How bad? Pretty bad...

So the DJIA fell approximately 45,000 points this morning, the S&P lost 322% of its volume, and the TED spread just hopped up about 800 basis points. What does this mean to the uninitiated in global economics?

LOTS.

I reiterate: Things are bad. Let's hope a bit that they don't get as bad as they reasonably ought to.

Nous, Naan, Nights

gliding past the bakery where,

pan-adventurous,

we'd take sugared bites of Francophone treasures

after late nights sleeping soundly

Broken Phone

Once again my Chocolate Phone has let me down. I was receiving a text message yesterday as I left the office and the thing froze up. I de-batteried it, then turned it back on, only to be greeted with a white screen and an occasionally flashing VERIZON sign. Uh oh. The next half hour is a blur, but I biked downtown and got it looked at. I parked on the 16th St. Mall, so my bike got "ticketed." Some kind soul had strapped a little sign to my vert bar that warned me about the possibility of getting a real ticket. How nice!

But anyway, it turns out that the phone eventually booted up all the way, so I could get my numbers. Sadly, I lost a great many stored text messages. I keep the best ones, so it was very sad to see them go. I suppose I still have them; my Chocolate phone is sitting in front of me right now taking up space. But we got everything transferred to a new slider (Venus) and now I am pleased. 

I would have gotten the 2nd generation Chocolate, but they don't make them anymore. The 3rd generation Chocolate is basically a Razr with a clickwheel on the outside. Yucko. Then I biked down to Vine St. and had a salad. Heyo.

Money

I'm not so sure that I'm so sure what's actually going to happen with this whole "worldwide financial crisis" business. Just a while ago, we were talking about $200/barrel oil. Now commodities are slipping, credit is unavailable, our banks are being consumed by either the government or each other, and the average consumer, anywhere, is forced to sit and wait.

We're looking for objects of blame, be they the "greedy bank executives," George Bush, the Democratic Party, or irresponsible borrowers like you and me. 

Well, my guess is that we all bear a certain amount of responsibility for this mess. It's not over yet.

VP Debate

Meh.

Small Town America, Big Town America

I grew up in a small town. The owners of a local restaurant (the only one in town) were Kosovars from Kosovo. This was all I ever really knew about them. When they moved away, the restaurant was taken over by...another Kosovar family. It seemed to be a trend. The food still tasted the same. My friends and I knew that they were immigrants, and that they had accents, but it never occurred to us why they might have come to America, or even what religion they may have espoused.

Well as it turns out, they were Muslims, and odds are that they left their country because of horrific religious violence there; I never asked for fear of causing discomfort. I hadn't  really thought of this until I left home for school and encountered other Muslims who I knew explicitly as Muslims. It all made sense to me then. Some of the kids were my age, and in looking back on my time in school with them, their religion was of little concern to me. I suppose this is because my hometown is quite obviously Christian; having never known other faiths, I had just assumed that the family at the restaurant was like everybody else. 

But when I moved to the city, I became very aware of the multitude of different religions swirling around me. Chicago was very close, and when I had reasons to visit, I would notice yarmulkes and hijabs and bindis and crosses and all sorts of other religious paraphernalia. In cities, multifaith existence is a given, but in the country, this may not be so. What I do know is that people in cities, even if they are different faiths, work and live and pray and hang out together.

In the country, even if we're not aware of it, we do the exact same thing. 

Economics and Expectations

New post up at The 1010 Project's social network:

http://the1010project.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2292542:BlogPost:741