KGB Report by Kevin G. Barkes

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(July 2000 and earlier)

Saturday, March 01, 2008
posted by KGB at 10:57 AM (permalink)

Check your watch...

... and make certain the date is correct. I just noticed my watch said it was Saturday, March 2. Most wristwatches don't have year settings, so there's no way for the devices to correctly process leap years.

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posted by KGB at 9:11 AM (permalink)

Experiments in canine telepathy, #23

Stop working, come upstairs, and give the good dog a cookie...
Stop working, come upstairs, and give the good dog a cookie...
Stop working, come upstairs, and give the good dog a cookie...
Stop working, come upstairs, and give the good dog a cookie...
..... zzzz .....

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Friday, February 29, 2008
posted by KGB at 5:33 AM (permalink)

Happy Birthday, big guy...

Superman is 70 years old today. February 29 was the first "official" birthday of the Man of Steel, chosen by the character's writers because it's the rarest of Earth days. After the character was "rebooted" in the late 80s, Supe's original birthday no longer appears to be canon. The comic book, the 90s television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and the currently-running Smallville, all have cited different dates.

I'm sticking with 2/29.

Oh- re: the photo above. The talented Dean Cain holds the record for total time spent portraying the strange visitor from another planet on film and, truth be told, was much better at it than anyone else who donned the iconic cape and boots. That said, my Superman will always be George Reeves.

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posted by KGB at 1:54 AM (permalink)

At least he's honest...

Most politicians begin their fundraising letters with phrases like, "My Dear Friend", "My Fellow Patriot," "Dear Fellow Warrior In The Never-Ending Battle To Defeat The Right-Wing Fascist Fearmongers Who Have Spit Upon The Constitution And Taken Our Great Republic To The Brink Of Annihilation..."

You get the idea.

That's why I found Al Franken's solicitation so refreshing. He doesn't know me from Adam. I'm in Pennsylvania, not Minnesota, and there's no way I can vote for him. He therefore omits the phony platitudes:

Ah, what the hey. I might send him a couple bucks. It's about time we had a professional comedian in the United States Senate. The amateurs are ruining the joint.

"When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation."
-Al Frankin

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Thursday, February 28, 2008
posted by KGB at 7:15 AM (permalink)

On February 28...

John Wesley chartered the Methodist Church in 1784;
The University of Pittsburgh was chartered in 1787;
Nylon was invented by Wallace Carothers in 1935;

And, at 11:16 pm on February 28, 1976, my son was born-- 44 minutes shy of being a leap year baby, sharing Superman's birthday, and being named Kal-El instead of Douglas Earle.

Sometimes things do work out okay.

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posted by KGB at 7:01 AM (permalink)

Question of the day

Zay N. Smith of the Chicago Sun-Times, reporting on US Airways charging $25 for a second checked bag:

Is there an additional surcharge for sending the bag to the wrong city?

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
posted by KGB at 10:18 AM (permalink)

UK earthquake: tragic consequences

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posted by KGB at 3:56 AM (permalink)

Speaking of Senator Craig...

Note the American flag lapel pin. There, doesn't that make you feel better?

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posted by KGB at 3:49 AM (permalink)

Gee, I'll pass...

I'm guessing one of the essential qualifications is a wide stance....

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
posted by KGB at 7:54 AM (permalink)

Show me the paperwork, Skippy...

Does the company to whom you send your mortgage payment actually own your note? If your mortgage was sold off and pooled with others into one of those subprime security bundles, there's a chance the folk who put together the deal didn't do all the paperwork. And, technically, your mortgage no longer exists...

Banks Lose to Deadbeat Homeowners as Loans Sold in Bonds Vanish

By Bob Ivry

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg)- Joe Lents hasn't made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That's when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton, Florida. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents's mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled

"If you're going to take my house away from me, you better own the note," said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Judges in at least five states have stopped foreclosure proceedings because the banks that pool mortgages into securities and the companies that collect monthly payments haven't been able to prove they own the mortgages. The confusion is another headache for U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he revises rules for packaging mortgages into securities.

"I think it's going to become pretty hairy," said Josh Rosner, managing director at the New York-based investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. "Regulators appear to have ignored this, given the size and scope of the problem."

More than $2.1 trillion, or 19 percent, of outstanding mortgages have been bundled into securities by private banks, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda, Maryland-based industry newsletter. Those loans may be sold several times before they land in a security. Mortgage servicers, who collect monthly payments and distribute them to securities investors, can buy and sell the home loans many times.

Each time the mortgages change hands, the sellers are required to sign over the mortgage notes to the buyers. In the rush to originate more loans during the U.S. mortgage boom, from 2003 to 2006, that assignment of ownership wasn't always properly completed,

"Loans were mass produced and short cuts were taken," White said. "A lot of the paperwork is done in the name of the original lender and a lot of the original lenders aren't around anymore."

The full story here.

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posted by KGB at 7:48 AM (permalink)

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

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posted by KGB at 4:23 AM (permalink)

I have underwear older than the first web browser...

...which was introduced 17 years ago today by Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, forever altering the intrinsic nature of computing and pornography.

Berners-Lee is currently working on the Semantic Web, a vision of information that is understandable by computers, enabling the machines to perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web. As Roger Ebert observed about the current implementation of the Internet, "Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly."

The Semantic Web is a revolutionary approach that will reap tremendous benefits for scientific publishers and those engaging in heretofore arcane sexual fetishes.

Related quotes of the day:

I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and- ta-da!- the World Wide Web.
-Tim Berners-Lee

Any fool can set up a Web site, and most of them have.
-Trevor Hing

Do the Luddites have a website?
-Ian Sholes

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Monday, February 25, 2008
posted by KGB at 4:48 AM (permalink)

Political quote of the day

[W]omen have come so far as feminists, that they don't feel obligated to vote for a candidate just because she's a woman. Women today feel perfectly free to make whatever choice Oprah tells them to.
-Tina Fey, on Saturday Night Live

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Sunday, February 24, 2008
posted by KGB at 12:27 PM (permalink)

Sigh

From The Borowitz Report:

Nader Announces Plan to Wreck Election
But Prominent Crackpots are Cool to Bid

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" today, consumer activist Ralph Nader told host Tim Russert that he has officially decided to wreck the 2008 presidential election.

Mr. Nader had been huddling with prominent crackpots over the weekend to determine whether he had enough support among his natural constituency, self-absorbed whack-jobs, to mount an entirely meaningless campaign.

"If I wreck the 2008 election, I intend to wreck it in all fifty states," Mr. Nader told Mr. Russert today. "I have no intention of being merely a regional spoiler."

When asked if his candidacy could hurt the chances of the first African-American nominee for president, Mr. Nader put his fingers in his ears and started going, "Lalalalalalalala I can't hear you."

But across the country, significant numbers of crackpots who have supported Mr. Nader in the past appeared to be cool to his latest bid to wreck a presidential election.

"If I'm going to waste my vote, I want to be sure I'm wasting it on the right wingnut," said longtime crackpot Stacy Klujian, who has supported Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex) in his 2008 campaign. "It is time for Ralph Nader to step aside for a new generation of bananaheads."

For his part, Mr. Nader said that he had already begun preparing for his latest run as a spoiler by sneaking up behind people who were watching "No Country for Old Men" and telling them how it ended.

"It wasn't as challenging as spoiling an entire election, but it was fun," he said.

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posted by KGB at 6:09 AM (permalink)

Quote of the day

Big weekend planned for the Academy Awards Sunday night? Are you folks excited about the Academy Awards? I mean, my gosh, how can you not be? Listen to this: this year, the movies were unbelievable. We had one about a serial killer; one about Alzheimer's; one about a kidnapping; one about a guy with a stroke- by God, that's entertainment, isn't it, ladies and gentlemen?
-David Letterman

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posted by KGB at 5:12 AM (permalink)

Overheard political observation of the day...

"Of course, the Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what we have now."

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Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse. Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however. I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993, and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...