beancounters

Where do you go from here ...

... if you're only thirty years old but you've already won a lifetime achievement award?

The world has gone mad.

If it had been me, I'd've refused to accept, on one of two grounds: superstition or good taste. Depending on the flip of the ol' Muir quarter.

State quarter

The Calif. state quarter hits the street today. The way folks are buzzing about it, you'd think it would have a street value of more than $.25!

I was intrigued by this economics fun fact:

According to the mint, it costs a nickel to manufacture a quarter. Every state quarter removed from circulation and stuck in a coin album, a jar or a sock drawer represents a profit of 20 cents for the U.S. Treasury.

According to a poll commissioned by the Coinstar coin counting service, about half the adults in the United States say they are collecting the state quarters and trying to assemble a complete set of all 50 of them.

If that happens, the U.S. Treasury will turn a profit of $1.5 billion.

Imagine - they manufacture coins that they hope won't go into circulation! I bet the post office sells all those commemorative stamps for the same reason. Oh, the world we live in.

In the end, the ultimate design choice was a good political compromise. If Ahnold had chosen a Golden Gate design, it would have ticked off L.A. If he'd chosen that Hollywood montage, we northerners would have sneered. But nobody, from the north or the south, can relate to Yosemite. It's a nice safe design.

Even though it looks as if a gigantic John Muir could walk over and ruthlessly crush Half Dome under his boot heel. Fear the Muir! And his mighty condor! As they stride this western frontier, squashing all who oppose them! Heh. Sorry. I couldn't resist. Now back to our regularly-scheduled reverence.

The comic book caper

I believe I promised to recount the great comic book purge. Well, last weekend I visited my mom, with the express purpose of helping clean out the closets. Specifically, about 8 or 10 years' worth of comics from my little brother's and my youth, taking up a whole lot of space. I was to box them and bring them home with me. So let's start here, shall we?

This is/was the closet in my old bedroom. I told you it was a wreck. See why a kid takes his life in his hands if he climbs in there for hide-and-seek? You slip on those suckas, you could crack your head open. I assure you though, the floor of the closet looked much different when I was in high school. On top of the comics were my collection of Famolares shoes. And some wadded-up Dittos jeans. So that's better.

Notice the closet door buckles outward. This does not bode well.

Yo, DaVinci Code fanatics

You think you're so hot, go ahead and decipher MS408!

I'll give you motivation

I've never seen anything like these alternative motivational posters. Aren't they beautiful? And at $15 apiece, I could afford to get sneaky and replace some of the boring old team-building posters around my office. [via]

Birthday plans

For Bunny's eighth birthday (in early February), BB and I thought we'd take her and a friend to San Francisco. I'm sorry, I know what I'm about to say is not snobby enough for the blog world, and I know I'll lose major style points for even thinking like this, but I seriously want to take her on an ϋber-touristy day hike. Fisherman's Wharf, the cable cars, the, uh ... oh I don't know, Ghiradelli Square? The wax museum? I mean, she's eight! I know she'd get a kick out of a day like that. I'd sure like to play hostess to a day like that.

And Lord knows her practical education needs a kick-start. To wit, here's us talking tonight at bedtime.

Me: One of the things I'd love to do is ride the cable cars with you. Do you know what cable cars are?

Bunny: Oh sure!

Me: Great. Have you ever seen one?

Bunny: [v. serious] No, but when my class goes on that field trip? Next week? We're going on a bus that has a DVD player!

Me: [v. confused] Oh, that will be nice. But the cable cars won't have DVD, you know.

Bunny: I know. They'll have cable, right?

Move over Buttercup

There's a new Puff in town!

Make your own Powerpuff Girl. [Via Jennifer]

GNP = Gulp, Nuh, Pwah

Economics II, like Wednesday's Budgets class, was located in a classroom the size of a cereal box. What is it with this program? Can't they plan any better? This is the computer age. It can't have come as a sudden shock to the policy office that 35 of us signed up for this course.

I forgot to look at a campus map before class yesterday, so I wound up parking at the exact opposite end of the campus from my classroom. I showed up late. Had to wedge myself into the room with a shoehorn. Sat jammed almost in a corner. My bags and coat stowed awkwardly under my knees. Head so close to the blackboard I couldn't read what was written.

All of which I can shrug off. Shrug, I say. See? I just shrugged, and ::floop:: off it came.

Here's what I can't forget: the first time I opened my mouth, I utterly floundered, and messed up what I wanted to say in class. Gah! I'm hopeless at economics-speak. I can read it; I can write it. I get A's on my papers. But I can't speak it. It always comes out sounding like this: "OK, consumer surplus is like, when you, like, pay for something? But you would have paid more? But they didn't let you, because ... well, that doesn't matter, never mind. And what's, um, up above the price, that's the surplus. Totally."

::crickets::

The horror stayed with me through break, when I could only answer simple questions with grunts and nods. Pam Not Have Firm Grasp of Vocabulary. But hey, maybe I could make it as an econ teacher in a junior high school. Totally.

Oh well. This semester will be my litmus test. Many readings, and hundreds of itsy teeny nuisance assignments designed to make one conversant in the field, or die.

Figurines of earthly delights

Check out these fantastic figurines, based on the art of Hiëronymus Bosch.

From the website:

[Bosch] holds a mirror to the world with his cerebral irony and magical symbolism, sparing no one. He aims his mocking arrows equally well at the hypocrisy of the clergy as the extravagance of the nobility and the immorality of the people.

[via]

Daisy gets defensive

So I'm about to go to sleep last night, when I hear my pomeranian Daisy at my closed bedroom door. She begins softly woofing. Not like Nature's little alarm system, but in a "Uh, hate to bother you ..." sort of way.

::groan:: I get up and open the door. "What?"

"I, uh ... I gotta go pee." says Daisy's body language.

"Well then go, Daisy. Go out the pet door."

"I ... could you come with me? It's so far away."

I walk with her to the kitchen. Gratefully, she scoots out the pet door. A few seconds later she comes back, looking relaxed. She sees I'm ready to berate her, so she springs that age-old defense on me.

"Hey. If you people had wanted brave wolves in your home, you wouldn't have bred us down to the size of throw pillows."

Nose, meet grindstone

Well, I hope we've all enjoyed this little blogging interlude of quizzes, parodies, and film reviews. Because it's over, kids! Buh-bye, see you next June!

First Budgets class session was tonight. It was great seeing friendly faces again. A lots of 'em: there were 32 of us crammed into a leeetle room with no air circulation. The prof extended a hearty welcome, but implied that if some of us chose to transfer to a less populated course this spring, he would somehow mend his broken heart and go on.

The prof is a pip. And I already like the books he assigned this year, so I have good feelings about the class.

Next week we will begin to learn the budget process. It seems that actual clients, such as heads of small nonprofit orgs, will come to class to "hire" groups of us. Throughout the semester, we'll learn to draw up proposals, and by the end of May, we'll have generated budget portfolios for the clients. Let that be a lesson to you: if your teeny nonprofit ever needs a BCP drawn up for free, go to the nearest grad school and let a public policy class use you as a course project.

Tomorrow -- Econ II: The Perils of Cost-Benefit Analysis! Aaaaaaaah!

Flashback to the days of multicolored soup and candles

This is one of the most inspired quizzes evah.

You are Inspiration Soup!! You live to Inspire
those around you with your green beany, white
chunky, red soupy goodness. Many have come and
lit candles in your honor. You've inspired
them to become better people. Thank you,
Inspiration Soup... thank you.


What Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974 are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

[Via Ms. Fish Tacos!]

[Be sure to visit here for the whole very funny and very sordid collection of WW recipe cards.]

No celebrating without a hall pass

Next month is the 20th Anniversary of The Breakfast Club.

Five things you might not know about the movie:

1. Before filming, Ally Sheedy (The Basket Case) and Molly Ringwald (The Princess) were to switch roles and Emilio Estevez (The Athlete) was to play the criminal.

2. John Cusack was one of the finalists for The Criminal (Judd Nelson) role, and Nicolas Cage read for it as well. Rick Moranis was originally cast for the role of Carl the janitor.

3. In the opening scene panning around the school, one of the shots shows Carl the janitor as man of the year, many years earlier.

4. When Bender (Nelson) is crawling through the rafters, he begins a joke about a woman walking into a bar. What's the punch line? There is none. Nelson ad-libbed.

5. The original cut of "The Breakfast Club" ran almost 2 1/2 hours. Universal Pictures cut nearly an hour off the film and destroyed the negatives - Hughes recently said he has the only complete copy in existence.

I want that complete copy! Name your price, Mr. Hughes.

I still love this movie. It's just dead-on the way we thought about ourselves and each other in high school. My brother and I used to be able to quote large swaths.

Movie nite with identity issues

There is just some Disney comedic humor that should never be revisited. The expiration date is too long past. To even open the lid is just trouble for the ol' gag reflex. So I steadfastly refused to sit down with BB and Bunny when they cracked open the original version of Freaky Friday last week. But on the night of the second half, curiosity got the best of me. I overheard something that made my feet walk right in there so my eyes could get a closer look.

It was the part where the daughter, Annabelle, trapped in her mother’s body, is in the kitchen trying to get a handle on the nightmare of housewifely chores. The phone rings. It’s Annabelle’s father, who is at work. What is his job? Whatever it is, it’s obviously made the man as much a nervous wreck as Darren on “Bewitched” used to be. Anyway, the dad calls in a panic. He is in charge of a regata down at the marina, to impress all the big-wigs, and his caterer just quit. He needs somebody to make dinner for 25 people, and bring it to the marina, in three hours. And his first thought – no, surely there was no thought process involved –his first action is to call his wife and holler for her to work a miracle.

Let’s review here. Dinner. Twenty-five people. Three hours.

Annabelle, flabbergasted, stammers into the phone that she can’t possibly pull off this feat. She is thirteen years old, you see, yet she understands the laws of time, space and distance better than a full-fledged adult. But the dad just paints right over all objections. Of course she can do it, she’s a good girl, she’s a real life-saver, etc.

Then! As if that weren’t bad enough! The dad hangs up, and sighs in relief! To his way of thinking, just by virtue of having placed one phone call, he solved his problem. He gave his crisis completely away. He is a new man.

At this point, I’m afraid I started to lecture the screen.

I mean, I do remember that even in 1976 when I first saw this, everybody considered Annabelle's dad to be a thoughtless asshole. But nothing about this would even begin to play in Philly today. Imagine your reaction to a phone call like that. Or even the reaction of a teen who’s trapped in her mother’s body. “Oh, your caterer quit? Shit, that’s terrible! I hope your staff will help you scare up some deli trays around town right away! Well, you better get crackin'. Good luck!”

CA policy blogs for struggling students

So, our Budgets prof has already informed us through our syllabus that he wants us to stay abreast of events surrounding this year's budget rodeo through the Bee and through Rough and Tumble.

I've also been compiling a list of links to other state policy and/or opinion-based blogs having to do with CA policy. Maya, I think some of these will help us in getting acquainted with the issues.

California Insider: Dan Weintraub's op-ed blog is very mild-mannered - I won't call it bland because I'm so nice, you see - and it occasionally contains news of the budget and the Leg.

Capital Notes: A sort of a capitol watch blog, written by John Myers from KQED.

It seems I can be bribed into cleaning your room

Sunday morning at my mom's house. I walked down to the local coffee shop for french roast, since Mom has forsaken coffee-drinking and takes only tea now. Tea? What are we, British?

Now she's making breakfast while I get started on a cleaning project. My brother will move back to California in February [pause for thunderous applause], and will stay here for a while until he can find a place. We decided he needs a proper room this time, instead of sort of camping in the living room like he does for short visits. So my old bedroom/storage room is being cleared out. (His old bedroom is now the den, where I'm currently typing this.)

That's why we picked now to do the comic book project - there were three boxes of magazines and comic books on the floor of the closet. Should be a little more livable in there by the time we're done.

(Dan, I'll take that $5 American in small, unmarked Washingtons.)

Movie nite at Mom's

Love, Actually: Very nice, feel-good movie. A relationship in there for everyone, kind of like Four Weddings & A Funeral on speed. Mom thought it could have used a few more sub-plots.

Fun at Amazon

This may be old, but I've never seen it before. The folks at Amazon.com had a little fun with our new paranoia over confusing election ballots.

[Via Asparagus Pee]

Adventure at Mom's

Help!

We're up to our eyeballs in comic books!

Send more boxes! And bags! And maybe a nice merlot for when we're done.

(Pictures to follow.)

Movie nite with red track suits

The Royal Tenenbaums: BB and I liked it quite a lot. As a comedy, it was a quirky psychological puzzle, not the funny ha-ha comedy I was expecting from the trailers.

I just realized that the key to most movies is that you are made to empathize with the characters, in such a way that you can guess or look forward to whatever it's going to take to make them happy (or at least complete). But in this movie, it's not immediately obvious what it's going to take to make the adult kids less dysfunctional. They're so blank and gloomy and impossible to fathom. But as the movie moves forward you pick up all the clues to their personalities or something, and then you start rooting for them to find a sense of balance. In the meantime, you cruise along for an hour or so, buoyed by the surreal style of the thing.

I recommend it, if you haven't seen it, which you probably have because it came out like three years ago! I told you, I'm way behind.