My morning was horrible, the class I teach didn't want to know and were just mucking around all the time. There is so much wrong with the very idea of this course and we got landed with it.

Damn I need a drink

keep to the Fen Causeway

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public: Alice Schroeder - Bloomberg.com

"I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it's true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn't call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that "as a preliminary matter" it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits.

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

NYT: Euro-Area Inflation Rose Above Zero in November

Inflation in the euro area moved above zero in November for the first time in five months, according to a preliminary report Monday, as higher energy prices pushed the index higher.

Consumer prices in the euro area rose 0.6 percent in November from the same month a year earlier, said Eurostat, the European Union's statistical agency. In October, the rate was minus 0.1 percent.

Celebrating Lisbon:

A Dutch icon has passed away: Ramses Shaffy, born 1933. His spirited character, his zest for life and his outstanding sense for poetry (particularly for a language as clunky as Dutch) justify comparisons to Jacques Brel.

(Meaning: Sing, fight, cry, pray, smile, work and admire)

Goodbye Ramses.

I'll be in Frankfurt late January and I noticed that the Städel Museum has a Botticelli exhibition at that time. I tried to book, and was confronted with a pull-down menu with the choice between Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. No Italy (no U.S. either...). So I called them up, and explained the problem. The person I spoke to told me to chose "Luxembourg", to give my whole address, with Italy, and promised to catch the fact that it was really in Italy, and to erase the "Luxembourg" by hand...

Not much excitement today. There was a lively discussion on the Swiss "minaret" referendum, with some commenter who needed a reminder to the ET guidelines (not to mention, to good manners when disagreeing). User moderation worked, as usual.

Then someone pulled a graph and the discussion restarted  around it (with new graphs, of course). All in all, fairly typical ET discussion, I'd say.

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

We get many 'days' in a year to mark a cause. I think World AIDS Day is the only one that works. For whatever reason. So I mark it, if only mentally, and make sure I carry protection.

That aside, it's a good excuse to share a depressing video.

Placed my first order with Amazon ... probably paid 25% of the asking price from the Sac State bookstore.  Bought big black Lehninger, 5th ed.; used big brown Lehninger, 1st ed. back in '74 when I took my first biochem course.  Will be interesting to see how the "dogma" has changed over the decades.

That and an organic chem text ... light reading over the 4 - 6 weeks off for the Christmas/New Year's holidays.  What fun!

I love the smell of roast chicken in the morning!

CataniaPolitica: Fini: Berlusconi is an Absolute Monarch

"Ma io gliel'ho detto. Confonde la leadership con la monarchia assoluta. Poi in privato gli ho detto: ricordati che gli hanno tagliato la testa a... quindi 'statte quieto' ". Aggiunge Fini, replicando così a una battuta del procuratore Nicola Trifuoggi che si riferisce a Berlusconi con queste parole: "E' nato con qualche millennio di ritardo, voleva fare l'imperatore romano".

"But I have told him. He confuses leaderchip with absolute monarchy. Afterwards in private I have told him: remember that they cut their heads... therefore 'be still' ", Fini added, answering in this way a statement by prosecutor Nicola Trifuoggi who referrs to berlusconi with these words: "He was born a few millennia too late, he wanted to be roman emperor".

The source is La Repubblica apparently.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

I need a help.I am back on some Serbian discussion where we are talking about war as generator of USA economy.
Can anybody direct me where I can find statistics about how big is part of the USA military complex in their economy and how many people work for military complex ( at least directly cause it's probably hard to follow having in mind that in logistic of the military complex there are so many corporations not directly working for military).
Thanks in advance