All white here.

Working on Valentine's Day dinner menu (for you know who :) ). So far, I'm thinking of blue cheese crusted rib eye, spatzle, salad with red leaf lettuce, avocado, Cara orange, olives and a balsamic/walnut oil dressing--maybe a sprinkle of toasted walnuts on top, and this evil, evil black bottomed chocolate cupcake with a cream cheese filling that my friend has renamed 'Black Bottom Booty'.  Still need a vegie. There's a touch of ice wine left in the fridge, and I'm hoping we have something red and robust left in the 'cellar'--it's been a couple of months since we made a Trader Joe's run!

And no----you can't all come  lol
  Elaine

BBC News - Alexander McQueen, UK fashion designer, found dead

The fashion designer Alexander McQueen has been found dead, his company said.

His office confirmed to the BBC that Mr McQueen, 40, was discovered at his London home this morning.

The Metropolitan Police said that his death was not being treated as suspicious. Unconfirmed reports have suggested that he took his own life.

A statement said his family were "devastated" at the "tragic news", and added that they shared "a sense of shock and grief".

In a message on his Twitter page on 3 February, Mr McQueen said his mother had passed away.

Volkswagen (VW) is recalling nearly 200,000 cars in Brazil because of a rear wheel problem.

The company wants to determine whether rear wheel bearings are sufficiently greased on the Novo Gol and Novo Voyage models made before July 2009.

VW says there is a possibility that a lack of lubrication could cause wheels to lock. In extreme cases they could loosen and even fall off.

The vehicles were made in Brazil for the local market, VW's third-largest.

This latest recall comes a day after car maker Honda added another 437,700 cars, mainly in North America, to its existing global safety recall over airbag inflation problems.

On Tuesday, Toyota announced the recall of about 436,000 hybrid vehicles worldwide, including its latest Prius model, to fix brake problems.

A couple who lost their camera when it fell overboard from a cruise ship have been traced after a trawlerman hauled the device from the Atlantic seabed.

Benito Estevez, of Spain, found the camera in his nets with five of the photos still intact on the memory card.

Barbara and Dennis Gregory, from South Africa, were en-route from New York to Southampton on the QM2 in 2008 when they lost their camera in the ocean.

Mrs Gregory said she had never expected to see the camera or the photos again.

"It's literally a dream come true, she told the BBC.

That's what they say on Faux, so it's gotta be true.

A 'centrist' is someone who's neither on the left, nor on the left.

Car pour l'État français, le boycott engendre bien une discrimination, acte puni par la loi. Selon l'article 225-1 du code pénal :

 

  « [La discrimination] commise à l'égard d'une personne physique ou morale, est punie de trois ans d'emprisonnement et de 45 000 euros d'amende lorsqu'elle consiste à entraver l'exercice normal d'une activité économique quelconque. »

Mais l'interdiction ne s'arrête pas là, et Guillaume Didier le précise que l'appel au boycott est également sanctionné par l'article 4, alinéa 8 de la loi du 25 juillet 1981.

Scrap UK's wind farm plans, says Gazprom boss
Deputy chairman of Russia's Gazprom argues plans for renewable energy are irrational and should be replaced by more gas-fired power stations

(...)

Alexander Medvedev said the UK and other countries should adopt a more "pragmatic" approach towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions following the impasse at the Copenhagen climate change summit. He argued it would be impossible to meet the UK's target to generate a third of its electricity from renewables by 2020 without a big contribution from gas. He also claimed it would be three times cheaper to meet emission reduction targets by replacing dirty coal plants with new gas plants rather than wind farms.

"If we do not want to see the authors of the 2020 strategy decapitated in a public square, I do not think they can forget about gas," he said. "We at Gazprom believe gas should be treated on an equal footing as renewables. I just hope that after the disappointment post-Copenhagen that the decision-makers will take a more pragmatic and rational approach to this."

He would say that, wouldn't he? Maybe a few more such speeches by him and the Serious People in the UK will suddenly start thinking that wind farms are a good thing!

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The European Parliament on Thursday broadly rejected an agreement with the United States on sharing information on bank transfers that was aimed at tracking suspected terrorists through their finances.

The vote in Strasbourg, France, underlined differences between the United States and the European Union over how to balance guarantees of personal privacy with concerns about national and international security.

A resolution to reject the deal passed 378-196, with 31 abstentions. The vote means that the agreement, which provisionally went into force at the beginning of February, cannot be used as planned.

The agreement would have freed the United States from having to seek bank data on a country-by-country basis. But Washington still could press for access to the data through such avenues.

Many members of the Parliament complained that the agreement -- meant to last for nine months while a more permanent arrangement was sought -- failed to guarantee the privacy rights of European citizens.

...in an interview with CNN's Christine Romans Wednesday, Geithner's predecessor Henry Paulson shone some light upon why he deemed his close ties to Wall Street valuable.

"In hindsight it was a huge help," Paulson said, when asked of his own history as former CEO of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs. Story continues below...

"One of the things I brought to the table was understanding markets, understanding what was going on at the different financial institutions," he continued. "And also, the fact that I've been a CEO helped me when it came to the decision-making process. I needed to be talking to the heads of all of the major firms."
...
CNN's Romans said after the interview that Paulson criticized banks for handing out large executive compensations. She described him as admitting that pay was "out of whack" even when he headed Goldman Sachs.
...
In 2005 alone, Paulson won $37 million in bonuses for his running of Goldman Sachs. In 2007, the New York Times pointed out that Paulson held a record for Wall Street executive compensation received in a year, though his compensation was bested by his successor, Lloyd Blankfein, who later received $67 million in compensation in a year.

Google's proposal, announced yesterday in a blog posting, is to build fiber-optic networks for as many as 500,000 people [sic] with connections of 1 gigabit per second. That's 20 times the speed of the fastest residential connections from AT&T Inc. [PSTN], Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp. [etc], and more than 1,000 times faster than the cheapest connections....

representing total residential fixed copper and fiber line installed's oh wild guess 120M? and uh 225M cell subscribers...

By building its own network, Google would be going around AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to provide Internet access directly to homes, giving it control over how data is delivered to consumers. Google has lobbied for net neutrality [!] legislation to prevent carriers from giving preference to some content providers over others.

... instead of the free $25/mo $45/mo muni wi-fi network GOOG was gonna build outa USDA pork that coulda levered GOOG VoIP "synergies" with Android OS "smart phones" and iDisnDats except it di'n't...

Google, based in Mountain View, California, will first identify cities or counties that want the service and then work with other companies to build the fiber-optic network, said Minnie Ingersoll, a product manager. Google will pay for the deployment of the service, she said.

oops

"We've been working with the FCC to advocate that the U.S. needs to make really bold, concrete moves to accelerate broadband deployment," said Ingersoll. "This is our attempt to put our money where our mouth is."

Ad Revenue

Google will probably not invest heavily to build out broadband networks and will instead aim to pressure carriers to bolster their networks, said Clayton Moran, an analyst at Benchmark Co. in Boca Raton, Florida.

Read more...

Standard satellite dish. check. Panasonic heat exchanger. check. Paved car port. check. Post 2007 registered car. check. Wait a minute. There's an alarm system. What have they got that is so valuable? Hmmmm....

Ardent Finnish streeters have already found a man in a garden with his trousers down, an arrest, a ufo in the sky, sleeping summer drunks, and celebrities in unusual places.

You can't be me, I'm taken

The sale in principle of a French assault ship to the Russian navy brought a stir this week - as the first military deal by a NATO member to Moscow, one that helps Russia's ailing fleet, and one that may involve the sale of three more ships.

A deal for the French Mistral, a modern $750 million craft that carries helicopters and up to 900 commandos, took place more abruptly than expected by other NATO members - at a time when European security policy on Russia remains in flux.

A Russian admiral has said the Mistral would have cut the 2008 war in Georgia "to 45 minutes." US defense chief Robert Gates in Paris this week expressed displeasure with the sale. But Jacques de Lajugie, head of international development at the French arms agency DGA, said it may be the beginnings of a beautiful friendship: "It is no longer one command ship, but four" sought by Moscow.

New Study: Cape Wind Will Reduce Regional Electricity Prices by $4.6 Billion

Cape Wind will reduce wholesale electric prices for the New England region by $4.6 billion over 25 years, according to a new report published today by Charles River Associates, a leading economic consulting firm.
The report found that Cape Wind will place downward pressure on the wholesale clearing price of electricity by reducing operations of higher priced and polluting fossil fueled units. This will result in average savings of $185 million per year in New England.

This is commissioned by Cape Wind itself, but it's good to see that info out there.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Renewable energy money still going abroad, despite criticism from Congress

Money from the 2009 stimulus bill to help support the renewable energy industry continues to flow overseas, despite Congressional criticism and calls for change, according to a new analysis of the program by the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

The Workshop was the first to report last October that more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms. Since then, the administration has stopped making announcements of new grants to wind, solar and geothermal companies, but has handed out another $1 billion, bringing the total given out to $2.1 billion and the total that went to companies based overseas to more than 79 percent.

There's several things here:

• grants going to foreign companies (mainly European): this is just the consequence of the fact that the main investors in US wind are European companies. For every $ of DoE grant, they're spending an additional $2.3 of their money to invest in US clean energy (or getting banks to finance it - and these banks are also almost exclusively European);
  
• a lot of the money spent on US wind projects goes to imports; this is linked to insufficient US turbine manufacturing capacity; this is the result of years of incoherent regulatory changes (the stop-n-go PTC, mainly) that have scared manufacturing investment away. A few years of consistent policies will get that investment in. But not one year of policy.
  
• 2009 was a strange year for wind, with almost 6 months of nothing happening because of the crisis. This caused job losses in project development and turbine manufacture, even if the stimulus helped kick start more projects by the end of the year. So jobs were lost in manufacturing (after a huge build up in 2008) while more jobs were created in O&M. Next year should see more jobs in manufacturing (and yet more in O&M).
  
• also, the change from a per kWh PTC support mechanism (pid out over 10 years) to upfront grants makes the amounts look large compared to the number of construction jobs involved (there are more jobs in long term O&M) - but this is a amount of money spent today that will have positive benefits for 20+ years.
  
• of course, no one worries about the cost in extra imports for other energy sources (you know, like oil or gas).
  

These freaky winter storms won't stop until the Saints toss the Lombardi Trophy into Mt. Doom. Just a working hypothesis.