Updates Etc.

Up to do wine shit for the rest of the week. Goodbye, San Francisco, especially you, little French waiter from Chez Spencer--nous nous sommes biens amusés.

I've not been following the papers, but have caught some hotel cable news, and I must say that the intense fixation on how the Mumbai attackers have been looking for Brits and Americans is more than a little untoward given the hundreds of Indians who have been injured and killed. Must it always be about us? India has long struggled with domestic terrorism (and India's governments have long profited by blaming Pakistani provocation for every eruption), and yet our natural inclination is to assume that this all has to do with the Anglo-American "War on Terror." Color me a skeptic.

Shoplifters of the World

I am traveling with family for the holiday and posting will be lizzite. Let me just say though, from the 18th floor of a rather chi-chi hotel in the middle of the city Michael Savage affectionately dubs San Fran Sicko: for mere inhabitants of a socialist workers' paradise, these fucking hippies sure do seem to have this capitalism thing down to a damn science. Dad and I were cracking up at the Ferry Building. "Look," he said, "bread lines!"

To Small to Wail

Fuck, I've got a Citi mortgage. Can I stop paying now? A very good friend of my family used to be a big-shot exec at Citicorp just before all laws were suspended and the firmament lifted toward the heavens and the water made wine and banks made insurance groups. He resigned just before the Traveler's merger in the late 90s. He was not sanguine about the prospects and suggested that the shit would fall apart in a decade or so. Whee!

So Citi is "too big too fail." What isn't, these days? It could have "spillover effects" in the "rest of the economy." Oh my god, my Euphemism is eating my Synecdoche. Run!