“Mr. Freshwater, this’ll come off before I get home, right?”

Now, we all know Americans’ waistlines aren’t shrinking - but the products they buy in the store are.  The main thing that bugs me about this is that companies are again making a calculation based on consumer stupidity.  The idea is, people will notice higher prices on the package, but they won’t notice that the package is shrinking.  A Tropicana spinster prefers to describe it as a “value-added redesign.”  Sigh.

Carlin was inspirational to me, in some ways, as a teen.  He had a biting wit and was more a social commentator than comedian.  I saw him live a couple of times - once at the University of Maine where he autographed a dollar bill for me.  The fact that it took me several months to spend that money was as much about my respect for him as my flat-broke-ness.

One of my favorite Carlin rants is here - Carlin on Politicians - and I’ll miss that penetrating side of him.  He could make us laugh so hard that our guts hurt, and not always because what he said was funny, exactly - but because it was so sadly true.  In his later years, I was sad to see him move more toward aimless anger and jokes about death and poop, but I suppose that’s how things go.

He died at Saint John’s in Santa Monica - just a mile or two from my place -  at the age of 71.

The Royal Bank of Scotland issued an unprecedented - and grave - warning about global markets today.  Some excerpts:

“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us .. as all the [global debt] chickens come home to roost… [the US Federal Reserve] is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets… economic weakness is spreading and the latest data on consumer demand and confidence are dire.”

Ruh roh!

The latest polls say that 84% of Americans now believe the country is on the “wrong track”.  And, over at Housing Panic, some choice words:

“HousingPANIC would also like to salute the 62,040,610 suckers who voted for Bush in 2004. Sure, Kerry was a mediocre candidate. Sure, you hate those fags. Sure, Osama is a scary dude. But good god, how could you have been so reckless with your vote? How could you have been taken for such a fool?”

Flickr founder says good-bye to the higher-ups at Yahoo!, while channeling Herman Zweibel.

Alright dude, if you want me to buy your book “How To Cheat At Photoshop”, you’re going to need to do a little better than this.

Stay off my plant!  Do not lean on my pod! We’ve all shared an office with people like this.. but wow.. and: potlucks and genius…

Awesome article by Alex Wright - an exploration of a little-known Belgian, Paul Otlet, who was thinking about social networking, hyperlinking, and multimedia back in the 20s and 30s.

Good TIME piece exploring the stupid goings-on about pot in LA.