Sunday

Brrrr! Something below zero. Wind. Blowing snow. Excellent day to stay inside. Or be in Cabo.

I've spent more time cutting snow-ice on my sidewalk, driveway, the office's sidewalks, and 2's street the last two days than I care to document. Suffice it to say, memories of the "ax-n-spade" days breaking pond-ice on the farm have been plentiful.

The headline-grabbing securities fraud case of Bernie Madoff is a current-day example of greed and corruption to the ultimate degree. Here you have an internationally renowned investment guru with A-List clientele (who call in favors to participate in the guy's programs). Consistent returns in up or down markets. Seemingly an answer for everything, even his skeptics. Then the wheels come off, and the losses exceed the GNP of a small country.

My thought this morning is that if Bernie can do it, is NASA working the same script? Maybe 1's been right all these years.

Not!

3 had the excitement of trying (and succeeding) to fly out of Beantown on Friday when many flights (including her own originally scheduled one) were canceled. She got the dreaded "auto-cancel" call at 1AM for a next evening scheduled departure. But her boss let her take the day off, and she was able to battle the system at Logan and finagle a seat on a late afternoon flight. Score one for 3!

4 is headed into C-town this AM to pick 3 up and return here tomorrow. My guess is that the chill will limit their running around on Michigan Avenue. Then again, Water Tower Place is inside.

College football's bowl weeks are in progress. The NFL has games on Thursday nights, and last night as well. Their NFL Network is even hard for me to find on the satellite. This is a similar play to the Big Ten Network that had the stink last year with the cable operators. It makes you wonder on a half-life analysis exactly where the rates of return and the fragmentation of broadcast sports are headed. They've obviously concluded that the old paradigm of the general broadcast network TV deal is dead. But how narrowly do you slice and dice the pie?

This is also related to my lament earlier about the disappearance of the traditional newspapers. Money drives everything, and if they can't make enough at a lower price for a general audience, then they go for a higher price for a more specific viewer. Fundamentally, you have the ad-rate driven media competing with the fee-rates of specialized programming. People always seem willing to pay more for the things that they actually want. Think Disney World. I'm betting that 3 could give us a technical marginal analysis on this, with charts.

Another aspect of this is the fantasy sports angle. I continue to notice (or even start reading) stories in the mainstream sports pages that are literate analyses of make-believe scenarios. I know 1.1 is into this stuff, but I just don't get it. And it is apparently just continuing to grow in participation among the more committed viewers and observers.

Which gets us over to the fantasies of online second life and virtual worlds with avatars (and avatarettes...my word!). I suppose that psychologists use different forms of personality substitutions to "get" to their clients, but I have trouble enough figuring out life in the real world let alone in a second one. Then again, the virtual world can exclude all the nasty things that we have to face and can be designed to be each person's Camelot. Again, just to many moving parts for me to process.

So does anybody out there have an avatar that they want to share?

My Russian cleaning lady came this morning so that I would have a clean house for the Christmas week. I'm thinking that Friday night for FFF at my place.

I just remembered that I can report that my lower level DirectTV unit is back on line. I had been told by a couple of people with whom I had shared my problem that the first thing to do was to hit the "reset" button. This sounded like good advice, and I had actually looked for the "reset" key several times when I had been at that TV over the last week. With no success even finding a "reset" key. Well, yesterday I resorted to the penultimate anti-male protocol and looked in the instruction booklet. Wall-ah! There's not a "reset" key on the hand-held clicker. The "reset" button is in the black box receiver. One "reset" later, and I'm watching HSN and ordering my Big O collector coin set.

For the truly nerdy, the term "reset" is a recurring crossword solution to the clue, "Common alley instruction." As in bowling alley when you want to override the automated pin-setter.

The information available on 4000 Days continues to set new standards for the obscure.

Lastly, the assistant manager at Biaggi's stopped by my table Friday and presented a gift bag that contained a bottle of red and a bottle of white along with a few snacks/treats. (You know when a restaurant gives you a holiday gift that you are spending too much time and money there.) Very nice. The thought was the good news. The reality was the bad news. I popped the cork on the red last night, took a whiff of the bouquet, a very small sip, and immediately re-corked it for re-gifting to 2. If she can drink it, or pass a couple of glasses on to then-to-be former friends, she has a drinking problem. Or a friend has a drinking problem. Easily the worst vino to come out of the Biaggi's wine room.

So hope everyone has a great day.

BCOT