Exceprt from an internal email to Countrywide employees on his last day as CEO as a result of the purchase rescue of Countrywide mortgage by Bank of America, Angelo Mozilo wrote:

Beginning in 1968, David Loeb and I labored seven days a week for several years attempting to have our voice heard and our mission to open up homeownership opportunities to as many families as possible to gain traction.

Boo hoo. I worked so hard. See ya suckers for all the big bucks I’ll pocket. BTW, David Loeb was co-founder of Countrywide and died July 2003. The press release is no longer available on Countrywide’s corporate site but is here via Google cache.

It’s frustratingly lame being stuck at a red light and not being able to trigger a green light. If you have ever ridden a motorcycle, scooter or bicycle, you know the routine. Here are two articles on how to change a traffic light to green: one for bicyclists and another for motorcycles, scooters and small cars.

"The small screen" is a common phrase. Several recent articles even discussed at length how the smallness of the screen changed the experience of what the writer was watching.  The self-absorbed authors did not make it clear whether they were watching a TV, a desktop computer, a laptop with a smaller screen, or an even smaller iPhone, iTouch or cell phone.

Each one of the above devices stood for "the small screen."  I’ll take a stab that the age of the author is directly proportional to the size of said author’s screen. Meaning, the older the author, the bigger his or her so-called "small" screen.

LA Times reports that

Rising gas prices may be the latest ailment afflicting the housing market, as figures released Monday showed Southern California home prices plunging 27% in May from a year ago and falling even more precipitously in distant suburbs.

People are willing to spend all that time stuck in traffic, but an extra $100 a week in gas money does them in. You would think the extra time would matter, but I guess people do not value their own time.

Then again they would probably just use the extra time to watch more lame TV so maybe their time really is not worth that much.

Or, is it that some people have never been out of SoCal and don’t know that absurd commutes aren’t necessary?

In Dr. Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog , 3 items about the flooding in Iowa:

1. it is the Midwest’s 2nd 500-year flood in 15 years (the area I live in had its own 500-year flood last winter). Is this a problem of data or does it raise "the question of whether the floods were, in part, human-caused"
2. "Part of the flooding is due to the draining of wetlands for farming purposes. As nature’s natural buffers against flooding are drained and filled to provide room for more farmland, run-off and flooding are bound to increase. Furthermore, as more levees are built to protect more valuable farmland and new developments, flood waters are pushed out of the former areas they were allowed to spread out in and forced into river channels behind the new levees. Even higher levees must then be constructed to hold back the increased volume of water they are asked to contain. " (he cites this from a Washington Post article)
3. "The heaviest types of rains–those likely to cause flooding–have increased in recent years … global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events.

Call The big Wall Street firm "Goldman Sacks " rather than "Goldman Sachs ."

Despite beating its peers in performance, profits are down at Goldman and layoffs are underway. Many of those who lose their jobs will be junior bankers, called analysts, who typically serve a two year term before going on to business school or moving on to other jobs.

Goldman is letting many of its first year analysts go but they aren’t describing this as getting fired. So first year analysts who are being fired after just one year are told that the have been placed into the accelerated one-year analyst program," according to people familiar with the matter. It’s like skipping a grade! Well, except that you get expelled from school after you get accelerated!

Read the full story here and a follow-up story here.

A bizarre story is unraveling about the co-founder of Broadcom, Henry T. Nicholas III. Backdating stock options was just the tip of the iceberg. (Be sure to scan the story linked to if you are not familiar with it.)

How can so many people have let this guy get so out of contol for so long? Among lawsuits filed was one involving a secret underground party room that even his wife did not know about.

A secret room! Just what every house needs. I roll my eyes every time my mom rattles off the latest "must-have" home feature she heard or read about in some press release presented as a news story. But this one might be worth pursuing. Not that every secret party room would be used like the one in this news story. (Again, read it if you have not.)

I imagine my mom’s secret party room would have a little TV room for every person, equipped with a big cushy Lazy-Boy, a fridge with an ice dispenser and a bottomless ashtray. My secret room would be just for me. No TV. Just peace and quiet to escape the loudness of a home otherwise run by a noisy pre-schooler.

The local police blotter reports:

JUNE 8 11:44 a.m. A resident reported his boat and mooring buoy stolen from Agate Pass. He had last seen the boat and buoy June 6. The boat was described as a 14-foot Duroboat skiff with 15 horsepower Nissan outboard valued at $15,000. The resident said he did not believe the mooring line had broken. He said he had searched the area by kayak with no luck. No suspects.

Were the the police able to maintain a straight face when they asked whether it could be possible that the mooring buoy was no longer moored to the bottom of this waterway that gets considerable current?

The title, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus , intrigued me, but the first paragraph of an essay by Clay Shirkey had me hooked and the essay just gets better:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

Every year

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.

A guy in a powerboat ran out of fuel and had to be towed to Friday Harbor. He had gone to Bellingham (the mainland) to buy fuel in order to save $0.75 a gallon. By the time he got there, the fuel dock was closed. On his way back home (a 10-hour round trip), he ran out of fuel and had to be towed in the dark of night with gale force winds forecast.

According to the math in one of the comments, he probably burned more dollars of fuel to make the 60 mile round trip than he would have saved so no one can figure out what he was thinking. I suspect saving money on gas was a lame excuse for some other reason to visit the mainland. ("Honey, I’m going out to top off the tank… ")