Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.
My wonderful wife and I probably watch too many episodes of The Incredible Dr. Pol on Nat Geo Wild. How else would I know that farrowing describes the birth of pigs?
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The first time I saw the sketch in this video, sadly the link is from a minion of the Evil Empire, I think I laughed harder than I have at any other time. It is still unbelievably funny to me, even after having watched it 5 or 6 times the past two days.
The bit was performed on the British version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” The American version? Well, for whatever reason I am no fan of Drew Carey and despite the fact that Aisha Tyler is very easy on the eyes she proved to be another clueless entertainer who doesn’t just want to bite the hand that feeds her, she wants to amputate it.
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This CNBC article is about people still using ridiculously easy passwords on the Internet. My understanding is most hacks of company computers are not the result of clever, but criminal, people going to great lengths to crack protection. Instead, every company has people who use passwords that are too simple and are easily guessed.
This CNBC piece is titled, “Inflation? Recession? Starting Black Friday, holiday shoppers are planning to spend.” Here is the first paragraph of the article:
“Americans are not planning major cuts in holiday spending this year, starting with Black Friday, despite inflation fears and the risk of recession being top concerns among the majority of consumers, according to an annual survey conducted by CNBC and SurveyMonkey ahead of the first big shopping weekend of peak season.”
Since 70% of US GDP comes from consumer spending I guess that is good news. It is also an indication of how much economic activity can be the result of self-fulfilling prophecy. If people really think a slowdown will occur soon, then many of them will spend less, further adding fuel to the slowdown fire, which may or may not exist in the first place.
Whether one looks at the 2-year/10-year or 3-month/10-year Treasury yield spreads, both are inverted, meaning the yield on the shorter maturity debt is higher than that of the longer maturity. (At this moment, the 1-year yield is actually the highest for all Treasury-issued debt.) Such inversions are considered to be a strong indicator of a looming recession. Of course, the lag time could be as high as 20 months or as few as 10. I won’t call Economics the “dismal science,” but it is certainly not precise and never will be, in my opinion, no matter how much decision makers rely on machine learning or deep learning. For the nth plus n time, history is replete with examples of the folly of human beings trying to predict the future.
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Here is a more or less random collection of photos. Hope you enjoy.
#FarrowingFriday
#WhoseLineIsItAnyway?
#somanyCARSjustonelife
#disaffectedmusings
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Disaffected Musings 
The Ferrari picture brought me some memories. I believe it is a 456 model but I am not sure, I always get confused with the letters and numbers of the European cars. Many years ago, my ex-boss in Brazil bought a crashed 1990 something Ferrari 456 and removed the powertrain to install it on a 1939 Lincoln Zephyr. He said: “People used to install V12 Jaguar engines in hot rods back in the day, so why not a V12 Ferrari?”
The biggest problem was making the sequential fuel injection work outside the Ferrari. I don’t know if they have found a way to make it work.
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You are correct, sir, in that it is a 1998 Ferrari 456 GTA, the “A” meaning automatic transmission. On the flip side of your ex-boss’s experience, I don’t think I could bring myself to install a non-Ferrari powertrain in a Ferrari. Remember that these cars are all rare. The California is the best selling Ferrari model ever and only about 18,000 were sold in total.
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“Americans are not planning major cuts in holiday spending this year”
Being as I was too lazy/wore out* to cook my own breakfast today, I went to the local IHOP. So happens it is next door to the local Wally World and judging by the parking lot folks are at least shopping. Whether they are buying remains to be seen. As for me, I wont have any spending change from last year, because last year was mostly zero and this year looks like the same.
*Yesterday WAS a long day. I arrived onsite at 3.45am and got the smokers going. Ended up smoking fourteen 8-10 pound hams and twelve 18-20 pound turkeys. There were an additional 16 hams that were oven cooked and 20 turkeys oven cooked. Those were cooked at various homes and brought to the site. We had about 290 adults and around 190 kids eat onsite and were able to put together another 200 “to go” boxes. What was left went into the food bank of the church we do this in conjunction with. Whole lot of food, whole lot of people putting it on, whole lot of work, even more full belly’s leaving.
Got home about 9.30, showered and then straight to bed, no pizza. 🙂
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Major kudos to you, DDM.
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