Remember the plotline in the Sopranos when Tony gets his hooks into his friend's sporting goods store, liquidates the inventory, runs out the credit then leaves the husk bankrupt ?

That's what came to mind while reading what Bain Capitol is doing to the Guitar Center chain.

Make 6-9% with the chance that the company could finally go tits-up? Why not! If it pays out, then great, and if it doesn’t – tax write off!

You know who else thought like that? The people who set the mortgage market on fire just a few years ago. They made a fortune by structuring finance in such a way that investments produced income irrespective of their true value. They could not have cared less about whether the end result was old people thrown out of their homes or eight million unemployed – that was someone else’s risk. Their risk got hedged by the taxpayer who would bail out the industry so long as the collapse was big enough, so building a decent, functional economy was besides the point.

This is the logic at play with Guitar Center. Financial parasites have taken over the host company and could not care less about the industry itself. They install some CEO who used to be selling DVD players. They swap private equity firms in and out. It doesn’t matter – it’s just another place for loose capital to suck out a few extra dollars or a tax break. After all, the entire value of the company is less than what JPMorgan paid in fines last year without breaking a sweat.

If money is speech, what did I say when I wrote that (big-ass) check to the IRS ? Since I have no choice but to pay my taxes, did the US government compel that speech? I don't think they have the power to compel speech, so that seems like a bit of a dilemma...

Anyway, here's Wye Oak

Let's listen to me...

You're welcome.

Eyelash extensions and a wig, and Ralphie's almost a hottie.

First, some legalese:

USA PATRIOT, Section 802(c)
(a) DOMESTIC TERRORISM DEFINED- Section 2331 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
    `(5) the term `domestic terrorism' means activities that--
        `(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
        `(B) appear to be intended--
            `(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            `(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
            `(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
        `(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.'.

Good stuff.

With that in mind, we can call this guy a 'terrorist'.

FBI agents in Texas have arrested a man who allegedly was plotting to use C-4 explosives and weapons to kill police officers, rob banks and armored cars, and blow up government buildings and mosques, authorities announced today.

Robert James Talbot Jr., 38, of Katy, Texas, was arrested Thursday on federal charges of attempted interference with commerce by robbery, solicitation to commit a crime of violence and possession of an explosive material, the FBI said.Robert-James-Talbot

After setting up a Facebook page called American Insurgent Movement (AIM), Talbot allegedly sought to recruit five or six like-minded people who wanted “to restore America Pre-Constitutionally and look forward to stopping the Regime with action by bloodshed.” He wrote this year on the AIM page that he was seeking people interested in “walking away from your life … to stop the regime.”

...

Talbot posted on Facebook that he had gone to four Bank of America branches to “play observation.” Talbot allegedly urged “anyone who robs these banks to kill everyone working for the ‘banking Cartels’ during the heist.”

Talbot’s Facebook post continued: “That is exactly what I will have my men do during the heist. Same goes with the Muslims. Mosques are to be a blast! With three of my guys with FA [full automatic] AK’s [AK-47 semi-automatic rifles], we will send that white house worthless piece of dirt and his Muslim brotherhood a message they will never forget.”

...

After using Facebook to recruit three followers, who really were undercover agents and an informant, Talbot encouraged them to “start watching violent war movies to mentally prepare for killing people.”

Well, everyone who doesn't work for Fox News can call him a terrorist, that is.

I hate April Fools day.

Back in 1994 or so, I bought a book on digital image processing because I wanted to be able to save some of my fractal images in GIF format and needed to know how to write a GIF. I copied the C code out of that book and used it for many years. And then the internet came along. And so I put that code in a little free library that also assisted with JPG reading and writing and posted it to the internet.

Since then, based on that library my name has popped up in the credits for digital music players, big-name video games, and assorted on-line articles. Very cool. No, I don't use the f'ing GPL.

And today, I'm back into that GIF reading code, trying to figure out why it won't read a particular GIF I found on the internet. So, I've been looking at the code from GIF readers on the net, comparing what I do to what they do, trying to figure out what's going wrong. But I haven't figured it out yet because most of the GIF reading code I've found on the net seems to be derived the very code I posted way back when - either from what I posted, or from someone else who started with that same book. Big claim! How can I tell? Granted, there are a finite number of ways to write a GIF decoder, and they're all going to look alike on some fundamental level because the job isn't extremely complicated (though there are some tricky bits). But, you can tell. Some of the readers still have my name in the comments, for example. Others have been modified a bit and have dropped the credits, but might still retain the exact variable names from the code I posted; and some retain residuals of the quirky logic that that original code used. I'm sure I could put together a tree that shows all various branches and derivations of derivations from that original code. If there was a need. Which there isn't.

But, the bottom line is that I can't fix my GIF code because nearly everybody who posts GIF code is posting something based on, or derived from a derivation of, the code I posted to the internet twenty years ago - the code with the bug I can't find. Sigh.

Lost my wallet yesterday - all my credit cards, debit cards, insurance cards, my driver's license... all gone.

Now I don't even have a way to carry around the cash we took out of the ATM before we cancelled all of our cards.

Nightmare.

But I hope a night full of phone calls is the worst that comes of it...

Update:
It was on the floor of my cube at work. I swear I looked there at least three times. What a drag it is blahblahblah.

Because it's spring, it's time to put the seeds in the dirt. Mrs. requested I plant some little cucumbers, gherkins, for pickling. Easy enough, I thought - there are a thousand kinds of seeds for sale in stores right now, surely I can find little cucumbers. But, I couldn't. I had to go to Amazon to find seeds for gherkins. And, of course, some mom-n-pop seed store out there somewhere had a packet of seeds for me. Hooray. They were many times more expensive than a packet of ordinary cuke seeds from the store, but still cost less than a jar of pickles. So, no biggie. Click, click, done.

The seeds appeared in the mail yesterday. Turns out they came air mail, from Singapore. WTF?

How can anyone make money air-mailing seeds halfway around the world for less than four bucks, including shipping?