My stock-market loss: $0
That, of course, is because I don't have anything in the stock market. You can't lose if you don't play.

Learned recently that according to the latest numbers, the unemployment rate in my semi-affluent suburb is 10.9 percent. That's probably low; many of my neighbors recently laid off from nearby high-tech and telecom firms received decent severance packages and haven't yet filed for unemployment. And it's going to rise, courtesy of the latest corporate explosion at WorldCom.

On either side of my house live men who work for a large telecommunications firm. Well, one of them worked there. He was laid off in March after 13 years. He got six months severance and free use of an outplacement service. Job offers he has received so far: 0. The guy on the other side still works for the company, but he knows his days are numbered. He's doing every conceivable home-improvement project and taking his family on vacation now, while the money's still coming in.

I have few personal worries about the economic downturn. I work in a dying industry, but it's stable, and it's not going away anytime soon. I'm reasonably valuable to my company; not so much in my current position, perhaps, but I have skills the company can use.

I do have serious concerns about the general state of the economy, and wonder how my generation will handle its version of the Great Depression.

I am not prepared to not have a job. I have no savings to speak of, not much in the way of formal education, and few skills outside those required for my current job. Except for the formal education part, I'm pretty similar to most people I know in my age group.

I don't have a lot of experience with "economic downturn," at least not from an adult perspective. I was a child during the recession years of the '70s and early '80s. I never had to consider an 18% home loan. The worst I've had to deal with, so far, is joining all my co-workers in not getting a raise for 2001, but even that was OK; thanks to a promotion, I got two raises in 2000.

But that doesn't make me immune from general worry. What I know of the 1930s is what I've read and what I've heard of my grandparents. What I've read and heard is that it was an awful, awful time in our history. It was every man for himself, and it took the deaths of 50,000 or so people in a Big War to pull us out of it. The people who had, in many cases, took an active role to make sure the people who didn't have didn't get any of theirs. Business resisted regulation on the grounds that such regulation was anti-capitalist. "Red." It's a wonder Communism didn't take a foothold in the United States by 1939, and World War II was probably the only thing that kept it from happening.

Historians will tell you that the Great Depression was necessary to force American society to take the final steps from being largely agrarian to being largely industrial. I will tell you that I'm damn glad I wasn't alive then.

In 2002, corporate executives have little incentive to not lie, cheat, steal and get as much for themselves as possible. When their companies go down, they're still going to have theirs. They're unemployed with millions stashed away. They're not unemployed, trying to figure out how to live without a $54K a year salary and with a worthless 401(k). That's not to say I think we shouldn't get as much as we can for ourselves. I just wonder if our society has any checks in place to keep one from getting as much as he can at the incredible expense of others.

The others fought back in Russia in 1917 behind Vladimir Lenin. The others fought back in Detroit in the late '30s behind Walter Reuther. I wonder who's going to rally the people this time, and where that rally will lead us.

Yeah, what he said
UPDATE: This now contains a broken link. The original has not yet been archived. Will fix as soon as I can.
This is basically what I was going to write about the Pledge of Allegiance thing. Instead of plagiarizing, I'll just link to it.

Busted!
Somebody figured it out. I feel so exposed.

A day of, perhaps, relative calm
It's Monday, and I'm not at work. A day off, or as I prefer to think of it: I have put myself on paid administrative leave for a day. It's not like I'm going to accomplish great things at home; on the contrary, clearly I'm sitting here at this machine instead of doing something worthwhile. But that's OK; I just needed a day to Not Be There.

Many fine opportunities await for me today. I could clean out the garage. I could play with the children. I could go to the library and research some interesting subject. Probably what I'll do instead is wander aimlessly around the house, tidy up some stuff here and there, check the e-mail and the web every once in a while, and accomplish nothing.

I'm OK with that.

Texas 12, South Carolina 6
I don't follow college baseball as closely as I probably should, but our reader from utexas.edu does. Said reader is having a national championship celebration tonight. All hail Huston Street and the Texas Longhorns, who overcame some adversity this season to haul some national title hardware back down to Austin.

Darryl Kile, 1968-2002
Wow. Because wild speculation is allowed in this forum, I'll speculate for a second: What if the death of the Cardinals' starting pitcher was related to steroids? A death of "natural causes" at 33 really raises some suspicion, at least from this corner. Mitigating that suspicion somewhat is the knowledge that Kile's father died of a heart attack at 44, very, very young. I have no evidence of that at all -- none -- but imagine the shockwave that's going to go through the baseball world if that turns out to be the case.

Update: Preliminary autopsy report reveals artery blockage. Sounds like a horribly unfortunate death.

The family circus
I realize I had promised stories from the family reunion, which was now two weekends ago. It's late, and the stories aren't really fresh, but I needed some time to think about it before attempting to share it with the class. It was a Friday and Saturday of mostly chaos and a constant effort to protect my children from themselves. It was two days trying to recognize people and figure out if I had ever met them before, and trying to mentally connect branches of the sprawling family tree.

But amid the chaos came a few snippets of things I'm still thinking about:

--My grandfather was a preacher at one time. His words commanded attention, as did the way he delivered those words. During the all-day picnic fest at the state park on Saturday, the large group gathered around at his request so he could deliver a few words. It was hard to hear what he was saying, and even harder to divine what the actual point was. I did learn that he had a sister who was married to "a no-good husband" and had "dopehead kids" and that she was institutionalized after she had her head blown off, or something. I learned that several of my grandfather's siblings died of lung cancer; he wrapped up that portion with, "If you smoke, quit." The group had gathered expecting a dramatic, touching moment to add to their memory banks. It dispersed quietly, somewhat disappointed.
--I was always my grandmother's favorite. I'm not shy about saying so, and truth be told, neither was she. It's the greatest honor I've received in my entire life. I have more respect for her than I have for any two other people in the entire world. She quit school at 11 to raise her brothers and sisters, but she's one of the smartest and wisest people I know. She brought up eight children in very demanding circumstances with no help to speak of. She lost her first child to disease at a very young age, and shortly after, she lost a brother to war. Yet she carried on, and she expected those around her to do the same. "The sun's going to come up tomorrow," she said, "whether you want it to or not." She's 80, and her hearing and her memory are ebbing. A couple of times over the weekend, she didn't remember who I was. I overheard her asking the person sitting next to her, "Who is that again?" If I spent some time to think about it -- and I'm trying like hell not to -- it would make me very, very sad.
--A staple of large gatherings in our family is music. Groups of men -- exclusively men -- get together and strum guitars and sing songs, mostly old gospel standards and John Denver tunes. I didn't bring my own guitar, but I managed to grab an abandoned one at one point. I joined one of the second cousins I didn't know. Turned out we had a common interest in the slightly raunchy music of Robert Earl Keen. We played a couple of songs, but they were songs that were definitely out of place with that group: "Sherry was a waitress at the only joint in town/She had a reputation as a girl who'd been around ... " probably wouldn't have gone over well with the "Amazing grace/how sweet the sound ... " crowd. We kept it quiet.
--I have many, many cousins, and even more second cousins, and third cousins. I don't know most of the second and third cousins -- they lived in Texas when I lived in Missouri. But many of them came to various family gatherings. I remember as a very little kid always being struck by the fact that so many cars at our family gatherings had Texas license plates. Scanning the parking lot near the state-park pavilion on Saturday, I was struck by the same fact -- and then I noted that my car was one of them.

Amid the chaos, though, I only picked up snippets. I never had the time to flesh out any of the stories that I heard parts of: a cousin who reportedly was a lesbian has reportedly switched back to the other team ... another cousin, 35, was lighting a cigarette while telling people about the "heart attack" he had allegedly suffered three weeks before. He's a little prone to tall tales, and I never got independent confirmation of the story ... another cousin was spoken of only in hushed tones; apparently she's now persona non grata ... apparently one of the second cousins from the Texas contingent had recently lost a daughter, 19 months old -- the same age as our youngest -- in a terrible home accident. Or maybe it was a day care accident. Either way, it was terrible. The reunion was her first trip away from home since the accident. ... no details, just snippets.

Despite the fact that I wasn't exactly looking forward to the trip, it turned out to be quite fun; not at all the lost weekend I was expecting. I was reminded that it's a large and diverse gene pool I come from. It's a bunch of mostly good people. It's also a few people with whom I wouldn't otherwise associate. Nothing wrong with that; that makes us like most families. I sometimes take solace in how average I am.

Jack Buck, 1924-2002
The voice that helped me go to sleep many, many summer nights during some tumultuous pre-teen and teenage years has been silenced. He was the broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals my entire life, and his voice is the source of some of my best childhood memories. Not just the highlights:

"Swing and a long one ... Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!" after Ozzie Smith's left-handed home run in the 1985 National League Championship Series, which vaulted the Cardinals into the World Series against Kansas City.
"I don't believe what I just saw!" after Kirk Gibson hit that homer in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series -- still the greatest thing I've ever seen in a baseball game.
Silence, then "Pardon me while I stand and applaud," when Mark McGwire hit his 61st homer in 1998.

... not just the highlights, but the routine, also. And the not-so-routine; I heard of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake from Jack Buck, who was broadcasting over a phone line when he should have been calling Game 1 of the World Series.

Buck and Mike Shannon were the Cardinals' broadcast team during the late '70s and early '80s, when I was just becoming a baseball fan. But from an even younger age, I was familiar with Buck's voice from many nights on my grandfather's front porch out in the middle of nowhere, where Cardinals baseball was his link with the rest of the world.

I would always try to keep myself awake long enough to hear Buck say, " ... and that's a winner!" to wrap up a Cardinals victory. Some nights I succeeded. Even after I left Missouri, I'd find myself trying to pull in KMOX in St. Louis to catch a little bit of the Cardinals' game -- not so much because I was a Cardinals fan; I never really was for any reason other than proximity -- but because the voice of Jack Buck over baseball was one of the greatest things I had ever heard.

His son Joe is behind the microphone at Cardinals' games now, and he's very good. He should be, because he learned from the very best.

One-liners
Some interesting, some not so interesting, all true:

I was on national television last night.

This week, journalism is fun again.

Guess I was right about the Lakers.

There's some real stuff to come. I was, after all, at a family reunion last weekend. Surely there's a story in that. But the last three days have been consumed by computer repair and by actually being busy at work. Too much going on in the head right now. I'll take some time to collate and staple it all.

Technology sucks
Came home very late from weekend trip to Anytown for a family reunion. Fully intended to go straight from the driver's seat to bed. The Wife was bugging me to hook the computer back up so she could look at some web site. I refused, refused, refused, refused, and finally gave in. Plugged everything in, turned it on, watched the usual startup procedure happen and then ... nothing. Tried that again. Nothing. One more time, just for kicks. Nothing. I was facing something I had never before faced: The Catastrophic System Crash.

Because I am who I am, I couldn't go to bed with a f----ed-up computer. So I spent some time on the phone with the Support Guy, who led me through several procedures, none of which worked. It was time for the Final Solution: re-format and re-install. And, oh, by the way, you'll lose EVERYTHING.

My computer is relatively new. Bought it back in February with the proceeds from the Freelance Gig. Have been singing its praises ever since. Because it's fairly new, it wasn't teeming with hyper-important stuff that was stored nowhere else. I lost a lot of archived e-mails, and a couple of programs I had just purchased via download -- I still have to figure out how to get those back -- but everything else was stored somewhere online. Basically, it's costing me a lot of time to re-install all this software and re-set the settings.

But it was a reminder of why I hate shopping. I hate shopping because I always make the wrong decision. I had some money to burn and an afternoon at the local Really Large Computer Store. I had a choice, basically, of buying more RAM (makes the computer really fast!) or a CD burner (so I can make backup discs, of course.) I chose the RAM. Really should have chosen the CD burner. Another chance for me to learn a lesson.

I have little faith that I have done so.

Missing, Day 3,650
When The Wife and I were very young, we both worked nights. After work, we'd often spend hours driving around Anytown or the outlying backroads, windows open, radio on, soaking up the wonder of being young. On the very early hours of June 7, 1992, we were soaking up the wonder of being young and driving Ozarks backroads in a new car -- a twin-cam Saturn SL2, for the record. As we drove, we saw much evidence of high-school graduation parties well in progress. Cars with their windows painted, packed chock-full of teenagers, many hanging out the windows or the sunroof or wherever else they could find to stick their heads out.

Somewhere in Anytown, about 2:30 a.m., a couple of girls left a graduation party to rest up before driving to Branson the next morning. They went back to the home of one of the girls. The girl's single mother had presumably already gone to sleep.

Somewhere in Anytown, about 2:30 a.m., these three women were seen for the last time.

--------------------------------------------------------------

We woke up on Monday to the news guys on KTTS radio describing a weird story. Three women -- a mother, 47; her daughter, 19; and her daughter's friend, 18 -- had disappeared from a house about a mile northeast of ours. "Gone without a trace," we heard for the first of what would be about a million times. No sign of a struggle, no sign of any plans to disappear. The women left behind their purses, their cigarettes, their medications, and, in the case of one, the clothes she was wearing the previous evening.

Police were baffled. The Bugle found itself in the midst of the biggest local crime story, probably, ever. I was safely ensconsced in the sports department at the time, so I participated as an eager reader. That era is also where my habit of changing the radio station to the news on the hour began. An entire city of 140,000 was on edge, anxious to hear news about the people now known as the "Three Missing Women."

Posters went up. Billboards went up. Three women's faces stared back at everybody in Anytown. The mom, petite, with short hair, looking much younger than her 47 years. She was a hairdresser at the place my wife had her hair done, although my wife was not one of her clients. The daughter, blond, with a blemish of some sort on her chin. The friend, with impossibly long, thick brown hair, big brown eyes, an all-American beauty. The police department said it had leads. Then it denied it had leads. The police had the public on the lookout for a mid-'60s Dodge van; they even parked one on the lawn at the police department, just in case you weren't sure what a mid-'60s Dodge van looked like.

They needed to look like they were trying. Because the fact was, they didn't have a clue.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Bugle ran a graphic daily, with the three women's pictures. "Missing, Day 4" ... "Missing, Day 12" ... it moved from 1A to the metro cover ... "Missing, Day 45" ... "Missing, Day 96" ... it moved inside metro ... "Missing, Day 277" ... I don't remember when we finally pulled the plug. It was sometime before I left Anytown in late 1993.

In those early years, nobody was ever named seriously as a suspect. Several people were investigated, but nothing solid ever came up. The billboards came down, the posters faded, I moved away. The families of the mom and the daughter had them declared dead after five years, so they could get on with their lives. The parents of the other girl still wait. They formed an organization to help other parents and family members who faced similar awful predicaments.

The Bugle reports that the local police have their eyes on one man, who is currently a long-term guest of the state of Texas. He was sprung from death row in Florida in 1989, 11 years after the murder of a 19-year-old theme-park employee, because the Florida Supreme Court decided the jury didn't have enough evidence against him. Instead of ordering a re-trial, they freed him.

This man lived in Anytown in 1992. He's admitted to lying about his alibi. He worked as a utility locater. He has a long criminal record, and a long record of toying with police, giving them enough information to make them think he might could possibly maybe be a suspect but not enough to build a case against him. He may be the guy, but from what I read about him, it's going to be awful hard to pin this crime on him. He was smart enough to be set completely free after being on death row for 11 years; he's probably smart enough to duck this one.

It's been 10 years. In every place I've lived since then, I find myself paying extra attention whenever a story crosses my desk about a young woman's body being found. And, almost without fail, at the top of every hour, I still turn the radio to the news.

The Irascible Texan
Things that make me go, "What the f--k?"

Report on this evening's news: Some national organization has listed the nation's "11 Most Endangered Places," a list of historic sites that are about to get bulldozed over in the name of progress. No. 1 on the list: A hyper-affluent neighborhood in my fair city, in which homeowners have developed a nasty habit of knocking down $750,000 homes so they can build $1,750,000 homes. To which I say: So? I like really old houses as much as anybody. I owned one once. But I have to think the people in this organization could find 11 things more worthy of my attention than what rich people are doing with their own land.

Headline: "Arafat headquarters attacked." Question: If the Israelis hate this guy so much, why don't they stop shooting at his house and just shoot him?

We've made our position on luxury sport-utility vehicles pretty clear. That said, now it's getting stupid: the Next Big Thing in SUVs is being presented by ... Porsche. Does the world really need a Porsche SUV? Like I'm going to go 155 mph off-road with three kids and two weeks' worth of groceries and a dog and two bikes on top? Yeesh.

The Lakers played like absolute steaming crap tonight and still essentially won going away. Too bad for NBC. Looks like four and out.

Holy shit, I'm mad now. My Internet service provider, MSN, which only provides me with ONE e-mail address through my account -- "but you can set up as many Hotmail addresses as you want," they promised -- now is pulling this crap. An extra $19.95 a year for a basic e-mail function? Microsoft is hurting for money? I could see it, perhaps, if my Internet service provider was Two Guys and a Rack Server, and they needed to raise more money to buy another Xbox or something. And, yes, I'm cheap (see the top of the page for proof; I'm too cheap to "get rid of this ad" for a measly $12), but I'm not looking for a free ride; I'm already paying for MSN and its one puny e-mail address. Looks like we'll be seeing how long Netscape can hold out before it feels the need to start charging.

OK, I'm done now. Thanks for playing along.

Real words uttered by real parents
Overheard in my house today:

"Son, stop kicking the lamp."

"Son, stop standing on your head on the couch."

"Son, take the spoon OUT of your underwear."

Woo-hoo! Comments are back
And not just any comments, but genuine YACCS comments, the apparent industry standard. Signing up for YACCS is apparently much like calling in to a radio contest. You have to hit it at just the right time. I did manage to restrain myself from saying, "Wow! I've never won anything before in my life!" when I finally was allowed to sign up.

Your opinion matters. Really, it does. Click the link to share with the class.

Lakers 112, Kings 106, final in OT
Wow. What a hell of an NBA playoff series. There's just nothing better than good NBA playoff basketball, and there has certainly been nothing better than what these two teams have come up with. The Kings have a hell of a team, one of the best assembled in a long time. But the Lakers have Shaq and Kobe. One can't imagine the Nets giving this team any kind of fight at all. Jason Kidd's great, and Kenyon Martin is big and mean, but they're not Shaq and Kobe.

I've become very partial to my local NBA team, the one with the loudmouth owner and the German guy who plays like Larry Bird. But I have to concede that they would have been no match for these Lakers. None at all. Normally, Shaquille O'Neal is the best player in the NBA right now. When he's hitting his free throws -- which he always seems to do when it matters -- he's the best to ever play the game. He's 7-1, 340, coordinated, explosive, fast. He's the basketball player you'd build if you had the parts.

Kobe Bryant knows how to play the game a little bit, too. All he did was score 30 points and make good decision after good decision. The best decision was to get out of the way and make sure the ball got down to Shaq down the stretch. Goodbye, Vlade Divac. Nice try, Chris Webber. Hedo Turkoglu? He's lucky to still be alive.

I'll say it again, and I'm ready to defend it: Shaquille O'Neal is the best player to ever play the game. He deserves another ring. Not much doubt from this corner that he'll get it.

Lakers 112, Kings 106, 6.4 seconds to go in OT
Say what you will about Shaq (and I have), if I was going to build an NBA team, he's the first player I'd pick, every time. He's just unguardable.

Random stray thought
Sometimes I'm astonished at how little I know about anything. Other times, I'm comforted by how little I really need to know.

Eavesdropping
Every time I take a walk through the downtown area of The Very Large City, I run across some person or another who, let's say, operates at the fringes of our society. Homeless people, obviously mentally ill people, people who talk to themselves or whomever will listen. One of my walks takes me by a Greyhound station, where many of the people who operate on the fringes of our society seem to gather.

The people on the fringes are individually very different, but most share a common theme. There's the woman who sits on the steps of Tony Roma's and repeats, " 'Scuse me ... 'scuse me ... 'scuse me ... " over and over, in almost a rhythmic fashion. Nobody stops for her anymore, except the tourists. There's the guy who's usually in the middle of the intersection of Ross and Market, carrying something that looks like a Bible and hollering at the top his lungs about our NEED for REDEMPTION at the HANDS of ALLLLL-MIGHTY GAW-DUH. There's the occasional person who asks you for "a dollah for the bus" or "my car's outta gas out on the freeway" or "do you have a lighter?"

I have always believed that everybody has a story to tell. One of these days, I might ask one of these people to tell me their story. Maybe.

Anyway, I found myself oddly disturbed by today's Person who Talks To Himself. He was in the McDonald's, carrying what appeared to be all of his possessions in a faded green canvas duffel bag. He was probably in his late 40s, judging from his appearance and figuring in the factors you have to figure when you're estimating the age of a person on the fringes. He had made his way past the security by not being incredibly disheveled and not incredibly aromatic. He was part of a large crowd of people at the drink dispenser, filling a large green plastic thermal mug with water.

While he got his water, he was speaking in a quiet monotone, not trying to attract anybody's attention but not trying to be unheard, either.

"Do you know ... COBOL?" he murmured to no one in particular. I thought he might be talking to me, so I looked up from my ketchup-dispensing.

He wasn't talking to me. Nor, apparently, to anybody else. I decided I had probably mis-heard him.

He put a little more ice in his cup. "Do you know. Anything. About computer science?"

I sometimes carry a technology magazine to lunch with me. I double-checked to see if I was doing so at this moment. I wasn't. He was not talking to me.

Then, as he snapped the top back onto his mug, still facing the drink dispenser, "Do you need a compiler?"

I was probably obviously staring at this time. He most likely didn't know I was there. He briefly regarded his reflection in the big red "Coca-Cola" logo on the drink dispenser. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder, took a drink of his water without looking at anybody else, and walked toward the door.

I know enough about computer science to know that COBOL is a nearly defunct programming language and that a compiler is something a programmer uses to, well, compile code.

I have a feeling that, at least at one time, this guy knew way more than that.

I'm going to be thinking about this guy for days. I don't exactly know why. But I know I will.

Why it's good to be an American
Halfway around the world, two nations teeter on the brink of war that one official says would be "somewhere between terrible and catastrophic."

Meanwhile, I'm pissed because a lot of bullshit calls went against the Sacramento Kings tonight to force a Game 7 in the Western Conference finals.

No comment
The comments system has apparently gone on the blink. I'll search for another one and hook it up soon.