Merry Krampus-tide

He drives Santa's car, I guess.

Bear week: Sunday

"'The kids were just crass (yeah), he was the nazz (huh?), with God given ass (woo), he took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar (yay!)'"

Bear week: Saturday

"I'm totally hiding.  Everyone's always looking for dark colored bears, so they'll just skip over me."

Power outage

Bear week: Friday

":-P We're safe in a tree! Watch out, or we'll use our drop-bear training!"

Snow!

Bear week: Thursday

"Hey guys! I got you a salad! It's only a little bit eated."

Bear week: Wednesday

"Whatever. You have to walk down a nice cleared path.  I have to ford a river.  Plus, three little cubs that I need to keep safe from river bandits.  Fucking river bandits."

Bear week: Tuesday

"Become a Travel Bear they said. See the world they said.  Fuck them. I'm tired of walking."

Monday: Bear week is a great idea

The rules of bear week:

1. Identify nine bear pictures.
2. Write captions for each picture, best if from the bear's perspective.  Like a lolcat, but remember that these are bears.  They have a certain dignity and gravitas, and should be treated with respect.  Also remember that bears are lazy a large part of the time.
3. Start nine days before Christmas.  Post one bear each day with that caption.
4. After bear week finishes, you move into "Bear Week Extra" which is comprised of two more days, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

I'm tempted to follow this up with turtle week, the launch into New Year, but the schedule is harder for that (can't overlap with bear week, so it's only seven turtle pictures).  Anyway, bear week is go, turtle week needs some consideration.

Random Scooby Dancing.

• Rebecca Sugar. In Forbes.
• I think this recipe is what I've been craving for the past week.
• Animal dressed as the same animal? ✓
• BFFs? ✓
• I am now suddenly concerned for the amount of dirt on things in Britain in the late 1950s.
• Squirrel with fancy ears.
• :( Always seemed like he was doing good things for Hawaii.
• I don't use instagram, because I'm not that hip.  Advertisers and marketing droids are though, so I'm glad I skipped out on that before it became another soulless money box for Facebook.
• Indiana Jones puzzle solved.  The Post Office shreds packages periodically, and if they find a plausibly addressed package, they attempt delivery.  Even to fictional archaeologists.

Bear week: Monday

"Hello. From my dirty appearance, you can clearly see that I'm currently a bit down on my luck.  I was hoping that you might be able to supply a pic-a-nic basket to help the poor wordland creatures?"

Sunday: Dear Me, go do laundry

So that "don't go to sushi on the weekend for a while" thing didn't work very well:

Kalbi nigiri and garlic ahi.  I need to remember to bring gum when I get garlic ahi.

 I also discovered that in Hawaii, you don't take the kids to get their picture taken with Santa:

Hello Kitty has clearly run the fat guy out of town.

"No, my left. Move to my left, so that's...like...your right maybe?  Just go the other way, you're not in the frame."

Banana guards.

• This was pretty much my reaction to the word that Kerry was likely to get the nomination.
• Those birds are totally about to be murdered by Creepy Sun.
• Cyndaquil.

Saturday: I need like another week before vacation that I don't have

How did that turn into being a problem?  :-/

Things I didn't do today that I was going to do:

• Laundry.
• Clean apartment.
• Work on paper that I want to be done.
• Anything at all useful.

I also did not herd sheep up a cliffside path.

I do plan on sleeping, though.

• So wait, what's the point here? 
• "Help!"
• Munch munch munch.

Friday: Getting things done before the end of the year is always nearly impossible

"Fucking ice..."

Mostly I just wanted to add something Adventure Time related.

• Spidermew.
• Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is a fucking idiot.
• Squirrels!

Thursday: Less productive than I would have liked

It turns out I might have written a perl script to automate production of "red panda says: fuck you, X" style images.

I arrived at work today to discover that a power surge last night had killed one of my monitors on my work computer.  I replaced it with an ancient monitor that is nearly dead.  It's hard to switch between them, because the regular one is nice and bright, and the old one is dim and yellowy.

Then, piles of emails all wanting immediate attention.  Woo.  Then I decided after everyone else had left that the new ventilation was trying to kill me.  Either due to dust or something, I basically became unable to breathe in my office.  That's always a bad way to do work.

And I discovered after getting home that there's a major problem with the one project I have left to finish before I leave on vacation.  Wonderful.  Maybe I can sort that out tomorrow.

"Hey, what's that?" "Nophing."

• Santa puppy.
• I have not seen this joke before.
• That's kind of cool.

Wednesday: There's a hour down the drain

Turns out it was me overrunning an array by using <= instead of <.  Still.

• Stupid Flanders.
• This is good news.
• That'd be cool until whatever lock failed and you slam face first into the ground.
• Did this actually happen?  I'm curious as to whether I should try to find video clips.

Tuesday: Delicious Ideas

I've been planning to do stromboli or calzones since Sunday.  I finally got around to doing something with those ingredients, and then totally forgot to take pictures of the making or the final slice.  Oops.  Here's the cooked version:

 Here's the "holy shit this actually came out of the pan easily without exploding all over" picture:

The ingredients by layer are:

• Bottom crust
• Ricotta
• Sliced and pan fried portabello mushrooms
• Wilted spinach
• Spicy salami
• Regular salami
• Pepperoni
• Provolone
• Top crust
• Sauce

Basically, I decided that I could just cram it all into a stuffed pizza, and call it good.  It was. Super good.

What are you doing stools? You're not cats, you don't even have fur!

• Incompetence.
• Not actually Clarence Thomas.
• Actually Tony Scalia.  This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of justice, I'm surprised even though it comes from this jackass.
• Again, fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.
• Interesting. Zbigniew Rybczynski has made a number of really great shorts, but I'd never heard this story before.

Monday: So sleepy

Telecons = my sleep nemesis.  I even tried to pre-emptively bribe myself to get up early this morning by having doughnuts in the fridge.  Not great doughnuts, but one was a jelly doughnut.  Safeway makes reasonably decent jelly doughnuts. Raspberry filling.  The Platonic ideal of the jelly doughnut, made flesh.
Well, made into a suitable facsimile of that Ideal Jelly Doughnut.

In any case, today we get to play a fun game. What time is it? Adventure Question Time!

Why doesn't Obama go over the fiscal cliff and then make his own tax cuts?

Short answer:

Yes.  That's exactly what he's going to do.

Long answer:

Assuming Obama doesn't start bidding against himself (see every major policy debate run by Democrats since, like, 1312), he has a nearly unbeatable hand.  All tax cuts expire in January, so by doing nothing, he immediately can propose his own tax cuts, and cast the debate as "Congressional Republicans are holding tax cuts for middle class families unless the rich get their cut."  That's a strong argument, and will probably force enough Republicans to sign on board for a reasonable set of cuts.  

This then leaves the sequestration issue to deal with.  If we lived in a sane world, Congress would note that we can borrow money from people, and in doing so, make them pay us to do so (note that the interest rate on these bonds is negative).  This suggests that there's little market based pressure to "reign in spending."  Then, based on the principle that no law made by Congress can not be equally repealed by a subsequent Congress, they could just turn off that part of the old law.  It's dumb, and isn't actually economically a good idea.  This is basically Krugman's Barney Frank's theory of Weaponized Keynesianism, where all government spending is bad and detrimental to the economy, unless that spending is through the military, in which case it only creates jobs and supports the economy.  Since this is obviously contradictory, the logical solution would be to increase government spending (noting that we're effectively being paid to do this) in a way to support the economy by buying things.  It's like going to war, except instead of blowing shit up, we build a thousand bridges.

The final issue that needs to be resolved at this point is the counter-point to the "God/boulder too heavy" analogy above.  All appropriations must be done by Congress in a finance bill that the president signs.  However, some jackass came up with the idea that we should have a debt-ceiling, under the assumption that government borrowing is somehow always bad (see above re: inflation adjusted treasuries illustrating that this is a lie).  The debt-ceiling is a way for the current Congress to inhibit the appropriations already decided by Congress.  This is so fundamentally stupid, I can't come up with an analogy.  Abandoning this would solve lots of issues, and would probably restore the credit ratings that we had four years ago.  Credit ratings are largely based not on how much you owe, but on the likelihood you'll pay the money back.  The debt-ceiling makes this repayment unclear, as if Congress prevents the issuance of debt to fund some current operations, it may be forced to not may a scheduled repayment.  Since like the entire world economy is based on the fundamental concept that US Treasury bonds are safer than any other investment vehicle, disrupting this fact once would basically fuck everything up.

However, this again assumes that we haven't elected lunatics and morons to vote on issues they simply don't (and actively won't in some cases) understand.

Cute red pandas to clear your head.

Calm path: four seasons.

I don't even know what this was supposed to be.

And no stromboli tonight either. I was too tired to spend an hour or two making one.  And then I spent an hour and a half writing a post on economics that is likely to not be read.  Go me.

• This is what I miss most at Christmas.
• Everyone misses Team Rocket. And Misty. She's better than all Alternate Mistys.
• I am less excited about the Hobbit than I was for LotR.  Three movies is really long, and the book isn't really that long at all.  It just didn't sit right with me.
• Natasha posted a pile of awesome this evening, and I'm linking to my favorite of the set.
• Did you not get enough economics today? This one is about robots (in a fashion).
• Finally, HuffPo fundamentally misunderstands how to show a recipe.  When the text describing the step vanishes randomly, and the slideshow pictures are at the lowest resolution available for 1994, you should stop trying. Or start.  Whatever. Your recipe presentation is bad, and you should feel bad.

I need to meta a post: Debt Ceiling Analogies

Don't read this unless you're linking from the other article posted today. Sssh. Secret stuff inside.

Sunday: I enjoyed my Sunday. You may want to skip this post.

Part 1: Lunch.

The standard "no clue what I want for lunch" happened again today, and I decided that I'd go with "fish" as the solution to the problem.  So, Nico's then.

Fish/chips/I was hungry and wanted calimari, too.

Not the best I've had at Nico's, with overcooked calimari and fish that largely shed the crispy coating.  Probably healthier in the long run, if you can get over the "totally fried" aspect.

And then there was a rainbow.

Part 2: This Crappy Pokemon Movie.

I've done this before. Often.  Many times, apparently.  This was not the best one I've seen.

"Douchebag vs. Douchebag: Why Even Have the Main Characters" would have been a better title.

It stars this jerk.  He speaks. Using Inuyasha's voice, which is just creepy.

He's friends with these three jerks.  They talk too, but largely tell him he "needs to train more" and "isn't ready yet." Why does that sound like Dragonball Z?

He ignores advice, and goes to fight this jerk. His ass is thoroughly handed to him, and he gets his jerk friends frozen in ice.  Good job, jerk.

Insert opening credits with extended opening theme music from current series here.

James is only in the movie here. Making a call.

To Jessie, who equally shows up for like two seconds.  Fuck.

 Blah blah blah, Loser McJerkface teams up with Team Twerp (Unova Version), and run from Jerky McKicksYourAss.  That's when the felonies start happening.

 Like breaking into the subway system by smashing in giant train doors.  Do subways have giant train doors? 

Then they steal a blimp.  A blimp stored at the transportation museum at the edge of town that the subway connects to for some reason.

Then they steal a train.  These thefts are attempts to confuse Jerky McKYA.

 Fighty crap happens, but not regular Pokemon fighting.  Random "now I must power-up to fight with my TRUE STRENGTH!" kind of fighting.

See?  Upgraded form.

 More fighting.  They free the jerk's friends, who stand around and don't help.

"Because, honestly? We kind of hate him too."

Then the jerk realizes that the true way to win is not to play, or some other stupid lesson.  The villain largely says, "there you go, that's what you need to learn" and everything ends happy.

Definitely needed more Team Rocket.

Part 3: Things Left Undone.

I left myself a note yesterday that I needed lightbulbs.  Then I totally forgot about them, so my kitchen is still dark.

This meant that it was too dark to make dinner, so I just had a sandwich.  That's unfortunate, because I was going to make either a stromboli or a calzone, and now I'll have to do that tomorrow after work.  Instead of immediately eating pre-made stromboli or calzone.

This, but this is undone for a scientific reason:

Part 4: I Watch Most of Another Movie.

Three years ago, I watched this movie.  They had the second(?) sequel on today, so I watched that as well.  Not quite as economically devastating.  Well, ok.  It's not economically devastating if you ignore the part where Tinkerbell nearly destroys the entire world in a blanket of ice.  That would probably mess up the society they'd built.

But hey, the ending is a deus ex machina.  So it has that going for it.

Part 5: Links.

• Is this story suggesting that because fines "could lower profits" at banks, we should just ignore all the shady dealings?  Isn't that basically condoning extortion?
• I'm also a bit sad that the monkey couldn't go home with his people, but then again, they left him in a car while they went to Ikea.  Nice coat, though.
• Puppy.
• Prime rib.