Bits and Pieces

It’s been snowing early this morning at Casa NewMexiKen. Nothing much, just enough to cover the trees and shrubbery and be kind of pretty. That’s especially true if you can just sit here and look at it and not go out.

Yes, I did get the shower faucet fixed. Thanks for asking.

New springs and seats: $3.99
New handle: $10.98
Satisfaction of doing it myself: Priceless

I saw yesterday that the mascot for the Alamosa (Colorado) High School is the Mean Moose. Cool.

Some people have said to me, “Your Mom is from Japan and your Dad is from India, so that makes you half-Asian.” What continent do they think India is in? I mean, 20 percent of American schoolchildren can’t find Earth — on a map of Earth.

That’s comic Dan Nainan quoted by Joe Sharkey in a column in Tuesday’s Times, It’s Not Easy Being a Comic on the Airport Security Line.

NewMexiKen is really enjoying the mellow sounds of The Road to Escondido, the album by J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton. Cale wrote “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.”

I’ve learned there is a new and improved way to construct the code behind the layout of this weblog, so bear with me this next day or so while I make the change. This new approach includes modular inserts for the sidebars.

Cal Berkeley and, to a lesser extent, Stanford are offering speakers and even courses free online via podcasts. UC Berkeley on iTunes U has course lectures in history, psychology, geography, ecology, economics, computer science and much more. Stanford on iTunes U is limited more to one-shot events than classes, but still has an interesting selection. How did we live before the internets?

I read a short item in The New Yorker over the weekend about sugar and corn and ethanol. Really it’s about our convoluted government. Here’s a taste:

In the nineteen-seventies, Brazil embarked on a program to substitute sugar ethanol for oil. Today, every gallon of gas in Brazil is blended with at least twenty per cent of ethanol, and many cars run on ethanol alone, at half the price of gasoline.

What’s stopping the U.S. from doing the same? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it’s not cost-effective to use it for ethanol.

Oh, it’s worse than that. Go read.

And Ben Stein had an interesting column, In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning. An excerpt:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”