The future

Today it's now April 1 of 2009, the day I predict the bottom of the economy can be experienced. I have other predictions for the future. If my predictions are true I will become famous and get a book contract. If my predictions turn out to be false, I can always say it all was an April Fool's Joke.

One year from today, ie. April 1, 2010:

The Dow Jones will be over 9,000.

The Standard and Poors Index will be over 1,000.

NASDAQ will be around 2000 and people will like Microsoft Windows 7.

The unemployment rate will be 6.5.

Obama will be unpopopular as a president. Fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be heavy and things will not look well on the warfront. Hillary will have a mini scandal involving finance.

Housing and gasoline will be up 15% for the year.

Ugly Betty will be cancelled, but a movie will be planned.

Governor Steve Lonegan of New Jersey will be unpopular with Jim Gearhardt for betraying the taxpayers of New Jersey. Former Governor Corzine will announce his engagement to Carla Katz.

April Fools!

White House Victory Garden

Taking the lead from my other blog, Balcony Tomatoes, the White House is now starting an organic victory garden. An inspiration to all of us, soon we will be a nation of tomato and rutabaga growers, saving the environment and stuffing ourselves with herbivorous delights. Nice to see even former president Bush is taking part in the festivities.

On other fronts, a blog on the stimulus package is being presented on the New Yorker site. One of my favorite pod casts is the Slate Political Gabfest. Emily Bazelon has such a cute voice. On the latest cast, one of the men (probably David Plotz) proposed that there should be a way for average citizens to buy toxic assets in the package being offered by Tim Geithner. My suggestion is that one of the mutual fund companies could offer a "toxic assets" mutual fund.

Till that time.

And

Being a librarian, I often have to catalog documents from government agencies of one type or another. One observation I have had is the use of the ubiquitous "and". You'll notice this in public agencies, museums, schools, colleges, foundations, graduate school departments and the like. What this means is that the museum you used to go to as a kid, say, the Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Art, is now the Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Arts and Culture. The Department of English at your old alma mater is now the Department of English, Language, and Contemporary Linguistics.

The Scranton School of Dance is now the Scranton College of Dance and Contemporary Movement. The state department of labor in Nevada is now the Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. The Katzenbach School for the Deaf is now the Katzenback School for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired. The Museum of Crafts is now the Museum of Crafts and Folklore. The Department of Geology is now the Department of Geology, Hydrology and Mineral Resources.

The reason for this, I'm guessing here, has something to do with money. A bequest is given in an area that is not the core of the organization but if they rename themselves, the thought is, they can get the grant. An area of study becomes fashionable and an organization renames itself to make it sound like they do the thing that is suddenly desirable.

Legislation in the nineties mandating that states do more job training is at the heart of the changes of departments of labor nationwide to names like the Department of Labor, Workforce Development and Cultural Resuscitation.

If I was a betting man, I would guess that with all the clawing for money from the Stimulus Act, we'll see lots more name changes this year. And the names will be getting longer, not shorter.

When things will turn around

All the prognosticators are in a dizzy. The economy is not behaving the way it's supposed to. However, most economists assume the market will eventually go up again. Unemployment will eventually go down, it will leave a few corpses, but it will go down.

Perhaps this is optimistic but one day things will start to get better. I'm going to make a prediction, based on the date of the trials of the Templar's. I predict the market will reach its trough on April Fools Day. After that it will start to go up. Same with housing. As one of my Texas relatives said once, “One thing they can’t make more of is land. So I’m going to get me some of it.”

This may seem unscientific but I have made my prediction and I'm sticking to it. We have nothing to lose but our jobs and our life savings.

The doctor's office

My father once said to me, "You know, the worst part of getting old is you spend all your time horsing around with these darn old doctors." The young college kid (male) has no prescriptions. Then in his thirties he picks up one. By the time he's fifty he has four. By his sixtieth birthday he has seven. By seventy he has twelve. And his wife has twenty seven. They have huge drug caddies just to keep up with the things. Finally somebody tells them the problem is that they are over medicated.



Going to the doctor's office nowadays is different than in the old days. Then you would read tired old Reader's Digests and try to guess the other patient's diseases. Now they have tv shows. Not ordinary shows like the View or Wheel of Fortune.



No, they show the Health Channel. I was sitting in the doctor's office watching the thing and noticed that every disease they featured, I had. "I have that!", I would say gleefully. Then they'd have another feature where a cute twenty year old would describe another disease. And I would say, "I have that too! I am lucky today."



Then they take you in and weigh you. I treat this like I am in security at the airport. Off go the shoes, the wallet, the keys. I need all the help I can get.



You think your turn will come when you finally get into the doctor's consultation room. But no, you have to wait there without tv for another half hour. At least here you can eavesdrop on other patients' visits.



My, do patients have ailments. Once in the eye doctor's office I felt like going into the room next door and shouting, "of course you can't see well at night, you're old!"

A furlough

At work there is a possibility we may all be furloughed for two days. One in May and one day in June. I've never been furloughed. Admittedly it's a wimpy furlough but still it's a furlough. Everybody is all excited and jumping up and down. A wimp at heart, I'm willing to play ball. I've always believed in the credo "to get along you go along". I'd do well in the Army but I was a miserable shop steward.

Getting furloughed is one thing. Getting laid off for real would be another. Great for this blog but not so great for my pocketbook.

Editor's note: In search of a picture of a furlough, I came across an interesting story of world war 2 called Gallagher. The serendipity factor.

Newspapers

Many of our newspapers are in financial trouble. True, people are reading their papers on-line, but they are not paying for it like their parents did when they paid the paperboy every week for the paper. That's the crux of the problem. If you can get something in a convenient form for free, why pay for it. When radio starting playing records, the record companies panicked. Then ASCAP started charging radio stations fees to play recorded music. Under an arcane formula, songwriters got money for air play.

We need to use ASCAP as the business model to charge moderate fees for reading publications online. We'll all hate it and grumble but we'll do it if we have no choice. The publishers must unite and create a pay mechanism for its content. Internet providers will have to pay a fee to receive magazine and newspaper content. They'll pass the cost onto consumers. Schools and libraries would get a free ride since they are largely their own isp's. Problem solved.

My chair collapsed while I was sitting in it. I feel like I am in a Japanese restaurant. It's feelings must have been hurt by an earlier blog.