LSTDT - part Avogadro minus twelve

Libertarians say the dumbest things for the (verrry large number)th time.

Coming off the Marine Park Golf Course, I heard a foursome loudly swearing allegiance to Ron Paul and bitterly lamenting Obama's deficits. Marine Park is, of course, a municipal course. Furthermore, the city keeps hiring an inept private company to run it. NY State runs Bethpage, site of the US Open and a conspicuously nice set of courses. Even the simple courses at Sunken Meadow (more my speed) are in beautiful shape.

In a previous post, I mentioned Jack Welch's either gob-smackingly stupid, deluded, or insulting assertion that "government doesn't invent anything". I saw a CSpan rebroadcast of a panel in which British historian Niall Ferguson repeats (verbatim) this nugget of wrong-fail-dumb while arguing macro-economics with Bill Bradley, George Soros, Nouriel Roubini, and Krugman AND Wells. He then accused them (maybe not Bradley) of being commies (well if YOU want to go back to the Soviet model...)

Hostages 5 Niall 0 (Attempt at Gaelic humor, and to paraphrase Myles, Gaelic to the extent that it is miserable)

Cocoanuts Redux

Greetings, patrons of the arts, if there happens to be some art going on where the beer is flowing.

The guy who puts on the local musician shows in LIC usually closes his sets with, oddly enough, Irving Berlin's "When My Dreams Come True". This song, some of you may recall, was the theme from the Marx Brothers first major movie "The Cocoanuts".

That movie, in another odd coincidence, was a spoof set in an astounding Florida land boom that was just beginning to tip into utter catastrophe when the movie was shot in 1929. I thought it would be a great opportunity to remake this with a Groucho-esque Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, (Chico and Harpo)-esque general contractors looking to flip houses, Margaret-Dumont-esque FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair, but damned if I couldn't figure some fit for the Zeppo-esque character, an affliction that seemed to challenge some legendary Paramount writers as well.

Fortunately, while browsing the better resources in the financial press, LOLFed.com (LOLCat has the "I can haz cheezeburger" cat, LOLRus has the walrus and his bukkit, LOLFed has "Emo Bernanke" and Citi CEO Vikram Pandit with a bandit mask) I found this article which gave it to me on a platter

"Coming soon to an internet near you is a company called eModifyMyLoan, which sells software (for $199, but if you act now, only $97) that purports to help homeowners modify their own mortgages. Its CEO is one Chris Mozilo. Yes, Mozilo. Angelo is his uncle, Chris himself a veteran of Countrywide, now profiting off some of the very customers that his father’s company helped into their present predicaments. So that’s clever."

For a modern actor for this role, I was kind of thinking Vince from the ShamWow/SlapChop thing.

There is a ready-made chunk of soundtrack (mentioned above) sung by Gus Rodriguez and Jeneen Terrana. Gus records under the name "Silbin Sandovar". His CD well rewards listening.

COBOL Sudoku and the Computer Geek's Rosetta Stone

So here's the story.

Every now and then I get a stuck on a Sudoku puzzle, so I wrote a computer program to solve Sudoku puzzles, which lets me know if I had the thing right as far as I had gotten. I wrote it in Java, since I had taken a course in it and had the Java development environment set up.

Some time had elapsed after writing it before I needed to use it again. Lo and behold, the Java environment had updated itself so often and so cleverly that I was unable to guess what the path settings should be. Another triumph of portability!

Too damn aggravating, computers are supposed to be easy to use you know, so I went to a REAL computer (an IBM mainframe) and wrote it in REXX, which supports recursion. To a point. A point somewhere about halfway through a Sudoku puzzle. In the telltale mark of true "it's not 1978 anymore" chickensh*t, the limit of the recursion stack is a little under 256.

Old computer geeks will recognize this instantly as a limit set as an afterthought in a program where the only (usually politically) acceptable modifiable control block had one spare byte. This was probably done in 1978 and the person who decided to do it was probably promoted for it. Noone has changed it since and it must be one jam-packed rat's nest of a control block, because try to find a way to bump up the REXX control stack on line. I dare you.

Everybody is all "Moore's Law" but the tale of how "modern" systems are tied to efficiencies and restraints of the ancient (i.e. my) era would have your knotted and combined locks doing the "quills upon the fretful porpentine" bit in no time.

So I went back to the mother tongue, COBOL. I had always wanted to write a recursive routine in COBOL, but never had the real motivation like one of those sadistically hard Sudokus they put in the Friday paper. It works like a top. Purists will feint because it uses (maybe 8) GO TO's, but such people will also pretend "C" had real thoughts behind its syntax other than tiny CPUs and saving typing on a DEC writer.

I google'd it and discovered that Bill Price had also written a COBOL program to do this. Bill was interested in emulating algorithms a person would go through so his program is a lot more complex than mine. I just had a Sudoku grid that was pissing me off.

So until I get the password set for my ISP webspace that I never use, anyone interested in a Rosetta Stone version of the Sudoku program in COBOL, Java, and (unusable unless you can up that limit) REXX can request one in the reply.

Now look what you went and made me do

Long time-no post greetings, avid readers!

What could make me go through the password reset ritual and fire up the old blog again? No less than Jack Welch, former CEO of GE and ridiculously shameless shill for the financial snake-oil notions that bill themselves as "libertarianism" or "market fundamentalism" or any number of other names for the Gordon Gecko greed-is-good ethos.

As I was flipping channels, he was on Bloomberg (rather than on his own CNBC, home of Larry Kudlow, the Wolfowitz of Wall Street) and he actually said "government doesn't invent anything".

Enough!

This came from a man who headed a conglomerate that made jet engines and nuclear reactors.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman mused as to why the Wall Street Journal editorial page prints such obvious lies that they know damn well are lies. He concludes that they must think they are serving a higher truth though he does not know what it is. I, like the Nobel committee, think he's on to something.

This reflexive "gummint bad, cut my taxes" trope has become our civic religion. Jack Welch apparently wants to be its St Augustine. This religion serves it flock even less well than Catholicism served Ireland in the age of Parnell. It has actually started trending toward Jonestown.

The broad prosperous middle class that was built by the New Deal and nurtured under the greatest socialist program ever, as Jack Welch certainly knows, US Cold War defense spending, has brought about its own demise in the name of this new faith. Apparently, when St Ronnie spoke of getting government off "your" backs, we should have asked for a clearer explanation of "you". It certainly did not work out well for labor (stagnant real median wages) or anyone paying college tuition.

I can understand why Jack Welch and the rest of the financial world wants to continue offer their financial innovations to what's left of the middle class, because as one of their spiritual mentors once said, that's where the money is.

Back At It

There is some other stuff that I really ought to be doing at this point, so I figured "Why not fire up the Shortale blog?" I had a fine holiday season, with most of the family gathering in. I'm trying to formulate, in the smithy of my soul, the unformed story of the white elephant swap and the subsequent intrigue of the white (and red) ceramic pig Rodrigo. I am going to have to chart that one out.

Speaking of tales of intrigue, as much as I love military hardware stuff, Tom Clancy is just too bad an author to suffer through. I believe I invented the summarization "It was a red and stormy night ... " though my niece says she thinks she heard Christopher Buckley use it also. Fine. I'm not copyrighting anything. Fair play to him.

A good contrast example is LeCarre. You never know whom to trust and all the conversations are indirect in one of the Smiley books. It's almost as if Clancy is writing "for dummies" versions of a spy novel.

I Lived

It seemed like it was going to be close, though. On the odd chance anybody reads this blog, I just finished the radiation therapy that was the follow up to the surgery.

Here is the big thing about radiation therapy on your throat: even if they tell you you are getting a minor dose, you will probably lose the ability to eat solid food for a good while, especially enough to total over 1000 calories. Once the 4th (of 6) weeks began, I gave up. I went to drinking Ensure Plus (350 cals 13g protein per serving). Toward the end and for the week after the therapy, it was tough to even get that down. The tip off is the phrase "you may have some trouble swallowing". Indeed. They're cooking your throat, it's bound to put things off.

Another problem is that your throat tissues try to heal themselves by cranking out mucus. You spend your waking time spitting, and you don't sleep much because you wake up gagging. There is not much that can be done about this, so get used to it. The situation is made worse by the "trouble swallowing", so the mucus just kind of pools up.

All in all, nothing I'd recommend. I did lose 20 lbs though and am quite svelte at the moment.

Gratuitous

Date: May 22, 2007
Time: 23:20
Place: Still in this vale of tears.

I realize my course work is over, but the last few days were pretty bad and the grace note was struck today. All the following details are true.

On Friday, I went to the surgeon in Boston. He said the cancer wasn't that bad, he predicted a full recovery. He'd just cut out a chunk of the jaw and replace it with a graft from a tibia, a bone in the leg which he held in low regard as a leg bone, but a wonderful source of grafts. While it was blending in with its new surroundings, I would accomodate it by breathing through an esophageal airway and eating through a tube in my nose for a week or so in order not to disturb it.

I was expecting arthroscopy. I had to ask the guy to shut up because I was about to faint. Apparently, its quite a common phenomena. I always thought that "make sure you're sitting down" stuff was pure sit-com, but it's true, the nurse said particularly so among big guys like me. It's a fight-or-flight thing. I could feel the blood drawing deep into my body away from my skin.

So, anyway, as I'm enjoying my one pleasure these days, my bike ride home, a pigeon craps square on my forehead as I cross the Welfare Island Bridge.

That's gratuitous.