You mean they listened?

Every time I try to steer the blog in the direction of something other than politics...well, there's not a whole lot going on just now over here anyway (rainy season, but I'm pleasantly busy at work without being overwhelmed, etc.). In any case, I had given up the bailout for lost (that is, I expected the stupid thing to sail through the House), but it's been stopped for now. A nice surprise, but just what were the Dems thinking?! They're poised to gain another 20 seats or so, public opinion is wildly against the bailout, the entire world is counting down the days until Bush goes back to Texas...and they give him a majority of their votes while the Republicans supply the votes against it? Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, guys! I guess I have to give the Republicans credit where it's due for living up to their claims of fiscal conservatism for once.

What should be done instead? I don't know. I do know that taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill, and I also know that the number 700,000,000,000 was chosen at random because they needed "a really big number". One thing I'd like to see changed immediately is the principle of "it's too big to fail." If a bank is too big to fail, it's too big, period.

The selfish bastard in me can't wait to see how far the US dollar sinks against the Singapore one.

The whole world is watching

Among my guilty pleasures of late is an American-style diner at one of Singapore's numerous malls. (I suspect Singapore probably has the most malls per capita in the world.) You know the sort of place, kitchy and over-the-top with its decorations from several different long-ago decades, but the food is great nonetheless. It's not really that unusual for Asians to try too hard in their own way to act American, but this place takes it to extremes. Tonight, though, I was in the mood for some comfort food after almost making it through a good but fairly tedious week, so off I went to the diner.

They have a rather wide selection of burgers. I usually don't order a burger because I'm trying to watch my weight (and I'm also now old enough to see that some of the more elaborate specialty burgers are, well, gross), but just out of curiosity I checked that part of the menu tonight. They had a new addition to the lineup: the Obama Burger. Just a reminder of whose side the rest of the world is on, I guess. I did check to see if they had a dish named for McCain...maybe a mooseburger, or something involving extra-aged beef...but they didn't, although their fries are made from McCain potatoes. (I don't think there's any relation, though...isn't the potato company Canadian? I do know they have a big processing plant on Prince Edward Island.)

I chose not to read anything into the fact that the Obama Burger comes with black pepper sauce. If they were trying to be offensive, they probably would have topped it with collard greens or some such.

Look out, you might get what you're after

Senior year in high school, my advanced English class read parts of the Canturbury Tales. I suppose the most precise thing to say here is that we read "selections from the Canturbury Tales, but for reasons I can't really explain, "selection" is one of two literary terms that I have always actively disliked. (The other is "extended metaphor." But I digress.) As my fellow literary snobs know, the prologue to the Tales is a character sketch of all the pilgrims Chaucer met on the road to Canterbury. After we'd read the prologue in class, we were assigned to write a series of character sketches modeled after it, a tale of a chance meeting with a group of people on a journey and a more detailed look at at least three of them. You might say we were asked to write an extended metaphor of the prologue. You might, but I'd rather you didn't. The tale could be told in rhyme, like the original; but it didn't have to be, as our extremely arrogant teacher wasn't sure we'd all be up to such a challenge. Best of all, we were allowed to work in groups of up to four.

Now, I had four best buds in that class - three guys and one gal - and I always did my group projects with some combination of them. However, on this occasion, the four of them teamed up before I even had a chance to talk to any of them, so I was left to do the assignment on my own. That's high school for you! I was down, but not out. After a healthy dose of teenage angst, I sat down one afternoon at my parents' 1987 Atari 1040 and, in one sitting, pounded out seven or eight pages in rhyme and iambic pentameter about a guy who's driving to the beach and meets a busload of rednecks at a roadside diner. I set it aside to edit and/or rewrite as necessary, but never thought of any way to improve it and just hoped for the best. On the day the assignment was due, we had to recite our compositions in class. After each group (and they were all groups, except for yours truly) had one member read their work, the teacher would provide some positive comments and some critical ones.

But when I read mine - coincidentally just after my four friends who had forgotten me - there was no criticism forthcoming, from any corner of the room. What did the notoriously hard-to-impress teacher say? "Well, what can we say after work like that? Incredible." The four friends? "We don't call him The Venerable for nothing!" By the end of the week I was getting compliments from friends who weren't even in that class. (The teacher had taken the liberty of reading my work to the other classes, as an example of what they could do if they tried harder.)

Six months later on the morning after graduation, as I was leaving the all-night grad party, a girl from the class - whom I had barely known - hugged me and said, "Bye, Dave, it was great listening to all your stories this year." That remains the closest I have yet come to what I'm guessing John Lennon felt at age 15 when he saw Elvis getting mobbed by girls on television and decided to go buy a guitar. Thanks, Laura, wherever you are. Hope you like my book if I ever finish it.

Why, you ask, am I bringing all this up now? Two words: Lehman Brothers.

Of course I was delighted when I got the chance to come to Singapore last spring, but I had been hoping to get a job in a bank. I did make the first-round cut in a couple of places (not Lehman's, though - I don't think they hired anybody from my class), but with no prior banking experience, it just wasn't going to happen in this economy. I didn't feel too sorry for myself over that this summer, as I was just glad to be employed somewhere. But I now feel secure enough in my current job to admit that I really didn't think it was going to fly for a while. It was boring (sometimes it still is, but things have picked up), it wasn't what I had planned to do with my degree (but then I always knew I might have to fall back on something else at least temporarily), it wasn't very well-paid (that's about to change), and I missed Paris. Who wouldn't miss Paris, of course? I told myself getting a job there without an EU passport is just about impossible anyway, but it isn't really. Difficult, but not impossible...if you can afford to wait around until somebody turns up willing to sponsor you. I, of course, could not. On top of everything else, after the false start in Luxembourg, I figured it was just a matter of time until the same happened here.

As I've discussed before, things have improved quite a bit after that slow start. I'm not rich yet, but business is picking up and it looks like there's going to be a lot of business-travel around Asia coming up pretty soon (not to mention a possible trip to Las Vegas in February). But that's beside the point. Whether there's a pot of gold down at the end of Orchard Road or not, it's a steady income that I can count on for the time being. If I had gotten a job with a bank...well, no need to dwell on that right now!

Where have I been? What do I think of Palin?

Apologies for my long silence. Things finally started to get busy at work. Before they got busy, I was seriously considering chasing after other options, but the current job came together a bit more at last before any such options really presented themselves. Working for a startup agrees with me so far. We release our flagship product in October, and after that it looks like there'll be a lot of business travel around Asia. Having not left Singapore since April, I'm definitely looking forward to that. In better-still news, I got a big raise this past week, although I won't actually see the money until the end of October. There will probably be more in store shortly after that, as that's when we start selling our software.

So...after going back and forth on the issue several times, I have tentatively settled on sticking around here for a while yet.

I didn't see any of the Democratic convention last week, but I read all the major speeches and was mostly quite impressed. It's about time Democrats start talking like Democrats again for a change. So what of Sarah Palin? I'm really trying to figure out what McCain must have been thinking, but I can't. I don't get it. If I had to guess, I'd go with the theory of appealing to disgruntled Clinton supporters. That at least makes the pieces fit together a bit better: he thought picking a female running mate would do the trick (and yes, that's ridiculous...but it is the way right-wingers tend to think about these things), and Palin is the only prominent female Republican out there at the moment who isn't either pro-choice or too close to Bush. He doesn't appear to have considered much else about her, but then there isn't a whole lot else to consider.

I have to admit that I am a bit concerned about the VP debate. I already wasn't very fond of Joe Biden because of his incredibly inept performance in the Clarence Thomas hearings, and having him debate a woman is only going to make that issue that much harder to forget. The fact that said woman is to the right of Thomas should neutralize that issue, but I'm not sure it will.

And since the misogynistic comments and "jokes" are already appearing around the net, this site is worth a look. I am curious as to how many of the offenders are McCain supporters, and how many of those will think twice about voting for a ticket with a woman on it. I don't want that to be the reason why Obama wins, but the poetic justice would be delicious at the same time.

Bikini mud-wrestling, DC style!

As a loyal member of the party that is best known for infighting among its own members, I can imagine all too well what the House Republicans think about this...but I have to hand it to Rep. LaTourette, what a comeback!

Rep. Dean Heller, class of 2006:

The Republican Party lost its majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and is likely to lose more seats in November, but Nevada Republican Dean Heller says he doesn't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

"I'm of the position that we really need to clean house in this Republican Party, and I think the next couple of election cycles are going to do that," Heller said.

Republicans who should be swept out, in Heller's view, include some from the historic class of 1994, which gave the GOP a majority in the House for the first time in 40 years.

"It's an old mantra: they came to change Washington, and Washington changed them," Heller said several weeks ago. "I think we got to the point where the majority of Republicans were trying to change America and tell (Americans) what they wanted instead of listening to ... what they need."

And in response, Rep. Steve LaTourette, class of 1994:

The fact is, the Class of '94 created the longest serving Republican majority in recent history, and we didn't lose it until Dean showed up.

Eeeeeyow!

There ain't no voices louder than the one inside your head

In a decade or so of spending almost all my time in consciously international settings (even if they're only "international" to me), I've run into a couple of recurring oddities. One of these is Canadians bearing tales of how excessively friendly other people suddenly become when they say they're not Americans. I don't doubt that it really does happen now and then, but seeing as I have never been treated rudely for being American while I was elsewhere in the world - that's right, not a single time - I have a hard time believing it happens as frequently as they seem to think it does.

I ran into another incidence of that tonight, with a Canadian woman I had dinner with after a supply chain conference. (Yes, the conference was just as boring as you're probably thinking. But a job's a job, and I ate and drank for free!) We got to talking politics, of course, and when she gave me the usual snide remark about how Americans will never elect a black man president (and became even more skeptical when I said I expected Obama to name Gov. Sibelius of Kansas his VP nominee - "There's no way America will elect a black man and a white woman!"), I bet her $10 that Obama would win.

The story only begins there. You see, after we shook on the bet, we got to talking about the election in more detail, and only then did she discover how closely I follow politics. She could have picked up on it earlier if she'd paid a bit more attention; I mislead nobody. Perhaps feeling a bit insecure now that she realized the bet was a fairly informed one on my part, she delved into some personal anecdote about somebody, somewhere, sometime, who had asked if she was American and, on finding she wasn't, gushed about how wonderful that was. Which took away any sympathy I might have felt earlier on toward her for entering into a bet with someone who knew a lot more about the issue at hand than she did. "I'm sure you know you're not very popular in the outside world," she chirped, in response to which I explained that I've lived overseas for four of the past five years and have never been mistreated by anybody who knew where I was from.

Like I said, I don't doubt that it does happen, but does it happen that often? I have my doubts. For what it's worth, I've been on the receiving end of the same reaction once, when a guy at a bar in Paris found out I was American. He asked if I was English, and on finding out I wasn't, he let loose with a tirade about les rosbifs and then paid my bar tab.

I took the snotty comment as a compliment in disguise, though, because really, my rattling off of a dry list of statistics about states that haven't gone Democratic since 1964 where Obama is now ahead in the polls rounds out my trilogy of the best comebacks ever.

The others? One of them featured almost exactly the same dynamic, actually: during the Monica Lewinsky mess, a Canadian gal I knew remarked that "Hillary ought to be running the country, but Americans aren't ready for a woman president. Jerks." All I had to do was say "Kim Campbell" and, well, I've never seen anybody bus her tray and disappear quite that quickly. The other involved a guy at a party who overheard me say I was a Jimmy Buffett fan..."Oh yeah?" he asked incredulously, "Name three of his songs!" The printed word can't do justice to his tone, which made it clear that he was certain I would name "Margaritaville" and maybe "Cheeseburger in Paradise" and then get stuck. Instead, I rattled off three extremely obscure songs, one of which has never even been released officially, and of course he accused me of making them up. I got as far as explaining the story behind two of the three (if any parrotheads are reading this and wondering, they were "Don't Bring Me Candy," "Richard Frost," and "Peddlers and Pushers") before the guy suddenly remembered he needed another beer and never returned.

Careful who you question, folks!

You can't make this stuff up!

During the Monica Lewinsky mess, there was a lengthy list of right-wingers who supported the impeachment and who also turned out to have infidelities in their past. Those of us who followed the impeachment closely can probably still recite the list. Henry Hyde was the favorite of many: he claimed "youthful indiscretion" as the justification for an affair he'd had in his mid-forties. (A few years later, he admitted what a lot of Republicans still haven't: that the real motivation for the impeachment was getting even for Watergate.)

In the years since then, I know some folks on the right who will immediately recite "I did not have sexual relations with that woman..." as an excuse for anything Bush et al are caught doing. In response to that, a lot of us on the left will say we miss the days when there was even time to worry about politicians' sex lives, as opposed to major cities being destroyed and illegal wars and such.

Lucky for us, those days aren't gone completely:

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, have signed on as co-sponsors of a proposed Marriage Protection Act that would amend the constitution to declare that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

What is there to add to that? I am going to miss seeing Mr. Wide Stance in stories like this, but at least we'll have Diaper Dave to kick around for another two years or more.