Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Miracle stain remover!

Carol and I were eating out last week. For dessert, Carol had a huge piece of peanut butter pie, covered in chocolate syrup. I helped, of course, and after I took a big bite I looked down and saw a dark stain on the leg of my olive green pants. I told Carol, she said leave it, and she’d put stain remover on it at home. But when we got home the stain was gone! Carol thinks it must have been only water, and not chocolate syrup, but I know better, because I believe in miracles!

Note to Larry Ellison: Shut Up!

Can’t the board of directors at Oracle tell Larry Ellison to keep his stupid mouth shut?

In a letter to the New York Times, Ellison said, “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”

I agree that firing Steve Jobs from Apple was one of the worst corporate decisions in history, and that John Sculley as CEO was a joke, but why is Ellison commenting on the situation at HP? Stick to your own concerns, Larry. Mark Hurd isn’t a founder of HP, and from what I can tell he has absolutely no involvement with product. Hurd is a money guy, who wants sales targets met, and costs cut. In other words, he’s a corporate hack. Firing Hurd is not like firing Jobs, it’s like firing John Sculley.

Hewlett-Packard is a company that badly needs different leadership, despite doing well recently, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. For corporate computing, the only story that HP has to tell right now is the XP-series of storage area network systems, but it isn’t their story, it belongs to HDS — Hitachi Data Systems. HP needs to get back to being an engineering company. Hurd has zero conception of what a SAN is, or even what USB is, and that’s why he needs to go, regardless of anything related to money mismanagement and sexual impropriety.

That’s a yacht to spend on a wedding

Chelsea Clinton is already 30? Well, nobody can say she’s rushing into getting married. The speculation that the wedding and reception would run into millions of dollars is way off target, apparently, but no matter what it’s costing it’ll be a lot more than what 99% of everybody else spends. Hey, the Clintons can afford it, and they’re not complaining about paying taxes.

John Kerry, on the other hand, continues to be a disappointment. As a Massachusetts taxpayer, I don’t believe his assertion that he always intended to pay Baystate taxes on his Ocean State yacht. Of course, what Kerry did was perfectly legal, so the only thing that’s wrong is the inherent duplicity.

I met Kerry only once, briefly, during my reporting days, and I can tell you the aloof thing is for real. Kerry couldn’t be bothered by a nobody kid reporter like me, and he wasn’t even a senator yet. Around that same period of time, when Ed Brooke was a senator, Ted Kennedy gave me his undivided attention for a 20-minute interview. For all of his personal failings, from that experience I realized Ted knew that loyalty was something he had to earn and couldn’t take for granted.

Unemployment going Hire and Hire?

What’s wrong with the unemployed? Why are they still out of work? Sure, it’s been reported that, on average, there are at least five applicants for every job, but if every one of those jobs gets filled, then the increased demand for goods and services will create more jobs, and the cycle will continue until we have full employment, and we’ll be back to having inflation, instead of deflation, in no time. See? It’s easy to understand!

So the problem must be, it has to be, with those who are unemployed, and not the government’s failure to pump enough borrowed money into the economy with public works projects and make-work jobs. So what, exactly, is wrong with these people who are looking for work, but finding none? The Onion explains the problem, and the solution…

Report: Unemployment High Because People Keep Blowing Their Job Interviews

According to the findings, seven out of 10 Americans could have landed their dream job last month if they had known where they see themselves in five years, and the number of unemployed could be reduced from 14.6 million to 5 million if everyone simply greeted potential employers with firmer handshakes, maintained eye contact, and stopped fiddling with their hair and face so much.