Saturday, September 20, 2008

Strange Saturday

I woke up really early this morning (for me, almost middle of the night). I staggered to the bathroom (which was what prompted awakening at that insane hour), dragged myself back to bed, and the phone rang.

I answered it and was greeted with my daughter's voice demanding "Why are you up so early?"

Half asleep, I had visions running through my brain of causing cosmic ripples through space and time just because I was awake. Ramifications so dire that she had to call to find out why the planet was tilting.

Once I explained, then she wanted to make sure that I was aware that I had listened to bad information on the news. My mistake was listening to a news report on a broadcast TV station. She proceeded to explain that Robin had listened to the news on PBS, and it was so much more reliable. She may be right about that. 

She then launched into an explanation that there's no basis for thinking that the bank I deal with might fail because 39 banks have recently failed according to the FDIC (plus two more that I know about since then). She said that those banks failed because they were "playing the stock market."

When I was in Junior High (about 50 years ago), the teacher told us about banks. He said they make money by "investing money." I asked how they invested money, and he said "By loaning a portion of the deposited money (such as for mortgages) and collecting interest on it, and by investing in stocks and bonds." That seemed like a risky plan to me when I was 14, but it's worked pretty well up until now, so maybe I was wrong about the risk.

But I still don't see how that means that keeping money in a specific bank is safe.

Oh, and she said that even though the news report I saw said specifically that the FDIC was broke, they were WRONG! They also said that some people high in the government had a meeting and said that the problem is fixed (without saying how).

Then she said that the broadcast TV news programs were reporting that the FDIC was broke because the government wanted them to do that.

The US government wants to convince citizens that they're incompetent and failing? Well, we knew they are anyway. 

Did I miss something?

Probably. I was half asleep at the time. It's possible that she didn't say what I think she did.

Then, she called back later to say that when I wrote "Arrrrg" yesterday, I misspelled it, and that it should be spelled "Arrrr."

I want to go back to sleep!

***************************

Somebody in the apartment place I live is moving out, and I got some stuff for almost nothing in their please-don't-make-me-move-all-this sale. 

Once I actually unpack at least most of the stuff I've been slowly unpacking for the past year, I should have a workable bedroom. And maybe I can find some stuff to sell.

Monday evening, we will have four more episodes of Lost. And I found a really zany article about the show online here. It favors the explanation that Lost actually has it's plot taken from an episode of Red Dwarf.

And, speaking of Red Dwarf, more news about the revival.

The same blog has a post about talking like a space pirate, too.

This all comes from a fabulous blog (news site?) I just found called io9.

The wit and the news keeps rolling on this not-to-be-missed site. I even found an article about Fringe being the most reassuring show on TV.

The new Primeval is about to come on BBC in America, and I want to catch it, so I'm going to stop writing now.

In the meantime, I hope you're having a great weekend!

No comments:

Post a Comment