I haven't posted for the last few days because I've been really out of it - DirecTV has totally screwed up the installation of HD satellite service at my house and it literally took me 4-5 hours on the phone yesterday to speak to a supervisor who could only promise me that she would ask the installers to send out a different technician another day.  The person they sent out a couple of days ago was new to the job, spoke only broken English and was at my house for 7 hours.  Even after all of that he managed to only correctly install service on two of the three TVs and he knocked out my internet service to boot.

I basically threatened to "grab someone by the collar" when I was on with one of the phone operators which is not like me at all....but it worked.....for now .
 
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There's a fascinating piece with a first print interview with "Abu Ghraib leash girl" Lynndie England here.  Sometimes it's really hard for me to believe that we're all part of the same species.
 
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Economic good news - Unemployment was announced as down last week to 4.6%.  Aside from the tech bubble of the late ’90s, the unemployment rate has not fallen below 4.6 percent since 1970.

The budget deficit for 2006 was the lowest it's been in 4 years at $256bn dollars.  As a percentage of GDP it is 1.9% which is historically pretty reasonable and less than half of the average during the Reagan and Bush I presidencies which everyone seems to use as the "we're even worse than then" standard for deficit spending.

The stock market is breaking new records and is almost close to 12,000.

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Ah, the good old days! All we wanted was to be loved!

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Watched "Looking For Comedy in the Muslim World" with Albert Brooks. Some of it is cute, but most of it is just not funny.  Which is funny itself since the movie is about Albert Brooks not being funny in the first place. C-

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Just for the historical record, I'm adding a link to the Cory Lidle plane crash.  I'll never forget when Thurman Munson died (another  Yankee who died in a small plane crash) becuase the front pages of all the newspapers on my 13th birthday showed the Yankees lined up in mourning at the ballpark.  I didn't even realize Lidle pitched for the Mets in his rookie year in 1997, but that's when I was in Argentina, so I was pretty disconnected from U.S. sports at the time.