Friday, July 11, 2008

Happy Fishnet Friday! Ridgid Tools Edition

FETISH EXERSIZE by *bigradart

The economy may be going down the toilet, but we can still celebrate Fishnet Friday!


Pinups: George Petty's Ridgid Tools Calendars

Funny comment over at 6 Degrees of Casey Serin:
Anonymous said...
Ok doeas anyone know of jellyfish in the sky being a common thing? I ask cuz I actually saw jellyfish in the sky and there were alot of them and they were really big and transparent. So I googled sky jellyfish and found abunch of stuff about it. Mushrooms open your perception to other dimensions or dimensional beings.
July 11, 2008 10:29 AM

Hat tip to Wagga for these finds:
Angry White Guy (Rob Dawg or Lou Minatti?)Dittoheads to pretend to think for themselves

Food for oil

Gallons of biodiesel per fattie...

BTW why is David Brooks such an idiot?
Thoughts on teeth and Angelina Jolie's caesarean preference:

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! I'm the real straight skinny!

Uber Murst!

Anonymous said...

Hey! I'm the real straight skinny!

Uber Murst!

Ogg the Caveman said...

Rigid tools are always a popular item.

Happy Fishnet Friday and above all happy weekend!

Akubi said...

I have a 36 somewhere in my numerology.
Not entirely sure who the 30-something measurement commenters are, but Hi Ogg!
Don't those fishnets look like the Bollywood film I suspected Aspeth was a star?
I miss Aspeth and Stephanie J. and Flailing Forward and such. I guess I stuck around because I wasn't just alarmed/amused by KC, but the absurd housing market in general. If one doesn't live here in the Californicated it might be difficult to appreciate (no pun intended), but we are so fucked.

Akubi said...

Awesome!
Is that my former flapper Grandma on the right?

Casey Serin said...

I have a 36 somewhere in my numerology.

Yeah, the number 36 comes up in my life fairly often as well:

- My weight in pounds
- My I.Q.
- The number of cents in my bank accounts.
- The average number of minutes I'm awake on any given day.
- Someone's gaydar when they see me, on a scale of 1 to 10. ;-)
- With any luck, the number of months that I'll be serving in FPMITA prison. ;-p

Akubi said...

Hi KC,
There's nothing wrong with being gay, but liar loan flippers are another story.
I am so sick of this bailout BS I'm getting a migraine. Reaganomics clearly does not work. How many years did it take for economists to figure that one out?

Ogg the Caveman said...

@ Akubi:

I miss them too. Those were fun times. Who would've thought that such good would come from a foolish failed flipper?

Ogg the Caveman said...

OT, but I got a kick out of Buycycling's take on very early mountain bikes, from back when the term hadn't yet taken hold. One probably has to be a bit of a bike nerd to enjoy it.

Anonymous said...

I murst fishnet friday. Alas.

Ogg the Caveman said...

My super sweet 16: An english perspetive

"In summary: Our world is doomed."

Akubi said...

@Ogg,
Do they still make any of them in Marin or have they all been outsourced to China or some such place?
Is that Sweet 16 a real show? How absolutely nauseating. She receives a 67K Lexus for her birthday and proceeds to cry and tell her mom she hates her. WTF?

Ogg the Caveman said...

@ Akubi:

Do they still make any of them in Marin or have they all been outsourced to China or some such place?

I doubt any of them are still buiding in Marin. AFAIK none of those guys are still building frames by hand. They've either gotten out of the business or are mass producing, and you can't do that in Marin.

As far as I know, the only builder featured in that article that's still designing mountain bikes is Gary Fisher. His operation is a subsidiary of Trek, which means frames made in Taiwan or the U.S. depending on price point. Mine was made in Taiwan.

Joe Breeze is into expensive utility bikes these days. I kind of want one but couldn't see spending that kind of money on a commuter.

Outside of those early big names, the Bay Area still has a number of craftsman framebuilders. Some are probably in Marin.

Is that Sweet 16 a real show? How absolutely nauseating. She receives a 67K Lexus for her birthday and proceeds to cry and tell her mom she hates her. WTF?

It's real in the sense that it's an actual show, but I'm sure it's at least partly scripted.

Mitchell said...

Pardon me for being boring but I'd like to brood aloud on this GSE bailout thing for a moment. It's all good; half the effect here comes from the conjunction of koi-eating octopi and mortgage securitization, right? So someone has to step up and post a comment as if this were just another housing-bubble econoblog. (Actually, it's just a lot more fun to talk about this stuff here than at the more serious places.)

So, at first it sounds bigger than subprime, much bigger. You have these two New-Deal-era institutions which own or securitize half the country's mortgages, $6trn worth. Those are their assets; but their liabilities, in the form of promised payments to bondholders, are just as big. And since housing prices are still falling, the value of their assets will shrink, and their balance sheets will end up massively in the red - which may add several trillion more dollars to the already huge ($10trn) federal debt.

Now hold on! - says the counterargument. Yes, houses may fall a lot further in value, but the GSEs own the mortgages, most of them originated pre-2005. A decline in the paper value of the house does not affect the value of the mortgage, unless it increases the risk of default, and that should only apply to people who have already tried to cash in a large part of the alleged value of their house, e.g. by taking out home equity loans. Which will be some of them, but overall the mortgages owned by the GSEs are a whole lot more reliable than the subprime ninjas were, right? So maybe their asset base won't decline too greatly in value after all.

But consider this (says the counter-counter-argument): this is the year of the great food and fuel crisis, in which the price of everything basic is going through the roof. Even if we ignore the effects of asset deflation, the simple increase in the cost of living is going to affect the ability of many people to keep up the mortgage payments, and some of them are going to default.

That's where my ability to argue with myself runs out, because to go any further you need some numbers for prospective default rates and I don't have them. Maybe someone at Calculated Risk does. Meanwhile, I'd like to point out the amazing facts about who the GSE bondholders are, i.e. the people they owe that $6trn to. It seems bizarre that the Chinese and Russian central banks should each own a slice of the American mortgage market, supposedly just as valuable as 10% of their entire national economies. It seems bizarre, and yet I feel that if I keep digging, eventually I'll come upon some set of relationships which sum up the totality of the global economy: who owns what, who owes what. It'll be like when Neo first gets his "Matrix vision". And then, as the world's foremost financial shaman puts it, the money will burn in my head forever after.