My Facebook news page has been overloaded the last several weeks with “25 things about me”, “100 books I read”, etc.  I just can’t bring myself to do one of those, but since I haven’t written here in a few weeks and my notes import there anyway I’m killing two dodos with one arrow.

- Props to WVU Basketball.  Despite being highly outsized in the contry’s roughest conference the men have gone 19-9 and 8-7 in conference, and have a strong case to go Dancing.  The women have an overall winning record (15-12, 4-10) after losing most of their veterans from a 25 win team.

- I’m a glutton for punishment.  Last summer/fall I read two Revolution-era biogaphies on John Adams & Ben Franklin that probably totaled well over 1,600-1,700 pages.  Currently on the nightstand – Lincoln’s Team of Rivals, another 750+ page tome.  Books on the Supreme Court and the summer of 1787 which resulted in the Constitution (you remember, that document we’re wiping our feet on) are waiting in the wings.

- It’s a good time for the kids.  Garrett recently tested into the Gifted program and spends every Friday morning working on more advanced topics with six other first/second graders.  Pitching-machine baseball is on the horizon this spring.  Ethan moved up from the Tiger Cub program at Casey’s taekwondo into the regular Tiger program.  With his Aspergers it’s been a good transition – it’s allowing him to better manage being in a new & larger environment with more sensory stimulation, get out some of his physical touch-point needs, and more advanced learning in following directions & safe play.

- No, I don’t yet know where we fit into Wells Fargo yet.

- I’ve bitched enough about Messiah to let everyone know how I feel.  Now we have a signed stimulus, banks around the world are faltering, a trillion dollar tax increase is on the horizon, the stock market indecies are reaching new lows each day not seen in decades, foreclosures are increasing while home sales are decreasing, etc., etc.  Change we can believe in my ass.

- Been awhile since I had done a major updating of a PC system or OS, but I successfully navigated a huge update with PCLinuxOS.  It remains my distro of choice, and with a real simple fix my upstairs desktop continues to run the new upgrade with no issues.  At first I thought I was going to have a major problem as the display and sound didn’t want to work, but the fix was simple if not surprising – the master boot loader was still trying to boot the old kernel rather than the new one.  A quick edit of the GRUB list file and everything was back to normal.

- Morgantown remains an attractive area in this economy, but I was surprised to learn this little tidbit – people who have lost their jobs elsewhere in more populous areas are coming here to look for work after seeing us profiled so prominently.  Some are so desparate that they’re coming here and staying at homeless shelters until they get up and running. We also apparently have a reputation of treating our homeless well.

- Taking everything personally is a bad and likely unhealthy habit.  If this is the case, why am I so good at it?

- Spring cleaning started early, and my loving wife has done a great job upstairs.  Now we get to dig through my world down here.  Joy.

- Winter….spring….make up your mind. Either warm up or cool off.  Just make a decision and stick to it.  I love winter, and I like spring.  I don’t like when they co-mingle.

- Leverage returns to TNT this summer.  Rules of Engagement returns next week.  Mythbusters finally returns next week too.  Hopefully House, Bones, Big Bang Theory, Gary Unmarried, Lie to Me, and Earl stay on sequence the rest of this spring.

- The most underrated cable show – The Soup on E!.  Absolutely hilarious roundup of the silly and inane week on TV.

Well, time for all of us to bend over and ankle grab.  The porky pig package passes the Senate and is off to compromise with the House, in the sense that getting bitten in half by a shark is a compromise from being eaten whole (or however P.J. O’Rourke said it).  The same tired, horrifying scare tactics have been out in full bore all weekend, and the end result is the ramrodding of America.

Lost in much of the kvetching for/against the stimulus is the argument that we can’t keep doing what we did before (which admittedly wasn’t working too well).  The problem here is that it presupposes that there are two and only two answers – the wrong one (43) and the right one (Messiah) – when everyone readily admits that the financial collapse is quite complex.  So why is it ok to treat this like a coin flip? “Dur, what Bush did didn’t work, so we’re doing the opposite.”  No, no, no.  Yes, the economy is souring, but rushing into the river to stick a finger in the dike (lol) is stupid when it’s more important to fiure out what caused the damn hole in the first place.  It’s OK, though…..I guess we should be thanking Garrett’s kids for paying off this boondoggle after we all turn to carbon.

Change we can believe in my ass.

After saving this to post I came across a perfectly executed opinion column from the Cato Institute.  The best summary I can give is the following excerpt from the piece -  “This is the fifth time in my adult life that the president has asked for or asserted unprecedented authority on an expedited basis with little or no congressional review. Each of the prior occasions turned out to be a disaster.”

As if we don’t hear enough propaganda every hour of every day, he’s taking over the airwaves on Monday in prime time to take more softball questions from pre-screened reporters about why many of us are so evil that we want the feds to actually CAREFULLY CONSIDER how much of our money they’re about to waste.  Like with most things in this world, though, there both a bad & good side to Monday night:

Bad – he’s pre-empting a new House episode on Fox, esily the best series on TV, for his latest dog & pony show.

Good – pre-empting House eases the pressure on my satellite tuner, allowing me to watch our boys take on the ugly thugs from Pitt in HD while still recording the rest of CBS Monday.

I’ve presented a fair amount of griping & complaining the last couple of weeks, so now I think it’s time to present something from the lighter side: Bob Knight’s golf video outtakes.  Sadly, this could be the soundtrack to most of my rounds.

For what is probably the first time ever, Morgantown and the surrounding MSA registered the lowest unemployment rate in the monthly Labor Department surveys.  Touchdown City led all 369 surveyed cities with an unemployment rate of just 2.7%, decisively beating the national average of 7.1%.  (The lowest unemployment rates of a city with popluations above 1 million people was Oklahoma City at 4.7%.)

Folks in Morgantown who study the economy point out that the main industries of education, healthcare, and some government employment are industries that handle downturns better.  Children still need to go to school and many still want higher education, while people in general still need doctors appointments.   WVU is a huge economic driver for several industries, pumping life into engineering/manufacturing (mining), health care (two hospitals, a Level 1 trauma center, all medical specialties, Mylan Pharmaceuticals), business personnel, legal, education, and other community support functions.  As I’ve said before, living here is very unique in that we have many amenities that similar sized towns across America don’t have.  Most of this is thanks to the University, an employer and lifestyle enabler whose headquarters are nowhere near as easy to move as the headquarters of a public company.  (See my old town of Charlotte, struggling with uncertainty around Bank of America and Wachovia/Wells Fargo.)

Mayor Ron Justice was interviewed on CNBC earlier this week to talk about life in Morgantown as part of their series on cities “Beating the Odds”.  While the questions & answers were boilerplate, there were some marvelous shots of the town mixed in that made Morgantown look pretty darn good IMHO.  Video link is here.

While we’re not recession-proof here (and no community ever is), we appear to be well positioned to hopefully ride out this storm with little scathing.  Of course, we never know what tomorrow brings.