Almost time for bed

But, today ended up being a pretty good day. Nothing in the world of appearances has really changed, but a lot has changed inside my head.

One thing that has gotten clearer for me is that it's time to really walk away from the things I don't want to do, and fully walk into those two things that I do want to do.

A few things are jelling in my head about what I need to be, who I need to be and how this all needs to come together. I'll write about it tomorrow after I've had a chance to process on it.

Thursday - sunny and bizarre

well, I've committed to go to this seminar today; then down to Lisa's to work on energy meridians, then back here for a short while and off to class in Spring. Assuming everything works out, that is.

I worked with Lisa a long while last night; hopefully today will bring some more results. I feel better this morning; I was able to start feeling energy movement for the first time in weeks today; generating a mental/feeling equivalent that I would like to have.

More later - have to get to the seminar

Hump day - screwed, I guess

When I get like this, I just don't see an upside. I worked on next year's tax business today, wrote (lovingly) to the clients who owe me money, tried to prod Nicholas into listing something on eBay, and set him up to call the education providers in Texas for me.

No progress was had in any direction.

Interestingly, there is no external pressure mounting on me; it's all internal. And, my trust is just shot.. why? I so often have success; why is my confidence shot all of a sudden?

Nick went off to buy cigarettes; he's since called to say that he's hooking up with Shelley to .. some excuse. He won't be back until tomorrow, I'm sure.

So, what's next? It seems that the mortgage business is gone for me; nothing's coming in. Tax time doesn't start for another eight weeks. Clearly these text books aren't going anywhere.

I just feel stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck.

And, I'm ready to just sack out. Not like it matters.

Hump day - welcome, new readers!

Yes, we have a new reader! Everyone, welcome Carlos! Nick's semi-boyfriend from Columbus, Ohio! YAY!

It's sunny and gorgeous here today, and I'm kind of figuring out what today is going to be about. I have some mail to get out, and I have some forcasting and budgeting I can do on Fabulair, so I guess I'll work on that.

And, I think I'll see about calling the potential customers for my mortgage book and trying to close some sales. Since there's no mortgage work to work on.

It's funny, last week, I decided that if I had to work this hard (as I do in the mortgage business) I'd rather be working on something I wanted to do. And, the universe serves RIGHT up. Here's where I mutter about how it doesn't serve up so efficiently for things that I DO want.

Nick is working on setting up an eBay business, working to find a job, and interested in calling all of these course providers that I do NOT want to call, because it's not what I like doing.

We wish him success. I need some.

At least it's gorgeous outside today.

I have to do some journaling this morning; then, I guess I should work with that some. I've said that I'm going to go to Creative Life for the practitioner installation tonight; now I regret having said that. It's a 57 mile drive round trip, which I also have to make tomorrow night.

Okay, time to do something.

How to keep marriage a sanctity

source article

INSTRUCTION AND ADVICE
FOR THE
YOUNG BRIDE
on the
Conduct and Procedure of the
Intimate and Personal Relationships
of the Marriage State
for the
Greater Spiritual Sanctity of this
Blessed Sacrament and the Glory of God
by
Ruth Smythers
beloved wife of
The Reverend L.D. Smythers
Pastor of the Arcadian Methodist
Church of the Eastern Regional Conference
Published in the year
of our Lord 1894
Spiritual Guidance Press
New York City


INSTRUCTION AND ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG BRIDE


To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

On the other hand, the bride's terror need not be extreme. While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it.

It is useless, in most cases, for the bride to prevail upon the groom to forego the sexual initiation. While the ideal husband would be one who would approach his bride only at her request and only for the purpose of begetting offspring, such nobility and unselfishness cannot be expected from the average man.

Most men, if not denied, would demand sex almost every day. The wise bride will permit a maximum of two brief sexual experiences weekly during the first months of marriage. As time goes by she should make every effort to reduce this frequency.

Feigned illness, sleepiness, and headaches are among the wife's best friends in this matter. Arguments, nagging, scolding, and bickering also prove very effective, if used in the late evening about an hour before the husband would normally commence his seduction.

Clever wives are ever on the alert for new and better methods of denying and discouraging the amorous overtures of the husband. A good wife should expect to have reduced sexual contacts to once a week by the end of the first year of marriage and to once a month by the end of the fifth year of marriage.

By their tenth anniversary many wives have managed to complete their child bearing and have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating all sexual contacts with the husband. By this time she can depend upon his love for the children and social pressures to hold the husband in the home.

Just as she should be ever alert to keep the quantity of sex as low as possible, the wise bride will pay equal attention to limiting the kind and degree of sexual contacts. Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance, would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices. These practices include among others performing the normal act in abnormal positions; mouthing the female body; and offering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in turn.

Nudity, talking about sex, reading stories about sex, viewing photographs and drawings depicting or suggesting sex are the obnoxious habits the male is likely to acquire if permitted.

A wise bride will make it the goal never to allow her husband to see her unclothed body, and never allow him to display his unclothed body to her. Sex, when it cannot be prevented, should be practiced only in total darkness. Many women have found it useful to have thick cotton nightgowns for themselves and pajamas for their husbands. These should be donned in separate rooms. They need not be removed during the sex act. Thus, a minimum of flesh is exposed.

Once the bride has donned her gown and turned off all the lights, she should lie quietly upon the bed and await her groom. When he comes groping into the room she should make no sound to guide him in her direction, lest he take this as a sign of encouragement. She should let him grope in the dark. There is always the hope that he will stumble and incur some slight injury which she can use as an excuse to deny him sexual access.

When he finds her, the wife should lie as still as possible. Bodily motion on her part could be interpreted as sexual excitement by the optimistic husband.

If he attempts to kiss her on the lips she should turn her head slightly so that the kiss falls harmlessly on her cheek instead. If he attempts to kiss her hand, she should make a fist. If he lifts her gown and attempts to kiss her anyplace else she should quickly pull the gown back in place, spring from the bed, and announce that nature calls her to the toilet. This will generally dampen his desire to kiss in the forbidden territory.

If the husband attempts to seduce her with lascivious talk, the wise wife will suddenly remember some trivial non-sexual question to ask him. Once he answers she should keep the conversation going, no matter how frivolous it may seem at the time.

Eventually, the husband will learn that if he insists on having sexual contact, he must get on with it without amorous embellishment. The wise wife will allow him to pull the gown up no farther than the waist, and only permit him to open the front of his pajamas to thus make connection.

She will be absolutely silent or babble about her housework while his huffing and puffing away. Above all, she will lie perfectly still and never under any circumstances grunt or groan while the act is in progress. As soon as the husband has completed the act, the wise wife will start nagging him about various minor tasks she wishes him to perform on the morrow. Many men obtain a major portion of their sexual satisfaction from the peaceful exhaustion immediately after the act is over. Thus the wife must insure that there is no peace in this period for him to enjoy. Otherwise, he might be encouraged to soon try for more.

One heartening factor for which the wife can be grateful is the fact that the husband's home, school, church, and social environment have been working together all through his life to instill in him a deep sense of guilt in regards to his sexual feelings, so that he comes to the marriage couch apologetically and filled with shame, already half cowed and subdued. The wise wife seizes upon this advantage and relentlessly pursues her goal first to limit, later to annihilate completely her husband's desire for sexual expression.

Is this how the Republicans are doing it?

source

This is (purportedly) a slave consultant's advice to slave owners from 1712 in the James River (Virginia) area. Its validity has been likely disproved:

Gentlemen, I greet you here on the bank of the James River in
the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and twelve. First, I
shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia, for bringing
me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves.
Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies
where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest
methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program
is implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for
our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw
enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords
of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highways in
great numbers you are here using the tree and the rope on occassion.

I caught a whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of
miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are
having uprisings, slaves are running away, your crops are sometimes left
in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires,
your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I
do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I
am here to introduce you to a method of solving them.

In my bag here, I have a fool proof method for controlling your
Black slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed correctly it
will control the slaves for at least 300 years. My method is simple.
Any member of your family or your overseer can use it.

I have outlined a number of differences among the slaves; and I
take these differences and make them bigger. I use fear, distrust, and
envy for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest
plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South.
Take this simple little list of differences, and think about them. On
top of my list is "Age", the second is "Color" or shade, there is
intelligence, size, sex, size of plantations, status on plantation,
attitude of owners, whether the slaves live in the valley, on a hill,
East, West, North, South, have fine hair or coarse hair, or is tall or
short. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an
outline of action- but before that I shall assure you that distrust is
stronger than adulation; respect or admiration.

The Black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry
on and will become self re-fueling and self-generating for hundreds of
years, maybe thousands.

Don't forget you must pitch the old Black vs. the young Black
male, and the young Black male against the old Black male. You must use
the dark skin slave vs. the light skin slaves and the light skin slaves
vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male, and the
male vs. the female. You must also have your White servants and
overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves
trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust only us.

Gentlemen, these Kits are your Keys to control. Use them. Have
your wives and children use them, never miss opportunity. If used
intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually
distrustful.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Can you pass this test?

This is purportedly from the Zanesville (OH) 1870 exam for new teachers:

English Grammar

1. Analyze the following and parse words in italics I cannot tell if to depart in silence, Or bitterly to speak in your reproof, Best fitteth my degree or your condition.

2. Write the following in prose, and parse the verb awaits: The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauthy, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour: The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

3. Give a brief example of a compound and a complex sentence. Give the rule for the use of the subjunctive mood.

4. Define and give the etymology of verb, prounoun, conjunction and adverb. Give example of a defective, an auxillary, an impersonal and a redudant verb. How many kinds of prounous are there? Give examples of each.

5. Prior has the following sentence. State it if be good grammar. If not, why? It it be, parse the word than: Thou art a girl as much brighter than her, As he is a poet sublimer than me.

6. Give rule for forming plural of nouns ending in "y," with examples. Give plurals of staff, radius, miasma, Miss White, rendezvous, talisman, loaf, grief, seraph, Mussulman, forceps, spoonful, who, beef, s, x, 6, and madam. Also give the singulars of kine, ashes, banditi [sic], swine, animalcula.

7. Compare chief, much, former, far, forth, next, round, up, ill, full.

8. Give the feminines of abbot, earl, duke, lad, marquis, hero, tiger, nephew, testator, bachelor, wizard, and ox.

9. Write the past tense and past participle of these verbs:
Lay, Seek, Sit, Get, Dare,
Thrive, Lie, Set, Light, Loose,
Fly, Flee, Chide, Overflow, Catch,
Lose, Swim, Climb, Drink, Stay,
Leap, Quit, Swell, Burst, Eat.

10. Define metonymy, catachresis, and hyberbole; and state the difference between a metaphor and a simile.

11. Punctuate the following lines: But when I ask the trembling question Will you be mine my dearest Miss Then may there be no hesitation But say distinctly Yes Sir yes.

12. Parse the three "thats" in the following sentence:
He that fears that dog thinks that he is mad.
Also parse the word "but" in each of the following:
There was no one but saw him;
We ran, but he stopped;
All ran but Peter;
If you did but know it.

13. Correct the following:
(a) Although I persuaded the old man, he refused to yield, and I expect he divided his estate between his 3 daughters. His example, though he meant well, is calculated to have a bad effect.
(b) As I laid down I seen the smoke rising over the way.
(c) Whom do you say that I am? or who do you take me to be?
(d) John and James were both there, though neither were invited.
(e) As water is froze easier than alcohol, so riches are easier acquired than a good name.
(f) Between you and I, there is some mystery about that fire last night. Did you hear where it was at? I am glad none of my friends were in the house. I should be sorry if either James or William were inculpated in setting it on fire.

Orthography

1. Give etymology of orthography. What are mutes, labials, and liquids, and why so called?

2. Give meaning of the prefixes, ante, anti, circum, quad, proto, oct, trans, sym, and con.

3. Form derivatives of prefer, begin, stop, run, defy, abridge, tie, and die, with the suffix ing or ed.

4. Write a word containing a diphthong, one containing a digraph, and one containing a trigraph.

5. Define accent, and mark the accent on the words: inverse, diverse, adverse, reverse, obverse, calcine, piquant, orthoepy, abdomen, acclimated, area, salutatory, accessary, gondola, illustrate, prolix, portent, inquiry, contemplated, expert, extant.

6. Spell the words (given orally)

Arithmetic

Put all your work on the paper and make it explain itself.

1. Define integer, fraction, interest, discount, power, and root.

2. What effect has multiplying both terms of a fraction by the same number, and why; and why in dividing one fraction by another do you invert the divisor and multiply the terms together?

3. If A's age were increased by its 3/7 its 4/5 and 19, the sum would equal 2-1/2 times his age; required his age.

4. Multiply 7/8 by .000018 and divide the product by 27 millionths.

5. 32 men agree to construct 28 miles 4 furlongs and 32 rods of road; after completing one-half of it, one-fourth of the number of men left the company, what distance did each man construct before and after one-fourth of the men left?

6. A man drives 97 pegs on a straight line and spaces them 3 ft. 8 in. apart. What is the distance from the first peg to the last peg, lowest terms?

7. A man receives $65 interest for the use of $600 for 3 years, 7 months, and 15 days. What is rate per cent.?

8. What is due on the following note?
$1200 Zanesville, O., December 10, 1871.
One year after date I promise to pay to the order of Richard Roe twelve hundred dollars, value received.
JOHN DOE

9. Give the rule for obtaining the difference of time, having the difference of longitude, and vice versa, and give the reasons for the rule.

10. A square lot containing 54,756 square feet is surrounded by a close board fence 12 feet high. What would the boards cost at $13 per thousand?

Geography

1. Where does the earth have the greatest diameter?

2. Why do we reckon 180 degrees of longitude and only 90 of latitude?

3. What is meant by the equinoxes?

4. Locate the Crimea, Bombay, Bay of Fundy, and the Capital of Mississippi.

5. Into what three functions is the government of the United States divided? -- define each function.

6. Describe and locate the Indus and Niger rivers.

7. Through what waters would a ship pass in going from Duluth to Odessa?

8. Bound France and give five of its chief cities.

9. Name the New England states and locate their capitals.

10. Define equator, zone, latitude, and longitude.

11. Into what bodies of water do the following rivers flow: The Danube, Rhone, Volga, Tiber, Rio Grande, Jordan, and Mahoning.

Take a Peak

full article

An interview with peak-oil provocateur Matthew Simmons
By Amanda Griscom Little
03 Nov 2005
Matthew Simmons.
Matthew Simmons: he's more radical than he looks.
Matthew Simmons has been stirring up a lot of angst in energy circles this year. This well-connected industry insider has concluded that some of the world's largest oil beds may be on the verge of production collapse -- and he's willing to bet his much-vaunted career on it.

Author of the recently published Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, Simmons is founder of Simmons & Company International, an investment bank that handles mergers and acquisitions among energy companies, and counts among its clients Halliburton, General Electric, and the World Bank. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, he served as an energy-policy adviser to the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign.

Conservative credentials aside, Simmons has been boggling the minds of people across the political spectrum with his recent prediction that the price of a barrel of oil could hit the high triple digits within a few years. To postpone economic meltdown, he says we should be drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other hotly contested spots. At the same time, he's calling for a massive shift in energy policy, including radical improvements in efficiency, as well as a return to local farming and manufacturing. With his unconventional opinions, he's single-handedly reinventing the image of the post-oil energy crusader. He talked to Grist from his cell phone while dashing between energy lectures.

question Let's start with a brief overview of the premise and implications of Twilight.

answer I believe we are either at or very close to peak oil. If I'm right, then we have to assume that five or 10 years from now we'll be producing less oil than we are today. And yet we have a society that is expecting, under the most conservative assumptions, that oil usage will grow by at least 30 to 50 percent over the next 25 years. In other words, we would end up with only 70 percent of the oil we have today when we would need to have 150 percent. It's a problem of staggering economic proportions -- far greater than the temporary setback of a terrorist attack on energy infrastructure -- that could end up leading to more geopolitical fistfights than you can ever imagine. The fistfights turn into weapon fights and give way to a very ugly society.

Oil well.
Is the sun setting on the era of cheap oil?
question How did this thesis evolve?

answer The odyssey began in the early 1980s when I realized that my firm was threatened by a production collapse in the energy and oil-service business. I thought, "How on earth could this have happened without us even knowing?" I started doing some careful investigation into energy data. The more I studied, the more I started to realize that so many people who call themselves experts in the energy market, including government analysts, are in fact experts in their opinions and don't actually base a lot of it in actual data.

question Why? Because the relevant data are confidential?

answer Yes, what's publicly available is extremely vague. No major oil-producing companies or nations allow audits of the data on their reserves and production, which leaves the experts effectively playing a guessing game.

question If the data are concealed, on what evidence did you base your own conclusions?

answer I've spent years poring over hundreds of papers from the Society of Petroleum Engineers that have revealed fascinating clues. First I took an inventory of the top oil fields in the world, field by field. I was aghast to find that nobody had ever listed even the top 20 oil fields by name. I found that there are only about 120 oil fields in the world that produce half of the world's oil supply. The top 14 fields, which make up 20 percent of global supply, are, on average, over 53 years old. In Saudi Arabia, which harbors a quarter of the entire global supply, there are only five key fields producing 90 percent of their oil. They're all old.

Naturally I was very curious to find details on the condition and productivity of these fields. Two years ago I took a trip to Saudi Arabia on a government tour for business executives. They plied us with various data points that just didn't add up, even vaguely. I've since found evidence in the engineering papers indicating that the major Saudi fields are seriously at risk of reaching their peak, at which point they will begin to see their output decline.

question In this case, would Saudi Arabia's leadership collapse?

answer I want to steer away from discussing specifics of geopolitics in the Middle East because I really don't want to shift the focus away from the economics. It doesn't ultimately matter who rules Saudi Arabia. They can't change the maturity of their oil fields.

question You made a $5,000 bet with conservative New York Times columnist John Tierney that per-barrel oil prices will be at $200 in 2010. How did you arrive at this number?

answer Well, first of all, the $5,000 bet was essentially an effort to be provocative and wake people up to how cheap oil still is. I started a year ago saying that we need to prepare ourselves for triple-digit oil prices -- and I don't mean $100 per barrel, I mean high triple digits. Will it be by 2010? We don't have any idea. It could be by the winter of 2006.

Oil price will ultimately be set by demand and supply. Current oil prices are ridiculously cheap. People find that hard to believe, particularly now, but consider this: $65 a barrel translates to 10 cents a cup. Ten times cheaper than bottled water. People who think that this is a really high price need to have their heads screwed back on.

question You have an enormous amount, professionally, riding on the prediction that peak oil is nigh.

answer I'm basically betting my entire career.

question What evidence did you find of looming production limits?

answer Let's start with the plummeting rate of discovery of critical oil fields. The French Petroleum Institute did a major study a couple of decades ago about the distribution of oil fields by basin, which lends itself to a chessboard analogy. What happens with phenomenal regularity worldwide is that within about five years of moving into a new area of potential oil reserves, prospectors tend to find the queen first, which is the second-largest; within a handful of years they find the king; and then over the next decade you find the next eight to 10 lords. And once you've found the royal family, the rest of the hydrocarbon deposits you'll ever find are basically peons in size. Research overwhelmingly shows that all the royal families have been discovered.

question Can you describe your findings that most of the king- and queen-sized deposits are so old that they have to be injected with increasing amounts of water to produce the crude?

answer For decades, Saudi Arabia has been injecting water in each key oil field to keep reservoir pressure artificially high. The data show that Saudis are now injecting somewhere between 15 million and 18 million barrels a day of water to recover 8 million barrels a day of oil. This is not sustainable. Geologically speaking, the faster you produce a highly pressurized reservoir, the faster the reservoir pressure collapses. Conversely, the more gently you produce the field, the longer you can produce it at a steady rate, and the higher amount of oil you get out of the field.

question I suppose it's safe to assume we're not poised to go gently into the twilight of global reserves.

answer To put it mildly. What they are doing is rapidly depleting the high-quality, high flow-rate oil, so they'll be left with vast amounts of oil that just won't come out of the ground without massive water input or thousands and thousands of wells being drilled.

question What kind of response have you gotten to this book? I saw in a New York Times Magazine article by Peter Maass that Sadad al-Husseini, a former executive of state-owned Saudi Aramco, essentially corroborated your thesis.

answer Yes, he's a first-rate person. We've actually become quite good friends. I don't know to what extent I might have actually liberated him to speak more openly about the limits to Middle East oil. I think I've given quite a few Saudi insiders cover for being able to finally speak up and say, yes, that's actually what I thought, too.

In the U.S., the response within industry and among politicians has been overwhelmingly positive. About 10 people total have attacked the book, and my guess is that most of them have one commonality: a consulting client called Saudi Aramco.

question It boggles my mind that data on oil reserves can be concealed. Knowing when we're going to run out would seem as critical to global security as knowing who has weapons of mass destruction. Why isn't disclosing oil data a responsibility on par with disclosing WMDs?

answer It should be. The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia spoke at Rice University about five weeks ago and he said, "We're as transparent as anybody." And he's right. Until we force that same standard of disclosure on Exxon and Shell and BP, then I don't think there's any reason to expect Saudi Arabia to behave better. What I'm suggesting is the whole world needs to go to a new standard. The problem, of course, is this: In political and corporate worlds there are currently significant disincentives to be forthright about these risks. That's why we're going to have to have some sort of enforced mandate. It won't happen voluntarily.

question What would you advise the Bush administration to do?

answer Clamor for energy-data reform. That's the only thing the governments of the world can do this year. But they can't do it alone. I think the global mandate of how we have to attack this problem needs to be a very coordinated, central plan. We need to have international energy cooperation so we don't go into an accidental energy war.

question Have you discussed these ideas with President Bush?

answer I have met with the president quite a few times on energy, but not since coming to these latest conclusions. But I have spoken very openly with senior politicians from both parties, and key people are paying attention.

Spend Your $.02
Discuss this story in our blog, Gristmill.
question I understand you are a strong proponent of allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the outer continental shelf.

answer Yes, ASAP. There's nothing we can do to solve our problems, but everything we do that helps is a bridge to buy us time. Ultimately, we have to actually create some new forms of energy that don't exist today. Solar and wind are, of course, electricity, so not helpful near-term on the transportation front, which is the most intractable part of the problem. Biofuels need to be intensely examined, but corn-based ethanol is a scam because it requires such intensive oil inputs.

question What about the shift to hybrid engines and, ultimately, hydrogen?

answer There are some 220 million cars currently on the road in the U.S. alone. The problem with that concept, which so many people think is the way you end the energy war, is it will take 30 years to turn over the entire vehicle fleet. We don't have 15 or 20 years, much less 30.

We need to think on a grander scale. We have to find, for instance, far more energy-efficient methods of transporting products by rail and ship rather than trucks. We have to liberate the workforce from office-based jobs and let them work in their village, through the modern technology of emails and faxes and video conferencing. We have to address the distribution of food: Much of the food in supermarkets today comes from at least a continent or two away. We need to return to local farms. And we have to attack globalization: As energy prices soar, manufacturing things close to home will begin to make sense again.

question What do you do personally to reduce your energy footprint?

answer Very little, actually. I do have a new Mercedes diesel car that on the open road gets up to 50 miles per gallon. But in fact I'm one of the problems right now. I'm flying around the country giving too many energy talks. If I really wanted to say I'm going to be a personal crusader, I'd actually shut up and stay home.

This is it, indeed this is it

Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls
you back when you hang up on him, stays awake just to watch
you sleep. Wait for the guy who kisses your forehead, shows
you off to the world when you are in your sweats, holds your
hand in front of his friends, Wait for the one who is
constantly reminding you of how much he cares about you and
how lucky he is to have you. Wait for the one who turns to
his friends and says that's Him.

Monday, Monday ver. 650.01

Well, here we are. Another morning with a lender who doesn't take or return phone calls, no real business coming in, and ..

On March 23, 2006, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System will cease publication of the M3 monetary aggregate. The Board will also cease publishing the following components: large-denomination time deposits, repurchase agreements (RPs), and Eurodollars. The Board will continue to publish institutional money market mutual funds as a memorandum item in this release.

full press release

Okay, so that loan is a dead duck. I think that means that, officially, we're out of loans to work on.