Blagowago

We had a great Christmas with all the cats, though they did manage to rip my floor asunder.

Tonight, my cat decided not to let me go through the proper stages of sleep, so I stumbled up around 8 thinking "Trans-Siberian Blagowago!" When I get deprived of sleep, I have strange mornings. I wandered around my apartment contemplating the Blagowago until I got my coffee.

And of course there were the usual sophisticated art school parties, including body painting with marker pen and arm stapling.

Eggs

Ah, friends! Like watching the telly but you have to talk to them.

On another note, Weeds is still good. I am watching season four now and still not tired of it. Anxious to find out how the third season of Dexter ends. Want another season of Sons of Anarchy, great series.

Two eggs.

Invasion of the Gay Garden Gnomes

I was hanging out with this beast. Her favourite pastime is reaching high ground and screaming.


Also, WTF of the week. The gay garden gnomes. They had lesbian ones too, equally mind-bendingly ugly, as garden gnomes often are. I just got myself a little bonsai tree.


Yet we stay happy, content and well-nourished.


But some have been gazing for too long into the abyss.

Anyway.

It was just as I feared. Number9dream was one of those great books which begin to dissolve towards the end, like grains of kitty litter in the shower, or, er, not quite perhaps. Anyway. The book was great but it just sort of unravelled infuriatingly towards the end like a roll of kitchen paper falling down from the counter and exploring all of the floor.

However, Cloud Atlas by the same author, David Mitchell, is hitherto fantastic. If I had it in me to write books, one of them would have been something like this - the concept, not the particular environments and situations. I even had one loosely planned. Now I can spend my time some other way. No games right now though. Dawn of War - Soulstorm and Red Alert 3 were both big mehs. Meh.

Done

Moving: done.


After moving, I took a walk past the royal castle. Apparently, somebody had been fishing junk out of the water.


We also went mushroom hunting in the countryside. Nothing found, but it was a very nice walk.

The cat with many names, the current one being Bubblan ("the bubble"), loves the new apartment, and so do I. It is very bright, despite it being the first of October, and with no curtains up yet, the sunlight awakes me in the morning. It rocks. Sure, it takes a bit longer to get to work in the morning, but that is nothing compared to the joy of living closer to... perhaps not nature, but at least a few trees.

I am sort of surprised by the financial blaha in the world. Not so much by the behaviour of individuals as by their total inability to work together to further their own ends in the long run.

As an investment banker friend of mine said; "Everybody was playing chicken, and nobody steered out of the way before it was too late."

It is no wonder that things happened. Sooner or later, the idiot lending to people who could not pay had to end. Using an interest rate of one per cent when calculating would inevitably lead to disaster in a world where it can rise to ten times that or more, as it has done before. But the slick guys giving out credit cared only about their own short term winnings. Which is fine. That is what usually motivates people to work. What is not fine is that the management of the institutions did not have the appropriate checks in place, incentive programs if you will, to make their employees act in a "responsible" way. That is, create value for the shareholders. Apparently, the shareholders had not created the right kind of incentives for management either. And so it goes, mostly everybody loses and a small number of people have their pockets full of money, but not nearly as much as this mess has cost. Ergo, a big fucking net loss to society which makes a great case for those craving greater regulation of financial markets. Regulation for regulation's sake sucks, but I really wonder how to combat this sort of events in a completely "free" market.

Now to go pick up the engagement rings, though my lady is currently in a foreign land, in a foreign time.