Honorable Enough

Killing Words won an honorable mention in Writers of the Future, the big science fiction and fantasy contest.

On one hand hand, this is only an attaboy, because to a professional outlet an honorable is a certification that, according to one judge, this story was not the best, and they only want to publish the best.

On the other hand it's nice that a professional author put a stamp of quality on the story. Ann C. Crispin did not get Killing Words at all and thought it was a horrible mess. I disagreed, but not audibly, since she is somebody in writing and I am nobody.

So I'm putting the certificate up on my wall.

Pushing and Popping

When government tries to control markets, they push on one end and something they don't like pops up on the other end. So they push on the other end and something else pops up. The Obama administration's preoccupation with executive pay is illustrative.

Early in 2009 someone realized that executives at the bailed-out insurance company AIG had earned large bonuses, consistent with contracts which had already been approved by the government bailer-outers. Death threats for these executives followed, in the wake of the furor ginned up by congress and by President Obama. Obama promised to squash bonuses for bailed-out companies.

Then the administration realized that if they cap executive pay at bailed-out companies that the companies would lose their best talent to non-bailed companies, making it more likely that the companies would require more bailouts and/or would fail (push/pop).

Government pushed again, looking at the possibility of controlling the pay of all executives, whether their firms had been bailed out or not (push/pop/push).

Of course, that would likely cause another pop, as firms in the U. S. lose top talent to other countries. So what if the American system fails? Those executives will be making great contributions to the American offices of an expanded Deutchbank, where my account will be (push/pop/push/pop).

Now the administration seems to have scaled things back. The new pay czar, a lawyer named Kenneth Feinberg, will be able to set pay at bailed-out companies--decisions not subject to appeal. Thank goodness for lawyers with godlike intelligences and tyrannical mandates.

Meanwhile there has been another pop. The Wall Street Journal reports, "Morgan Stanley has said it is de-emphasizing annual cash bonuses in its pay packages, relying more on base salaries, restricted stock and deferred cash payments subject to clawbacks if the employee's bets turn sour down the road."

"Uh, Mr. Arkwright . . . we're not going to offer you $100K plus a possible $125K bonus if you perform well. We're going to offer you $100K now, plus $125 at the end of the year. Oh, and if you don't perform well, we'll take back the $125 we promised you."

I only hope that Feinberg is not skilled enough in semantics to recognize this rephrasal of the standard bonus contract. If so, get ready for another push.

Fields of Hell

I accompanied my son's fifth grade class on their field trip. In one sense, it went off without a hitch. Nobody died and nothing broke down.

We visited a cave, an aquarium, and IMax. The trip took 5 hours of driving and 5 hours of touring/eating. There were so many activities that nobody got to enjoy them. One kid in the group I was chaperoning kept lagging behind because he wanted to stop and look at seahorses, crocodiles, sharks, caves, waterfalls, etc. But there was no time! To hit our time marks we had to walk at a fast clip the whole way.

Of course, we slowed down for the IMax, but after four hours of running, both kids and adults slept through it.

When we loaded the bus to go home--2.5 hours, we got food, a drink, and an extra bottle of water. But the teachers did not want the kids to use the bus bathroom because if they let one kid go, they would all want to go.

I could never be a teacher. Or a prison guard.

Unforgiven

I saw a little of Unforgiven tonight. It has one of the most beautiful lines in the history of film, perhaps in all of literature. Here it is. If you're the jumpy kind, you can start at 2:20.

The deep, dual, meaning of the final line is worth the price of admission.

Not Too Big To Fail

The U. S. President has proposed that the antidote to the problem of companies growing too big to fail is to shrink them. Goodbye future Microsofts and Walmarts.

However, I remain unconvinced that any company is too big to fail. I found the perfect counterexample.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center was the nexus of the entire financial world. Surely the destruction of the twin towers, along with systems and trained personnel would plunge the financial system into chaos. Surely the twin towers were too big to fail.

The towers went down in September 2001. The third quarter of 2001 did experience negative growth. Though the economy had struggled before the towers were destroyed, the recession ended in the fourth quarter of 2001.

The total collapse of the financial nexus of the world did not wreck the world financial system, or even the U. S. financial system.

Is AIG too big to fail?

Pikers.

Husk

Hunting for something on television, my wife found a TLC show on outragrously obese people. The doctor asked a 700 pound woman, "Have you always been this big?"

I nearly died.

I wanted her to reply, "Yes, I have. My mother died in child birth--all that was left of her was a husk."

Tiara

When I first heard of her, she was the unstable wife of the mayor of a backward southern town. Then her husband was killed in a bar fight. She was convinced that he was killed as a result of a conspiracy, so she ran for mayor and won.

For a while after that I saw her on television every week, raging at the town council, accusing them of all manner of chicanery. She was entertaining. The town regressed. She did not win reelection.

The next time I saw her she had a following. She was a princess of the Dugdemona tribe of Native Americans, which she had founded. She claimed five counties of a state that had been sold in the Louisiana Purchase. She based her claims on language in the treaty which referred to the Indians. She had followers. She had opened the tribe's membership to anyone who paid the membership fee.

I looked around for her on the web today, but did not find her. She may be lost to time.