I Can't Pound One, Period!

Start at the 1:20 minute mark:

Pump Pain

Hah! I've been telling y'all this was coming, for years.

Recall 16 months ago we bought a little car (32 mpg) expressly because of this prediction of mine.

Obama's people are printing money to monetize the stock and bond markets (so they can get re-elected and so they can bailout the 'old people' that run this country).

But an irresponsible, rampant policy like this inevitably juices the commodity markets too.

The funny thing is....high gas prices from now to November will be taken out on incumbent politicians. Obama - er, I mean his *handlers* - have to be aware of this.

So I believe at some point soon they will take the air (monetization) out of the stock and bond markets in order to knock down oil a peg before November. Sure they will *release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve* and make a big announcement out of it....but that won't really lower the price of oil that much.

Oh wait, some of you naive folk that the Strategic Reserve was for real emergencies like supply chain disruptions and wars???

Hah! No it's always been for incumbent pols!

The one problem with my little Volvo is that I'm too scared to drive my kids around in it. There are just too many crazy drivers here in NY. I feel like we'd be crushed instantly in the event of an accident (versus my Chevy Tahoe).

While politicians might not survive higher gas prices....the public will figure it out. Soon everyone will be driving less, ordering from Amazon Prime, and driving a moped:

What's that old moped joke?

Something like - They're like fat girls....fun to ride but you don't want your friends catching you riding one.

???

Networking?

I hate the word, *networking*, but that's essentially a big and growing part of what I'm doing these days.

For one thing, it's not easy to homeschool kids in New York in the sense that there really aren't that many kids whose parents are educated enough(!) to pull them out of school.

So I'm always driving all over the place, introducing myself to everyone, responding to online forum questions, picking brains, and striking up *education* conversations with just about everyone I meet....all in an effort to find other homeschoolers, convince people to *opt out* of institutionalized AND to promote myself as an educational resource.

I mean today I drove 25 minutes Northeast to a little art/math co-op; then I drove out to middle island for my kids' American History Club (watch John here). Tomorrow we are taking the 40 minute train ride into NYC (plus a subway downtown) for an *Art and Design* fair with the NYC homeschoolers. THEN on Wednesday, we are trekking 90 miles east to an observatory at night!

So that's just a clue as to why my blogging has been so tragically light these days. Florida was easier. Less commitments!

Math Haters

While dyslexia is a fairly well-known and oft-discussed affliction these days...

There does exist an analogue in the math world - Dyscalculia.

Apparently its sufferers (*math haters!*) have trouble recognizing and counting dots quickly. Or at least this is one of the diagnostic tests they fail.

They say that 3-6% of people suffer from it - and that's across the entire IQ range.

I do believe this actually exists although my inclination is to always take the *under* of the percentages posited by financially-interested researchers. So say it's more like 1-2% of Earthlings.

There are free dyscalculia tests online, just have to Google.

Also, there is a nice, seldom-used word for people who can't compute....it's innumerate.

A Little Different Than Cafeteria Swapping

Yeah, she is indeed homeschooled! Article here.

Thanks to Heather for this one.

'For The Children' Morons

I bumped into some guy from town the other night at a local restaurant's bar.

He said he was on his way to some benefit at the country club.

CaptiousNut - What for?

Dude - It's a fundraiser for the schools...

Hah!

They already spend a mind-blowing $26,000 per pupil, and they need more?

AND these Morons will voluntarily contribute???!!!

CaptiousNut - How much does it cost to go?

Dude - Well as a family we gave five thousand...

Wowsers! (Tickets started at $300 per couple.)

Dude - It's a way around the state cap....if the town spends any more money the state will reduce its aid. All the wealthy towns do this...

Another attendee, the next day explained further:

OtherDude - Last year it was to install WiFi everywhere. This year it's for smartboards...

Apparently the foundation simply picks a sleek new *cause* each year, preying on the misguided fears of these wealthy parents. Yeah, without smartboards....their kids will *fall behind* everyone else. Right.

As I said, they already have PLENTY OF MONEY in town. The superintendent makes $270,000 per year to achieve the worst academic results of all six towns that abut our district!

OtherDude - But how much of that $26,000 per pupil goes to pensions?

CaptiousNut - Not that much, now anyway.

You see, he has an answer on the tip of his tongue, no doubt echoed by the *foundation* and other naive folk that continue to ignore the school district's criminal fiscal irresponsibility, runaway pensions, and ridiculous salaries; naive (guilt-ridden?) folk that just bend over and take the inexorably escalating property taxes.

The most Moronic assumption of all, however, is that they all just equate money spent with educational outcomes.

There's a verse in the Bible - Proverbs 29:12:

If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials become wicked.

While that may be very true right now in Washington....a proverbial spin on it might well read:

He that hath fatal Moronic assumptions, is ripe for rampant exploitation.

It's just too bad they are dragging the rest of us, the remnant who understands what's really going on, down with them.

They think they are subsidizing smartboards....but all they are doing is subsidizing pensions and incompetence.

Chess - A Way Out And Up!

There's a documentary coming out on an amazing NYC government school. Here's a clip:

I'm telling y'all....this is a powerful game.

Overnight Camp?

My wife emailed me today:

Do you think kids are too young? It is 5 nights only. I think they would LOVE it.

http://www.campsfatimabernadette.org/specialprograms.php see starter week

So I googled Camp Fatima to see where it was.

First of all, New Hampshire is too far for me.

Second of all I noticed the tag *sexual abuse* on the Google Map page.

What the heck is that?

Well, another google revealed that Camp Fatima was the scene of some alleged(?) sexual abuse not too long ago (2002?).

I sent my wife the link to that info and the terse response to her suggestion "Good one!"

70 Million Hits In A Week?

I don't have time to watch a minute of it.

Someone said it's a scam.

I only came across it because I was deciphering this:

If it's important one of youse can let me know.  Thanks.

Shocking Violence In Socialist Schools

Okay, the *Shocking* characterization in my title is tongue in cheek.

Look, even if your kid isn't bullied themself....the odds are that they are actually bullying some other kids beneath them in the pecking order - even if on a psychological level.

Lord of the Flies isn't what happens when kids are taken out of school/society...

No, it's what kids do to each other everyday when sentenced to *forced association*.

I watched two older Asian geeks at chess class yesterday tease my sweet-as-pie son. I mean these kids were certainly outcast dorks in their local government school penitentiary; and I don't even think they were mean kids, relatively speaking, by any stretch. But they were 11 and 12 years old - my son is 7.30 - and they probably just don't get many opportunities otherwise to flick another kid away like a fingertip booger.

The older homeschooled kids never, EVER tease my son; I mean almost everyone loves him.

When you do something as profoundly against the grain as keeping your kids out of school...it's nice to be continually, if not constantly reminded - even if by chess dorks - that you made the right decision.

I was no angel in school myself.

I used to bully the football players, the minority gang leaders,...

The idea that making a *cause* out of the *bullying epidemic* is going to do anything, at all, is absolutely ridiculous.

A Tale Of Two Nines...

Wow!

For those of y'all who don't know how to keep score (honestly)....Sergio Garcia, the 'Rory McIlroy' of yesteryear, shot a sizzling 5-under on the front and a disastrous 8-over par on the back nine.

I've certainly done that before, in a manner of speaking. But I usually do it the other way - 10-over on the front, 1-over on the back. I reckon I've done that a bunch of times.

UPDATE - Check out the OCTUPLE BOGEY:

After eagling the first hole too!

Book Rec - The Bluest State

The The Bluest State is a terrific book about the horrible place I grew up in. And I especially recommend it for anyone who's ever *done any time* in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

The author refers to the bad guys as *Boomer Liberals* even though as far as I'm concerned, and as he admits, he is in fact one himself.

I didn't expect to take any notes on this one so I was without paper and No. 2 pencil when I sat down to read it. Consequently there are no less than about 20 pages dog-eared!

But I'm only going to type up one little excerpt:

Years later, Googling the slogan, I found the consensus meaning of "The personal is political": the "broad texture and character" of our personal lives are not a result of our personalities and life choices, but are "defined by the broader political and social setting." We are what a corrupt political system makes us, and thus we suffer from "a totality of oppressions." It's a wonder, given Hanisch's depressing no-exit spin on this, that we even get out of bed.


But my peers in Cambridge didn't have quite the same gloomy, humbling take on it. "The personal is political" was a slogan from heaven for my generation, endowed with limitless self-esteem by our parents, instinctively understanding that the center of the universe looks back at us from the mirror every morning. We took it as a green light to let our gut feelings and personal biases - often mistaken for moral principles - dictate our civic behavior. We used it to justify a new brand of politics that valued personal identity over communal interests, all the while insisting they were one and the same. Widespread protests in the streets of Cambridge during the spring of 1970 were described as antiwar, but they were really a convention of grievances from feminists to anti-Zionists and everything in between. The uniform of choice that spring was a T-shirt with a red fist on the back, a generic but satisfyingly defiant symbol. Exotic concepts of discrimination with made-up names like "lookism," and "heteronorming" got their start from "The personal is political" and its comforting premise that if you believe strongly enough in your own oppression, just as the children in Peter Pan believed in fairies, it must be real.

That just about describes all of my Mass Boomer uncles and my father to a "T". Every time I see them they are complaining about a *totality of oppressions*!

Never, and I mean never, do they ever convey the outlandish notion that, perhaps(!), they themselves have any responsibility for or any control over whatever the particular grief is.

Precocious Headbangers

I'm not a thinking-about-killing-myself headbanger in the slightest....but I prefer this one:

I wonder if they sing/play "I Used To Love Her"????

It's All Reps!

Check out this 'old coot':

700 push-ups, 10 sets of pull-ups and dips, 5 DAYS A WEEK!

This February, down in Naples, I had access to an artificial putting green. Determined to improve this weakness of mine I committed to putting for 20-30 minutes, twice a day, for the entire month.

What a difference it made!

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I've never putted that much, in such a short period of time, in my entire 22 year golfing career - not even when I was working at a golf course 5 days per week.

While there's almost always a smarter, more efficient approach to whatever it is someone is endeavoring....it's also always possible to put in a whole lot more *reps*.

And the thing is, as I recently found out on the artificial green, the better techniques will undoubtedly manifest themselves during the added reps.

Wow!

Apparently ABC has a new show debuting this month:



It's based on the book "Good Christian Bitches". And it's produced by the invert who did the whore-romp "Sex And The City".

Wow, again.

I say short this one. Advertisers are going to take a beating. Wal-Mart is already stepping out, even before the show started!

Plus, no one is really going to watch it - neither Christians nor born-again pagans.

Mr. Clutch?

Only 6'1 and 170 lbs, my alma mater UPenn's Zack Rosen may not be NBA-bound....but apparently he's had a pretty impressive season:

As Penn heads to Princeton Tuesday night, trying for a share of an improbable Ivy League title and a playoff date with Harvard, Palestra regulars come up with their own ways of calibrating the sensational play they have seen from Zack Rosen all season.

"People sometimes think coaches have more control than we do. His ability to just make plays sometimes even amazes me," Penn coach Jerome Allen said of his senior point guard. "I can maybe count on both hands how many times this season he's had open looks. Not too often."

Stu Suss has sat by Penn's bench since Chuck Daly was the Quakers coach - during the Nixon administration - always coming up with numbers that don't appear on the stat sheet. Ask Suss if he has any interesting Rosen stats beyond his Ivy-leading 18.5 points per game or his 5.3 assists, and he answers, "As a matter of fact . . . "

In the last five minutes or in overtime of Ivy League games in which the score was within eight points - "in that specific clutch situation," Suss explained - Rosen had played 48 minutes, which happens to be the length of an NBA game.

Rosen's box-score line in those 48 clutch-situation minutes: 53 points, plus 6 assists, 1 rebound, 1 blocked shot, 1 steal, 2 personal fouls and 2 turnovers.

Asked if he can think of a player carrying a team as Rosen has carried the 2011-12 Quakers, Phil Samko, the Quakers' basketball trainer since 1985, goes away from basketball and back to his own youth in Worcester, Mass. "Not since Yaz and the '67 Red Sox," referring to Carl Yastrzemski's Triple Crown season.

I'll pull one more little quote from that article:

"I don't believe in talent," Rosen said.

Hah! That seems to be the theme wherever I look these days...

If You Click On The Arrow...

...you'll be accosted by funny junk:

Stealing The American Dream

Hah!

A buddy/old-neighbor of mine up on Boston's South Shore just sent this to me...

Looking at the picture and the headline I thought for a split-second that it was my old a$$hole landlord!

But then I saw that it was in Maryland; and that it was ONLY $1 million worth of delinquency.

My landlord, as far as I know, still has 3-4 properties that totaled over $4 million in *non-performing* debt.

And he stopped paying everything, 4.5 years ago...

One quick excerpt:

"How is it people can stay in a house for five years without ever making a mortgage payment?” said Thomas A. Lawler, a former senior vice president at Fannie Mae who now runs his own consulting firm in Loudoun County. “That’s a screwed-up process. It’s an example of how the process is broken."

Can you believe this effin' guy quoted in the article???!!!

HE WORKED FOR FANNIE MAE - WHERE IT WAS THEIR POLICY TO NOT EVEN LIST A LOAN AS 'DELINQUENT' UNTIL IT WAS 2 FULL YEARS IN DEFAULT.

Fannie, his company, loses hundreds of billions, he goes out scott-free to run his own *consultancy*....and then waxes outraged at his own former boondoggle!

The *Fake-Analysis* Is The Best

Whenever you need a laugh (or a cry)....just take a gander at the YouTube comments for any highly-viewed, viral type of video. It never fails!

They Will Die!

Movie Rec - Winter's Bone

This one is very well done:

Netflix characterizes Winter's Bone as *dark and gritty*, indeed it is - but my wife and I enjoyed it.

On Balls

Me? I play with whatever balls I find (when searching for my playing partners' errant shots!)...

And if I run out of balls myself, I just reach into someone else's bag. Believe me, they'll never know!

For Real?

Government Education - A Crossfire Of Blame

Still Battling Vermin!

A minute ago I found this under my rump on my desk chair down here in Naples:

I can't for the life of me figure out how it got there.

Must have been a retarded mentally challenged lizard...

See also - Mice Body Count - 13.

Euthanize Teens?

I vote *YES*...

Packing Up To Go Home

It was tempting....but we decided NOT to buy any Naples real estate and stay here permanently. In a couple days we are heading back up north, to our home in NY.

The highlight of this trip was having my first wife with us here for 2+ weeks at the end in addition to 5 days during our first week.

This year we branched out - as we always do. Habit is the hallmark of 'old coot'-hood!

For the first time we went to beaches other than Vanderbilt Beach.

Delnor Wiggins Beach, just a little bit north, was fantastic!

We didn't like Barefoot Beach as much - although it was cold that day and may have affected our assessment. It seems like Barefoot Beach is where all the Ft. Myers people go to get away from, well, Ft. Meyers people!

We also went to Lowdermilk Beach. That too was fantastic. If you go, be sure to be there BEFORE 9:30am because the tiny lot fills up quickly.

And today we ventured all the way down (25 miles?) to Tigertail Beach on Marco Island which was nothing short of spectacular. The best *shelling* I've ever experienced.

I did play golf twice - once at the Country Club of Orlando with a Philly jabroni and again at Arrowhead in North Naples. Arrowhead is okay as a layout but its greens are terribly slow, as is the pace of play. While there are plenty of golf courses in Naples most of them are private and only really cost effective and accessible in the off-season. Arrowhead is one of the only ones with a decent price ($50-$80) that is open to the public. So it's mobbed. I don't know that I'll play golf here again in February.

Although I did get plenty of much-needed practice putting in - on the condo development's artificial green. I was putting every morning AND every night for a good 30 minutes. It definitely paid off...

Yesterday we hit Randy's Fishmarket - apparently it's a super-famous restaurant here. Who knew?

Well it was sensational. And realize that I am a complete, spoiled NYC food snob when I say that. I thought it was awesome, as did my wife, and another NYC couple that dined with us. And, get this....I don't even like seafood!

So if you are in Naples, do try to get there. Warning - at 5pm or so it gets packed.

The kids got a ton of schoolwork done - as they always do. Luckily the library down here sold us a temporary library card for the whopping sum of $10. 40 books per week were consumed, easily. And before my wife got down I had them doing a significant amount of math each day too.

The condo we rented was terrific. For $3,200 (all in) we enjoyed a 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath unit with 13(?) foot ceilings in the Bridgewater Bay development. It's 1,800 square feet and going for between $200,000 and $215,000 these days....down from $435,000 or so at the top.

The units downstairs are a little smaller - 2BR, 1,400 square feet - and get this....the guy downstairs owes $370,000 on his! On the market today they are only going for around $170,000.  How'd you like to be the bank holding that note???

I actually took this pic!

Yeah, there are a ton of 'old coots' here. Everywhere you look you see them. Invariably they are DOING NOTHING, TALKING ABOUT NOTHING, reading vaping non-fiction books through closed eye-lids, and MOVING SLOWLY. People have asked me *how can you stand being around all those dinosaurs???*.

Well, it's easy. As a lifetime golfer I'm pretty used to 'old coots'. Plus, it's not like there aren't annoying people of younger ages everywhere up north - or a bazillion drooling, napping geriatrics!

We had an absolutely great time this year - it was the best snowbirding month we've enjoyed yet. Perhaps my wife is right about February being better...

Warren Buffett - A Housing Moron Too!

Apparently in the past he said that housing would have bottomed by now.

Single family homes only look cheap in Florida and other places that have been over-developed. And they only look cheap because of record-low, unsustainable mortgage rates.

NYC had 3 housing crashes in the 1970s alone. Meanwhile all these bull-market housing Morons think that today, somehow, the housing market correction is going to happen without NYC-area real estate dropping hardly at all - which it hasn't!

Here's the link for his latest.

See also - Warren Buffett - STEALING From Taxpayers!.

Burger Rec

I finally made it to Five Guys, the upstart burger joint. I had been avoiding it because of my kids' allergies - sesame seed buns and peanuts all over the place.

If you haven't had one of their cheeseburgers....I HIGHLY recommend you going!

Both times that I went (this week!) I got my burger *all the way*, i.e. with a bunch of toppings.

Toppings, all of them, are free.

And this is a welcome change. For this is the one case where I'm a complete *socialist*. I'm just sick of these places that surcharge for everything extra. ($2 for a slice of cheese on a sandwich at Circes in Scituate, MA, $2 for a little scoop of guacamole at Chipotle, etc.)

At Five Guys you can get any or all(!) of the 16 toppings for *free*, sort of.

Of course the place is pricey compared to fast food burger joints.

A cheeseburger, small fry, and a regular drink cost $11.63.

So basically there is a surcharge on those Morons that like *plain burgers*. They are subsidizing people like me - as they should!

(Like those fools who, when as a group you have to decide on a pizza, complain that they only want a plain/cheese pie. They should be shot!)

I say skip or share the fries. They are tasty, but you might not even have room (or budget) for them. Seriously, the burgers are so big the fries could be split 3 ways.

Okay. I had the dude put my fries in a separate bag - to keep them away from the sesame seed-loaded burger. And I gave the fries this afternoon to my kids...

As I was typing up this post I read on the Five Guys' website that their fries are made in 100% peanut oil.

Now, allegedly my daughter is/was severely allergic to peanuts - according to some Moron with a medical degree who had her *tested*.

She's still breathing and hasn't reacted at all that I can see....so I guess we've been lugging her Epipen around for 5.5 years, and getting all paranoid around peanuts for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON!

Classical Funny

Tony Soprano's Mother!

So I'm looking up common and important Latin expressions for the flashcards I'm creating for my son et al...

And I come across this hilarious one:

Obit anus, abit onus

It means - The old woman dies, the burden is lifted.

I thought better of including it on the flashcards, for now anyway.