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| Arf? |
Dogs: So there was this guy in Oregon, Jeremy Taylor, and his dog Ally a few Sundays ago. Alas, his SUV gets stuck in the snow on a woodsy road somewhere in the vicinity of Wake Butte, wherever the hell that is.
He stays stuck there for five days.
Finally along comes a snowmobiler who saves poor Taylor, who’d been living on five — count ‘em five — packages of taco sauce.
I’ve got a good mind to fire my source, Time Magazine, for doing a fifth-rate job of reporting. Among the questions that, back in the day, any city editor worth his salt would have told a young reporter to "go the hell back there and ask" are:
- Did he share the taco sauce with Ally the dog?
- If not, did the dog eat any thing out there in the woods? Maybe he caught a squirrel or something?
- What kind of a dog is Ally? Big? Little? Poodle? Retriever? Another damn Labradoodle or Cockerpoo? There's a picture in the Time web story that shows a dog from the rear that might (or might not) be a collie. Is that Ally?
- Wasn’t Jeremy carrying a cell phone?
- What's with his SUV? Don't most of those things have four-wheel drive that's supposed to drive you out of snowbanks? If so, how come it was stuck?
- If Jeremy had all those packets of taco sauce in his car, what happened to the tacos? Or did he live on the tacos and forget to talk about that because he’d sound less heroic?
I can keep going, but why bother?
Donald Trump: Remember the mortgage meltdown of 2009? Remember when the Senate and House slapped regulations on the banking industry so it wouldn’t happen again? Remember when Donald Trump's administration relaxed the banking regulations because, umm, Barak Obama?
Well, here we go again.
Reuters is now reporting that the trading of U.S. Government-backed mortgage securities increased five fold in the first half of 2019, making it, according to “industry sources,” “the fastest growing revenue source in investment banking.”
Reuters goes on
The shift this year to a more dovish interest rate policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve has sparked a surge in investor demand for packaged-up home loans issued by mortgage agencies Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Banks that trade these securities, known as agency residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), have profited both from increased commissions on trading them as well as holding them on their books as they appreciated in value.
The boom in trading comes just over a decade after the global financial crisis, caused in part by the collapse in value of much riskier bonds linked to U.S. home loans that banks packaged up and sold to unwitting investors.
How long do you want to give it before those “much riskier bonds linked to U.S. home loans” start getting packaged again, too? And after that, before the entire economy turns into a hot liquid slurry of molten wealth that dribbles out into Donald Trump's toilet? After which, Trump will fire Larry Kudlow but blame the economic crash on the Fed?
Personally, I give it another six minutes. Wall Streeters, don your crash helmets! (Just sayin’.)
More dogs (Kink department.) So here’s some West Hollywood dude who has shed his real name in favor of the handle “Sexy Vegan.” He’s had his new name tattooed on his forehead and chest (a handy means of identification in case he ever gets decapitated without his wallet in his pants pocket).
Does eating Vegan mess with your mind?
I ask this question because, Sexy Vegan was recently reported by News of the Weird to be living rent free in an LA hoosegow after he was arrested for….here comes the dog….sexual abuse of his dog. How did the cops find out about it? Why, quite naturally, because Sexy posted it on social media.
Evidently, he’s also been on Dr. Phil, where he revealed that “I do get judged a lot for being different.” Maybe The Trumpster can use that line if Russia ever releases the alleged pee tapes.
Other Stuff: I have nothing against Carly Simon, but I’m not a huge fan of hers, either, largely because I can only think of one really catchy song that I know for sure she wrote. And I don’t even know the title of that one, although I do remember the opening stanza, largely because it’s a near-tautology:
You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.
Which of course it is, because she directly addresses him (or her) in the song, and it's all about what he or she (probably) thinks.
I also know that Carly is the daughter of a book publisher (as in Simon & Schuster) and that she is one of three sisters, another of whom was a gorgeous opera star who once had a thing going with a TV newscaster of considerable fame, the third a Broadway show song writer. I felt pretty smug knowing that much. Hey, you know, inside New York stuff.
Now Carly is evidently working on memoir articles instead of, or in addition to music. The current New Yorker has a memoir article revealing that she was a movie buddy of Jackie Kennedy's, and that to avoid notice in movie theaters, Jackie would hide in the ladies room until it was time for the movies to start.
Makes sense to me. Who could blame her? On a trip to a racy X-rated movie with half-sister Lee Radzivil back in 1960-something (I’ll take a wild stab at ’67), Jackie and Lee were confronted by a paparazzo, one Ron Galella. The film, by the way, was a pornographic Scandinavian import named “I am curious (Yellow)” Legal porn was still a novelty in those days.
Anyway, Jackie decked Galella, which not only made the gossip pages, but also prompted the following entry in a New York Magazine jingle-writing contest in which the first line always had to be "Higgledy Piggledy." (I remember the jingle by heart because I wrote it, and because the bastards only gave me an honorable mention for it. I shoulda won first prize):
Hiddledy Piggledy
Jacqueline Kennedy
Flipped a photographer
Over her head
Changing his countenance
Melodramatically
Curious (Yellow)
To furious (Red).
That’s it until Donald Trump, or some dog, or paparazzo, or exceptional lunatic, inspires me to get off my duff and post again.
4 comments:
ROTFLMAO!
Too, too funny!
I'd completely forgotten about "I Am Curious (Yellow)."
I never saw the movie, but I remember seeing the ads on the subway - I was probably around 10 or 11.
I also remember seeing ads for "Barbarella" and other then "X" rated movies on subways and buses.
Quite a shock to the system!
Kind of woke some things up in me. ;-)
So Victor,
Barbarella was what they called soft core. I remember it as being rated R, not X, but Google is now telling me it was PG. Yeah, I find that hard to believe, too. But it certainly wasn't hard core X. It was based on an adult comic strip, it starredJane Fonda, and to the best of my recollection, she was never fully nude in Barbarella. (Believe me, if she had been completely nude, I'd likely still remember it.)
I Am Curious (Yellow) on the other hand was real, authentic, gen-u-wine porn, complete with — it was shocking, shocking! in those days — a fellatio scene. U.S. Customs Service initially confiscated it. The courts set it free again. All the brouhaha in the courts created a Streisand effect and suddenly everybody, even Jackie Kennedy, had to go see it. It was the beginning of the, uh, porn revolution.
There! I hope that straightens everything out.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crannk
IIRC, Barbarella the movie opened with a dreamy sequence showing Jane floating in zero gravity and slowly taking off a silvery form-fitting space suit piece by piece. The low-grav effect was very well done. She rotates gently in space, mostly in profile, and ends up nude, her long hair floating poetically around her head. Very artistic, and tame by today's standards of course, with no more exposure of naughty bits than you'd see in a nude by Ingres, say.
The comic strip was a sort of humorous science fiction fantasy, with Barbarella travelling the galaxy having erotic adventures with aliens, robots, etc. It was very French; I remember seeing an issue or 2 back then, but didn't have enough French to get into the story.
I would have put the taco sauce on whatever upholstery looked the most appetizing.
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