At Home In The Wasteland: December 2008 Archives

Russky Standart in...Palm Desert?

I gotta say, I was really surprised to find Russian Standard vodka for sale at our local grocery store (the one off Hwy 111 in Palm Desert).

Now my parents can impress all their friends when they serve cocktails with some good vodka (not that Smirnoff/Absolut/SKYY junk).

Stuff I did this week

- Ate In-N-Out
- Ate a TON of Mexican food. Seriously. A ton.
- Saw a bunch of friends
- Took the Mosin M91/30 out to the desert to shoot a few rounds
- Toured the "wind farm" in the San Gorgonio Pass
- Completely ignored this blog and most e-mails
- Etc, etc.

It was good to be home for an entire week, but it's back to the grind tomorrow.

2008 mug shots of the year

Some real winners in this batch.

Svetik the pink hippo

Zookeepers at the Kaliningrad Zoo showed up for work one morning and were shocked to discover that their hippo had turned pink overnight.

One onlooker told the Austrian Times: "He looks very pretty but that colour might not help him much when he gets around to breeding. He doesn't look very manly."

Indeed.

I guess we'll have to bail out the Iraqis, too

Heeey, I coulda sworn the Bush administration said the reconstruction would pay for itself:

Plummeting oil prices may force Iraq's government to slow ambitious reconstruction plans, and the country could face a budget shortfall by next summer, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
"We're in a situation where Iraq is … potentially going to be in a deficit mode next year," said Paul Brinkley, who leads Pentagon efforts to aid Iraq's economy.

The trend worries U.S. officials who say a strong economy is needed to lock in the security gains made over the past year. "The long-term stability of the country heavily depends on a vibrant economy," Brinkley said.

[...]

"For next year, with the oil prices going down, we're going to have a problem," said Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq's ambassador to the United States.

If prices decline after that, "it's not even going to be enough to pay salaries, never mind reconstruction of the infrastructure," he said in a speech Tuesday.

CPC Pipeline capacity to double

I never thought this day would come. The CPC Consortium has finally agreed to expand the pipeline's capacity, which will carry some 1.4 million bpd of Kazakh crude by 2013.

God save the pint

Because "I'll have a half-liter of (insert beer here)" just sounds lame:

The European Parliament voted to allow the continued use of the pint and the mile on Tuesday, sparing British drinkers from having to order half liters and Irish drivers from staying below 110 kilometers an hour. Before the measure passed, Britain and Ireland, the only European countries still widely using British imperial units of measurement, were required to set dates for scrapping them next year. The vote in Strasbourg, France, also allows shops to post imperial and metric measurements side by side.

Russia and OPEC

No promises from Russia on production cuts, but I thought this was interesting:

In a speech to the assembled OPEC ministers, Mr. Sechin said that Russia’s beleaguered oil producers had already pruned production in November, and could cut still more if market conditions warranted. But he gave no promises.
Instead, he put forward a list of changes that Moscow would like to see made to the international pricing and trading of crude.

First, he said, the world needed to establish some other recognized benchmarks than those now used in New York and London for trade in West Texas Intermediate and Brent crude oils. Those benchmarks, he said, were “inappropriate and unfair.”

It was also “worth discussing” scraping the U.S. dollar as the primary oil currency and replacing it with a basket of currencies—a pitch made from time to time by Iran and Venezuela.

The world, Mr. Sechin said, also needed “new trading floors” in other parts of the world to counterbalance the power of the New York Mercantile Exchange and to better reflect the “actual turnover volumes” of crude itself, as opposed to the mere “financial instruments” traded on the Nymex. The Kazakh capitol of Astana, he said, would be one good location.

Mr. Sechin then pitched Russia being granted permanent observer status within OPEC. That way, he added, Russia could host an OPEC meeting sometime next year.

Back to "vrag naroda" eh?

Dzerzhinsky would be proud:

New legislation backed by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin would allow Russian authorities to label any government critic a traitor. The bill, which is expected to pass in Parliament, would expand the definition of treason to include damaging Russia’s constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity. That, critics said, would essentially let the authorities interpret any act against the state as treason, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. A group of human-rights advocates issued a statement on Wednesday saying that the legislation “returns the Russian justice system to the times of the 1920-1950s.” Existing law defines state treason as actions harming external security by passing information to “foreign organizations.” The new bill would add nongovernmental organizations based anywhere in the world that have an office in Russia to the list of banned recipients of state secrets. The government has repeatedly accused foreign spy agencies of using the organizations as a cover to foment dissent.

Dear GW, my glorious alma mater

I just received your most recent e-mail, in which you once again implored me to contribute to this fine institution of higher learning. What intrigued me about this particular e-mail, however, was that you asked me to donate money in order to support scholarships for athletes, including a basketball player named Travis who expressed a desire to play in the NBA upon leaving GW.

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

A bit of advice, if I may. Asking recent GW graduates, many of whom toil in unglamorous office jobs that do not pay millions per year, to donate money to wannabe NBA professionals is a bit ridiculous. Perhaps in your next e-mail you could tell us about a student who wants to, oh, I don't know, do something worthwhile, like cure cancer or work in a refugee camp.

Oh, who am I kidding? The next e-mail will probably ask for donations on behalf of Phil, the business school student who dreams of becoming a hedge fund manager and eventually purchasing a gigantic yacht.

Very truly yours,

Lindsay Fincher (B.A. Political Science, 2004)

Office Depot closing a bunch of stores

Because they suck:

Office Depot Inc. will close about 9 percent of its North American stores over the next three months and open fewer locations next year in an effort to cut costs, the office supply chain said Wednesday. Advertisement
The plan to shutter 112 stores will reduce the chain’s base to 1,163. It plans to close 45 stores in the Central U.S., 40 in the Northeast and Canada, 19 in the West and eight in the South.

[...]

Office Depot shares, which have tumbled more than 82 percent since the beginning of the year, were unchanged in pre-market trading Wednesday at $2.43.

Amazingly, the Palm Desert store (aka the eighth circle of hell) is not on the chopping block. This is likely due to the fact that all the old people (99% of Palm Desert's population) need their Post-it note dispensers and Frank Abagnale Jr. endorsed anti-forgery gel pens.

'Cos there's a red star up on the Christmas tree

What the EFF?!

I wish they would play this on WashFM (Christmas music 24/7)

"People just took to boozing like crazy"

Interview with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz on his experience as a kid living in Ukraine during the Chernobyl accident. I'm seeing Gogol at the 9:30 Club in a few weeks and can't wait. One of the best concerts I've ever seen was their show at Coachella in '07.

Clean Coal Carolers = epic fail

Now, I'm not going to get too down on the coal industry, because my family in Illinois has worked in it for several generations (both mining and power plants) and it's still a vital source of energy in the United States, but the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity's "Clean Coal Carolers" are ridiculously lame. It's basically a flash video where you dress up lumps of coal, pick a background, and listen to the pieces of coal sing songs like "Frosty the Coalman". I mean, seriously, WTF? Who thought this would be a good idea?!

My clean coal carolers are at the beach, and dressed in winter clothing. Another WTF?

Even worse, they set up a Facebook page to promote the Clean Coal Carolers, and the enviros are absolutely dominating it. I bet some old dude at ACCCE was like "Hey, I hear the kids hang out on Facebook these days! Let's make a fan page for the Clean Coal Carolers!" And then they are promptly mobbed by enviros basically calling them killers and what not. Yeah, that Facebook page was a great idea.

Basically, this was a total waste of money. Instead, they should have developed a game where you have to capture CO2 and store it or something. Duh.

Oh, and natural gas is way better.

OMG I love the British

I want to move back to the UK and be an MP.

Worst Palm Springs tourism ad ever?

This ad came up while I was reading an article on The Guardian:

Wow, "life = fun"? Amazing. I think a third grader designed this.

Where a kid can be a kid

Like most babies of the 80s (with apologies to SoCo) I loved going to Chuck E. Cheese's and eating tons of pizza, drinking several pitchers of soda, and redeeming hundreds of tickets (won from skee ball, of course) for some useless junk toy. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, several Chuck E. Cheese's have turned into a not so family friendly environment, with some locations even hiring armed guards to keep the peace:

In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese's.
Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child's birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant's music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain's namesake mouse perform.

Why does Dianne Feinstein hate fun?

Citing security concerns, two senators who sit on the Congressional committee in charge of inaugural ceremonies appealed on Tuesday to the mayor and city council of Washington, D.C., to reverse a decision to keep bars in the city open until 5 a.m. during inauguration week.
Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee chairwoman, said she had “grave concerns about the unintended consequences” of the plan approved by the city last week to extend the hours that bars and restaurants can sell alcohol.

Seriously, I'm so glad I have cool Senators now. Jim Webb would never bitch about this because he's too busy polishing his collection of guns and telling Bush to mind his own goddamn business. Also, he would probably be drinking whiskey with the people until 5am, unlike Princess Feinstein.

Amazing skateboarding dog

This dog is AWESOME.

I am going to teach Tucker to do this.

Yes, January 20th will be hellish

So get ready for this magic moment, ladies and gentlemen. With Obama's swearing-in comes the first audacious act of his administration: Get the population equivalent of Los Angeles to stand on a geographical pinhead and then disappear into a subway tunnel.

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December 28, 2008