09:18 – I’ve just been reading the results of the Spanish bank “stress test”, which concludes that under the “adverse scenario” Spanish banks may need a bailout to the tune of up to €60 billion. The problem, as with all of the past “stress tests”, is that the “baseline scenario” is simply ridiculous and the “adverse scenario” is in fact the rosiest possible scenario. Here’s their explanation of their scenarios.
The adverse scenario was deemed by the Steering Committee to be appropriately conservative, both relative to the past 30 years of Spanish macroeconomic indicators (the economic scenario being three standard deviations away from long-term average for the three years of the exercise), as well as relative to adverse scenarios used in recent stress tests in peer jurisdictions (e.g. the EBA Europe-wide stress tests and the US CCAR). Moreover, the adverse scenario included a third year of recessionary conditions, unlike the two-year period commonly seen in other stress tests. (See Appendix: Macroeconomic scenarios for further analysis).
The reality is that perhaps €150 billion is about the best they can possibly hope for, and €250 billion or more is certainly not out of the question. Imagine that for the last 30 seconds a bicyclist has been riding along on more-or-less level ground, with small ups and downs. That’s the source of the historical data for their scenario. But a couple seconds ago, that bicyclist drove off a cliff, and he’s still falling. What they should have done was use historical data for only the past two or three years. Instead, they buried that recent, more significant data, with 28 years’ of long-term averages. Geez.
13:10 – Uh-oh. Barbara’s over at her parents’ old house cleaning things out. I just took Colin for a walk down the corner and back in drizzling rain. On our way home, I spotted what I thought was a kid’s bracelet or necklace in the middle of the street. Upon closer examination, I concluded that it was a dead juvenile Carolina Flatsnake (Snakus flattus carolinensis). I need to remember to mention that to Barbara before we walk Colin again after she gets home. I’d hate for her to be surprised.
I just shipped the last two biology kits we had in stock, along with two chemistry kits. Two customers each ordered one of each kit. We still have a dozen chemistry kits in stock and half a dozen more biology kits and 15 chemistry kits downstairs ready to pack up, which means I really need to get to work on making more of the biology kits.
16:10 – Three cheers for Whitney Kropp, the teenage girl in Michigan who was the victim of what the MSM describes as a “prank”. In fact, it was a vicious attempt to cause her pain, an unpopular student whom a bunch of punks decided as a “joke” to elect to the homecoming court. When she found out that they were making fun of her, she considered killing herself. Some prank. Instead, she decided to show them they were picking on the wrong girl. When the story hit the news, Whitney found overwhelming public support. Local businesses and the public, local and remote, donated funds or services to buy her a prom gown and accessories and treat her to a makeover. She attended the coronation surrounded by cheering fans.
And what I can’t figure out is why these vicious children were making fun of her appearance. No, she’s not drop-dead gorgeous, but she’s certainly a reasonably attractive teenage girl. What is their problem?
Kudos also to her date. I suspect there were a lot of guys lined up to be her escort. And I hope those punk kids realize what miserable excuses for human beings they are.
Sounds wasteful to leave it in the road like that where Barbara might miss it when you could have brought it home and put it where she was sure to find it.
Yeah, right. I remember Barbara’s other close encounters with snakes, most recently one on our front porch. I think that one was just a black snake, but it might have been a water moccasin. I put it in a jar and took it over to one of our neighbors. She took it away from the neighborhood houses down by the creek and released it. Barbara was still hyperventilating when Mimi called to say she’d (very carefully) released it.
The last time before that was when we were up in New England in 2000. We’d just visited LL Bean, and stopped at a park on the way back to our B&B. Barbara went wandering off and when she came back I was lying on my stomach with the macro lens focused on a snake about 2″ (5 cm) from the front of the lens. She couldn’t see what I was shooting, so she bent over to look. She screamed and backed up at warp nine. The snake screamed (yes, I know they can’t hear, but I’m sure it felt the vibrations from Barbara’s scream; every piece of glass nearby shattered) and backed up at its highest rate of speed.
Then the other day I was shooting a macro image of a Wolf spider (Hogna carolinensis) that had built its web under our deck. She walked up to see what I was doing, and backpedaled fast when she saw what I was shooting.
And the truly bizarre thing is that Barbara (and my mother) has always believed that I’m afraid of spiders and snakes. This despite both of them having seen me handle live snakes and, in my mother’s case, having seen me allow a tarantula to crawl up one arm, across my shoulders and down the other arm while I was discussing it with one of my friends.
I guess Jim Stafford’s Spiders and Snakes (back in about 1974) was never one of Barbara’s favourites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGJVA6pKWpw
I remember when I was about eight and my sister was 16 hearing a blood curdling scream from my sister’s room. The family went to investigate, it was just a huntsman spider on the wall. Even I’m not afraid of them. Dad dispatched it with a broom, even though they’re good.
About Whitney, yeah, kids can be real arseholes (and that includes females). I think she’s quite attractive too, especially the last photo you posted. I really like tomboy/blue stocking types.
I read once about some guys at an Australian university who would deliberately pursue new first year girls who weren’t worldly-wise, act really nice to her for a couple of months, date her, etc. And then drop her without explanation when she thought she had a serious relationship going. The girls involved were usually shattered by this.
Looks like West Branch, Mich. is a small town in the middle of nowhere in the upper peninsula. Kids have a lot of challenges growing up, and I can attest—having spent early years in Tiny Town—that a certain combination of factors coming together, can set a kid or two off for no logical reasons other than envy, and they then dedicate themselves to deprecating that person.
Our desks in grade school were half-a-person staggered from row-to-row (so it was harder to talk with the across-the-aisle neighbor), and the kid who sat to my right and slightly behind, used to copy answers from my tests. By rotating my paper slightly to the left, my body blocked his view, and prevented him from copying. This pissed him off no end, and he started down a course to demean me to one of 2 cliques I hung out with. Soon, I was ostracized from that clique, which was difficult, because most of the kids in it had been friends since first grade. I had my other friends, but the original clique was kind of my ‘home’ group. Very tough to deal with,—but I knew what caused it; this girl may not have had that same insight.
We moved to Indy the year after that, and in bigger cities, cliques are (or at least were) just not as strong, for some reason. Contrary to the fiction of the old “Andy of Mayberry” TV series, small towns are not especially good places for smart or unconventional kids to grow up in, IMO.
Janis Joplin grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, a town about 1.5 times the size of Tiny Town in 1960. Joplin was taunted by classmates and driven to be an outcast. After leaving Port Arthur for San Francisco and gaining national success, she refused to have anything to do with her former town and high school, refusing to accept an invitation to return and perform. I remember seeing her on a talk show back then, and she said something like, ‘They wouldn’t have anything to do with me when I was in school and made my life miserable; I’m not going back to say “that’s alright.”‘
This is a better version of Spiders and Snakes, but it has a very annoying ad at the beginning…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NxCEjMbNqY&feature=fvwp
In college, we took homecoming king and queen so seriously that the candidates included Halsey Taylor (the water fountain in one of the colleges) and Harvey Spooner (a fake student that one time had a 4.0 while taking 27 hours one semester – seniors and grad students took all his exams). My college usually nominated Hugh G. Rection and Ava Gina. They won a few times and we had to find someone to play them. Eventually, the athletic department got fed up and took control of the elections and only allowed serious candidates.
Hmm. I see Wikipedia says Joplin did attend her 10th high school graduation reunion. She must have had a change of heart after the interview I saw. IIRC, what I saw was on Johnny Carson’s show. On Dick Cavett’s show, she announced she would attend the reunion, but stated her classmates “laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state.” Her sister reported that attending the reunion proved to be an unhappy experience for her, and in Rolling Stone, Janis subsequently denigrated both her town and the classmates who had earlier humiliated her. Less than 2 months later, she overdosed and died, although the overdose was considered unintentional from heroin that was overly strong, as several others using the same dealer, also died of overdoses around the same time.
Interesting that you folks should mention Janis Joplin. I graduated HS from the same school she did, only 13 years later and lived about three blocks from where she grew up. Port Arthur was and is a refining town; most of the households had a member of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers union. Janis’s dad was an engineer at Texaco, and as such was a member of management. Not a good thing for popularity. I know, my dad was an engineer at Gulf’s refinery. I at least was a guy and could play football and knock a few heads to gain respect. I remember when she came back for the reunion in 1970. She did an interview with the local NBC affiliate in which they kept asking her about her date for her prom. Pretty disgusting as far as I was concerned.
Wouldn’t Snakus flatus carolinensis be Carolina Fart Snake? Or does my Latin stink?
Like the old saying goes, small minds are interested only in people. When I go out to eat with people from Tiny Town, 99% of the conversation is about who did what to whom and how many times, who the distant relatives of so-and-so are, ‘isn’t that guy over there related to Susie Creamcheese’s younger cousin?’ and ‘did you hear Tom’s wife left him?’ I am not kidding about this. It is impossible to get these small minds off the subject of people. They do not care about anything else.
It was a revelation when we moved to the big city, and my schoolmates were talking about ideas, and what it took to do something with your life, instead of what kind of clothes some classmate was wearing (the Wikipedia article mentions specifically that the locals considered Joplin was ‘dressed like a whore’ for her class reunion and that was then passed on to the national media).
Even now, with the Tiny Town conversation being exclusively about people—most of whom I do not even know,—what a contrast when I have dinner with friends in Indy: people are NEVER the subject of conversations. Such a small town environment is no place for smart kids to grow up, and I saw to it that my kids were raised in big cities.