I am truly concerned by what’s going on with the craziness in the financial markets right now. We need a clear understanding of the fundamentals of a working economy, and for that we turn to Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Click the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures and read the story.
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© Disney
This was the first comic book story by Carl Barks I ever read. If you’ve never read a Carl Barks story, now it’s your first too.
Tickets for Petula Clark’s appearance on Mother’s Day at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, a mere 80 miles from here, go on sale today at 10am.
P.S. I have my tickets! Ordered them online, and I have a link that lets me print them myself. Also, our man in Scotland, Dave, reports the following has been posted by the British government at this link.
Read the Government’s response
Thank you for your e-petition.
Petula Clark’s achievements in music are well known and respected. It is easy to see why so many people want to see her record formally recognised. This is underlined by the fact over a thousand people have signed the e-petition on the No 10 website calling for her to be made a Dame. Your support has been carefully noted.
This is only acknowledgment that the PET-ition has been noted, not that it is being acting upon. The whole concept of petitioning the UK gov’t online is new, so there’s no way of knowing if this is the standard response. I would point out, however, that there’s no mention of Pet being such a trouper for the troops during WWII. My feeling is her contributions to morale during the war in and of themselves warrant the title of Dame. And of course she’s had such a wonderful career ever since then!
In this prescient drawing by Charles Schulz, Barack Obama continues to try working his magic on Hillary Clinton…
Oh, those capitalist risk-takers! They sure hate government intervention… until they’re in trouble, as victims of their own greed. Now that the Fed has agreed to back a loan to keep Bear Stearns afloat, what about every other large financial institution that runs into trouble?
[Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson would not discuss what would have happened if the government didn’t extend a financial lifeline to Bear Stearns. “I’m not going to speculate about what ifs,” he said.
This is a ridiculous statement! The Fed and Treasury wouldn’t have acted unless they had an idea of what would happen if Bear Stearns went under. Bailing out Bear Stearns may be reassuring to Wall Street, but I think it’s scaring Main Street.
Do I have one single favorite Beatles song? Actually, yes, I think I do. Overall, I tend to favor John over Paul, but this one is my favorite.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/HelloGoodbye.flv 440 330]
And while I have the old Laser (pre-DVD) video disc player going, here’s a delightful short scene from Magical Mystery Tour. Seeing this, it’s obvious that John had a kid of his own.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/MagicalMysteryTour.flv 440 330]
Extra: That version of “Hello, Goodbye” is obviously not the original stereo mix from Thursday, November 2, 1967. Further, it’s slower. Or perhaps the mix for the record was sped up. I’ll put it here for comparison, taken from the original Capitol Records LP of Magical Mystery Tour that I first heard 40 years ago.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/MAR/HelloGoodbye.mp3]In the UK, Magical Mystery Tour was a double EP, and it had only the songs on side 1 of the American LP.
Click to enlarge
Most bloggers use a blogging host, and they don’t go to the trouble to be their own Webmasters on a Web host, like I do. This Web site is hosted by a company in Phoenix called iPower, or iPowerweb. It’s a big hosting service, specializing in small businesses. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s some unscheduled downtime, as we like to say in the high-tech biz when things go wrong. Everything was OK after a while, without me doing anything.
The last time I had something go wrong that absolutely had to be fixed and wasn’t going away on its own, I called iPower tech support, and after an hour I got somebody on the phone who was very nice and fixed the problem. But I know that my friend Bismo, who uses iPower for domain and e-mail forwarding isn’t happy, and there are many other customers with complaints. These problems have become widespread to the point where the Arizona Republic recently had an article about iPower’s woes. Here’s a bit of it.
Web host firm plagued by client criticism
Andrew Johnson
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 6, 2008 12:00 AMComplaints about Web-site crashes, shoddy tech support and billing errors have spurred fast-growing IPower Inc. to revamp its approach to customer service.
In recent months, the Phoenix-based Web-hosting company has nearly doubled its number of customer-service representatives and adopted new software to manage customer feedback.
The changes have come as the company finds itself the focus of Internet blogs slamming its service and customers threatening to cancel their accounts.
I’ll eventually be confronting some major changes to this site, including an update to the management console. I’m not looking forward to this, because the potential exists for everything to fall to crud. Whatever problems come up, I hope iPower is ready and able to help me.
