Happiest Birthday in Years

Nothing extraordinary, perhaps, to the untrained eye. Went to work, ate lunch by myself, went to the gym after work.

A co-worker made my day by bringing in lime jello and some Disney coloring book pages her and her daughter had colored for me. One had a candle taped to it, since her daughter insisted I had to have a candle for my birthday.

I had been complaining a couple weeks ago that the company café never served lime jello. Just the red flavors: cherry, strawberry, cranberry. She made a tub of it. It was the perfect gift. The thing about jello is that you can utterly gorge yourself almost without remorse.

Google created this special logo for me:



A handsome Asian woman handed me a daisy as I was leaving the gym.

My girlfriend bought me 20 golden kiwis.

It even rained a bit on the way home. God -- or deterministic meteorological events -- giving me a car wash for my birthday.

When it comes to preposthumous events in a preposthumous author's life, few are as preposthumous as a birthday. Today I felt like that kid in my favorite Dr. Seuss book:



I had a wonderful day.

Implacable May Weather

Miserable weather today -- drizzly grey Southern California spring stuff. Put me in mind of Bleak House and implacable 19th century November London weather:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

The Housing Meltdown Deconstructed

Listening to this week's This American Life right now and it's doing an amazing job giving a big picture view of how we ended up in the housing mess:

355: The Giant Pool of Money

Worth listening. (Probably can find a link here.)

Of course, even without this background, I knew we were in deep shit the day I saw this graphic in the New York Times:



That's all you needed to know and you could pick the year (if not the month or day), the wheels were going to come off. What still amazes me is the financial geniuses like those at Bear-Stearns that were still investing in toxic mortgage funds in 2007. 2007!

Jacarandas in Bloom

These are jacaranda trees:



They usually bloom in Southern California this time of year. It is one of the annual phenomena I always take notice of.

This year it seems to be happening a couple weeks earlier than normal -- the kind of thing normally attributed to global climate change. I don't have any evidence aside from this vague impression.