossus,” which sold for $1,500, but was mostly forgotten until 1945, when it was inscribed over the main entrance at the base of the statue.
There was a profile of Jerry Buss, the owner of the Lakers, on TV the other night . . .
Buss spent very little time with his family when his kids were growing up. When he and his wife separated, they didn’t tell the kids, and it was five years before any of them noticed the difference.
True story!
Clearly, I have not been nearly as ruthless as I could have been at disregarding my family in my pursuit of success.
On a bus ride from the hotel to one of the parks, we were seated behind a short, fat hayseed with an enormous head . . . we passed a number of landmarks and attractions, none of which seemed to capture his interest.
Then, just as we arrived at the Magic Kingdom, he jumped halfway out of his seat, pointed to a clearing in the woods and shouted, “Turkeys! Wild turkeys, right there!”
Microsoft said Tuesday that it will boost its dividend, buy back shares and offer a $3-per-share one-time payout as part of a plan to return up to $75 billion to shareholders over the next four years.
Bill Gates announced that he will donate his share of the proceeds — he owns over 1 billion shares, so that comes to $3+ billion — to charity.
This is a picture of 14 pugs in a hatchback, although you can only see five of them really well. Ours — Lightning — is the one in the middle.
We tried taking pictures with the hatchback open so you could see the dogs better, but they all started jumping out, so we had to abandon that plan . . .
My son’s hockey game got completely out of hand. I’ve never seen a game like that . . . they led 11-9 before losing 12-11. My boy had eight goals. Neither team could stop anything.
A New Jersey woman recently pleaded not guilty to murdering her brother-in-law by serving him a blended cocktail of pineapple juice, maraschino cherries, and several ounces of antifreeze.
Interesting fact: Although antifreeze is toxic, it actually tastes pretty good, making it an ideal choice for knocking off spouses and boyfriends.
Sometimes I feel really old . . .
I’m not getting any younger
I’m not getting any smarter
I’m not getting any healthier
Sometimes I feel like 45 would be a pretty good age to die . . .
tediocrity (Te`di*oc”ri*ty)
n. pl. tediocrities
- The state or quality of doing tedious things that are of mediocre value.
- Ability to do, achieve, or perform in a tedious, mediocre manner.
Reading an excerpt from the tray liner at KFC:
We plate your food while it’s still hot, and serve it at the peak of flavor perfection.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” my son says.
I found an old Christmas card from my son this weekend, the kind of thing that’s looked upon wistfully by probably no one except the child’s parents.
Here it is anyway . . .
Dear Mom and Dad,
I wish you an awesome
Christmas and I would’ve
bought you an expensive
present but I couldn’t
afford one. I still
love you though.
Love,
Casey
In Iraq this week, Saddam Hussein was handed over to his countrymen to answer for his deeds, including genocide and crimes against humanity. The possibility now exists for Iraq to become the second functioning democracy — along with Israel — in the Middle East.
I think this is great news, but if you’re pessimistic and having trouble striking the correct cynical pose, here are some suggestions.
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. . . . Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough.
Christopher Hitchens takes a chainsaw to Fahrenheit 9/11. Here’s an excerpt, on the film’s closing quote from Orwell’s 1984:
A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
A Slate article confirms my 20-year suspicion that Garfield the witless comic strip is just an adjunct to Garfield the marketing empire, rather than the other way around:
Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990’s were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq. . . .
