Hard News: Life Goes On
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Starter for ten: what do you get when you have too much money chasing too few goods?
A tax cut?
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To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.
That's gold.
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Serious Question:
What’s Dan Quayle up to these days?
Oh, being looked after as you'd expect:
It was reported in the May 5, 2007 The New York Times in an article about a lawsuit filed by Greg LeMond against Timothy Blixseth, that Dan Quayle and Bill Gates both have homes in the ultra-exclusive Yellowstone Club, a Rocky Mountain ski and golf club located near Big Sky, Montana, just north of Yellowstone National Park.[26]
Dan Quayle is Chairman of an international division of Cerberus Capital Management, a multi-billion dollar private equity firm, and president of Quayle and Associates. He is an Honorary Trustee Emeritus of the Hudson Institute.
Quayle authored a memoir, Standing Firm, which became a bestseller. His second book, The American Family: Discovering the Values that Make Us Strong, was published in the spring of 1996 and a third book, Worth Fighting For, in 1999.
Quayle also writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, serves on a number of corporate boards, chairs several business ventures, and was chairman of Campaign America, a national political action committee.
As chairman of the international advisory board of Cerberus Capital Management, he recruited former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who would have been installed as chairman if Cerberus had successfully acquired Air Canada.
The Quayles live in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Quayle, then working as an investment banker in Phoenix, was mentioned as a candidate for Governor of Arizona prior to the 2002 election,[27] but he declined to run.
Dan Quayle signed the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century.And clearly in the tent with the neocons.
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Questions asked of me/my mother/other foreign friends while living in Texas and/or Louisiana:
'So, y'all have Christmas in July?'
'What language do you speak in New Zealand?''
'I met a guy from Australia who runs a big Ford car dealership. Do you know him?'
'You have your own money? I thought you would use US dollars.'
'Do you wear grass skirts around the house?'
'London sounds great, but I don't think I could live without peanut butter.'
Them: 'What do y'all think of George Bush in New Zealand?' Me: 'Most of us really dislike him.' Them: <surprised, hurt look>
'Do you have electricity there?'
<resentfully> 'Why are you faking that accent?'
I feel kind of mean for writing all that now and mocking the peeps, actually. Some of them were kindly feeding me and had invited me to their houses and stuff, and they were sweet. And really, why would they need to know anything about NZ? We're irrelevant. But it was hard to keep a straight face on occasion.
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'So, y'all have Christmas in July?'
I was asked this month by two separate and equally intelligent persons whether in NZ we called the northern winter months "winter" or "summer".
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Excuse my ignorance, but what actually is a "robocall" ? I assume it's an automatically-generated phone call that indiscriminately rings loads of people and recites dodgy messages to whoever answers ?
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Well living in Berkeley I never quote got those sorts of questions - though one work mate thought I came from an island off the east coast of Canada (she was entranced that I'd grown up watching Dr Who, and considered it a kids show - it did play at 4pm after all)
The seasons thing does mess them up (and timezones that change with time of year).
I do wish we'd hold halloween in NZ in late April though - we carved pumpkins here last year (expensive and hard to find) - and it was still day light out when the little kids came around - the whole fun of halloween is taking little kids around in the dark to see the scary stuff and meet the neighbours
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I was asked this month by two separate and equally intelligent persons whether in NZ we called the northern winter months "winter" or "summer".
I was asked the same thing when I was living in the UK. By my manager at the time. He'd been wondering for ages whether we called it winter when it was hot, and summer when it was cold, but discretion had prevented him from asking until the company Xmas party - at which point inebriation trumped discretion.
So it's not just Americans. Though I did hear an American friend of mine (recently arrived in NZ) say proudly the other day that he was nearly able to distinguish between the New Zealand and English accents...
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Crazy-ass congresswoman Michelle Bachmann may find that crazy-ass ranting on national television has consequences.
Short version - her opponent in the district has raised six hundred thousand dollars in 48 hours since said rant aired!
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You want "interesting" questions, try travelling Greyhound non-stop from NY to LA with a funny accent.
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Quayle authored a memoir, Standing Firm, which became a bestseller
Bet he didn’t, bet he used a ghostwriter. He may have subsequently read it, but there are no guarantees there either.
Favourite, possibly apocryphal but who cares, story about Quayle came from mid-campaign. The feeling was that they thought he had a bad image as being not quite a Man of the People.
So they organised a morning walk-about thing in Manhattan.
He enters the diner or whatever they call them and looks around for potential voters. Finally, he walks up to a women, outstretches his arm and says “Hi, I’m Dan Quayle.”
Long awkward pause.
Woman replies : “I’m your bodyguard.”
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My favorite comment on Powell:
The McCain campaign have done some digging on this Powell guy and apparently he has never done a day's plumbing in his life. Ergo, his endorsement counts for 'zippo, nada , nothing.... '
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I think Bernard Hickey pointed out that this bank guarantee covers investements in busienss like South Canterbury, which means one can effectively have a guaranteed deposit at 10%! Who in their right mind would invest in the NZSX? What a nutty scenario!
From my armchair, this band deposit scheme still needs some serious revision. Doesn't the govt also have a commitment to supporting listed companies through functioning capital markets as opposed to questionable local investment in silly things such as overpriced houses?
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she forgot to ask for money
Word from my Twitter friends is that the Dems have largely stopped asking for money on the phone calls and are instead making sure you'll vote. Sample size small, of course, but that's the impression I got.
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But it was hard to keep a straight face on occasion.
I asked an American here if he liked Thai food. He said, dude, I've only been in transit in Taiwan.
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Excuse my ignorance, but what actually is a "robocall" ? I assume it's an automatically-generated phone call that indiscriminately rings loads of people and recites dodgy messages to whoever answers ?
Precisely so. Used mostly by cash-strapped campaigns, because Americans have become so inured to them they tend to hang up as soon as they realise it's a recorded message (i.e. about two words in.) That McCain is using them so extensively is a telling sign og just how hard-up his campaign is trying to compete with Obama's fundraising.
(What I'm *really* waiting for in terms of outspending is the half-hour TV spot Obama has purchased for Oct. 29 to address the nation. It's both audacious and brilliant.)
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I assume it's an automatically-generated phone call that indiscriminately rings loads of people and recites dodgy messages to whoever answers?
Bullseye.
Favourite, possibly apocryphal but who cares, story about Quayle
Better than wishing he knew Latin so he could better converse with the people of Latin America?
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Crazy-ass congresswoman Michelle Bachmann may find that crazy-ass ranting on national television has consequences.
Short version - her opponent in the district has raised six hundred thousand dollars in 48 hours since said rant aired!
Which will doubtless be why she's now claiming she never said what she said ...
Wikipedia has more on her penchant for McCarthyism and other charming aspects of her character, including the fact that she belongs to a church that regards the Pope as the Antichrist.
Interestingly, in the election that put her in office, her Democrat opponent raised twice as much in individual contributions, but she was massively bankrolled by the congressional equivalent of the RNC.
She really is quite evil.
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Why do US newspapers come out and endorse candidates and ours do not?
Well, not explicitly...... -
I was asked this month by two separate and equally intelligent persons whether in NZ we called the northern winter months "winter" or "summer".
It's slightly arbitrary that when northern hemisphere people visited or lived in the southern hemisphere for the first time they chose to associate seasons with the suns angle.
They could have chosen to regard the seasons as purely temporal so that we had cold summers and hot winters. After all, concepts of summer and winter don't really apply in the tropics, but are still used (when is summer in Singapore?).
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(What I'm *really* waiting for in terms of outspending is the half-hour TV spot Obama has purchased for Oct. 29 to address the nation. It's both audacious and brilliant.)
Yep. I've got my mediaphile hat on for that one. I really want to see what it looks like.
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texan: wurz noo zeel-and?
me: an island in the pacific ocean
texan: iz that south a' mexico?
me: pretty much.You should have told him it was next to Rand-McNally: the country where people walk on their hands with hats on their feet, and hamburgers eat people.
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Why do US newspapers come out and endorse candidates and ours do not?
Well, not explicitly.Because ours are worried that if they explicitly declared themselves to be National party pamphlets, a non-National government might notice that they are an unregulated and abusive monopoly?
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Traveling in, amongst other places, Nashville, it was frequent and actually charming to have your nationality and similar enquired about from nearly every shop assistant, waitress, bank teller, etc. that you ran across in your daily business...
Some had a reasonable idea what or where NZ was, others less so. But when one complemented me on how well I spoke english, I just burst out laughing... and then politely let him know that I was glad I spoke it well, as it was the only language I knew.... And although it did cross my mind at the time, a strange and unexpected bit if discretion withheld the words "and I speak it better than you" from crossing my lips.
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Because ours are worried that if they explicitly declared themselves to be National party pamphlets, a non-National government might notice that they are an unregulated and abusive monopoly?
Be fair, I'm sure there's a couple of student mags that would endorse centre-Left parties.
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