Karl Rove’s  opinion piece in the WSJ “Bush Is a Book Lover”  explains alot about the past 8 years. The article tells us about the vast quantities of books that he and Bush have read each year for the past few years.

Rove and Bush had a contest of sorts to see who could read the most books.  For 2006, Rove writes:

At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. 

Fifty-eight of the books he (Bush) read that year were nonfiction. Nearly half of his 2006 reading was history and biography, with another eight volumes on current events (mostly the Mideast) and six on sports.

In 2007, Rove won, 76 books to 51.  Thus far in 2008, it’s Rove 64, Bush 40.

We all have 24 hours in a day. Bush does not have to do laundry, cook, drive to the office, do the grocery shopping, etc. so, granted, he does have some discretionary time that most of us regular folks do not. But, my word! That’s a lot of time spent curled up with a book.

Imagine a world where Bush read “only” half the 110 books.

In 2006, that means he still would have read 55 books. Instead of reading 55, imagine he used that time to read briefings.  Briefings on defense issues. On financial, economic issues. Domestic issues such as our educational system, unemployment, technology, et al. 

Now let’s take those 55 books we let him read in 2006 and sprinkle in a few highly relevant books about financial markets.  

Here is a proposed reading list. Imagine if Bush had read some of these relevant books (mouse over for a photo of the book cover and more info):

• The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• The Bill from the China Shop: How Asia’s Savings Glut Threatens the World Economy
• The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures , Revised and Updated
• Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks
• Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons from Wall Street’s Four Great Bottoms
• Tomorrow’s Gold: Asia’s age of discovery

With the remaining time left, let’s suppose Bush pondered. That is, just thought about things. Thought them through. Think about it.

Today, my email inbox taunts me with subjects like:

There’s Still Time! Rush shipping extended on great gifts …
Christmas Gift Baskets in Time For Christmas
Last Chance for Christmas Delivery
Get Delivery by Christmas …
Last Day to Order Gifts in Time for Holiday Delivery 

That last one is from the company that I placed a toy order with on December 15th. I have little hope of receiving it because of the snowstorm that slammed our area.  Nothing is moving in and out and around our fair city.

I have become too reliant on our nation’s delivery infrastructure. Although I placed all orders by December 15th, my gifts have little hope of arriving.  My favorite status message is “Your package has experienced an exception.” Threw an exception.  Funny sad to us software geeks.

 I do my Christmas shopping online while the rest of the household sleeps and the house is quiet.  Now, it’s 1:15 am. I need a gift for my dad.  A HomeDepot gift card would be just the thing.  

He really would like it. It’s not just me being lame.  He’s that kind of dad, a real fix-it-up chappie (a Dr. Seuss character).  Behold, the online shopping experience during the wee hours. 

“Temporarily offline … visit one of our … stores” Gee how convenient.

Fortunately, fewer sites have been down during the night this year. It was a bigger problem last year.  

Lowe’s is open for business. They get the sale. Cha-ching for them.

Can’t tell if The Amish Homepage is a parody site, or is serious.  Whichever, it is so web 0.1, consider it campy-retro-web design.

Yes, I know, Amish people are not supposed to use electricity,
but we’re making sure that we use as little as possible…

1. This page uses no fancy background.
2. This page uses darker colors so your monitor will use less energy.
3. This page is lit by fire.

Lehman No. 2 Joe Gregory Lays Off Household Staff of 29 and won’t be taking the private helicopter or seaplane to work.

A moment of silence please as we reflect on the 12th anniversary of  Alan Greenspan’s famous comment about irrational exuberance made on December 5, 1996:

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? 

 Major market closes on December 5, 1996:

S&P 500 - 744.36
Dow Jones - 6,437.10
Nasdaq - 1,300.12

On December 5, 2008:

S&P 500 - 876.07
Dow Jones - 8,635.42
Nasdaq - 1,509.31

Oh, what a wild and bumpy ride it has been.  

Snapfish says about ordering prints of photos:

To calculate the shipping cost for your print order, add the above tiered prices to your base price for each set of ten prints (not including the first five prints). Tiered prices apply to all delivery methods. See pricing tables.

Shipping & Handling: Prints & Enlargements
	standard	2-day	overnight	canada	international
1-5 prints	99¢	$5.99	$8.99	$1.99	$4.99
6-195 prints	49¢	49¢	49¢	49¢	49¢
196-395 prints	39¢	39¢	39¢	39¢	39¢
396-595 prints	25¢	25¢	25¢	25¢	25¢
Each additional print	10¢	10¢	10¢	10¢	10¢

Huh!?!?! Say what???  And I have an MBA for gosh sakes.

Scandals, swindles and secrets entertain fans of crime stories and  film noir movies. Here are some real-life dramas:

From TechCrunch: “Last week, Danish Computerworld awarded IT Factory … with the prestigious Denmark’s Best IT-company 2008. This week, the company has been declared bankrupt and its managing director Stein Bagger went missing in Dubai while under scrutiny by the police.”

Reporters also found out Bagger had been renting a secret office in a conference hotel since two weeks near the IT Factory offices, which he reportedly used to forge documents and signatures in order to keep the massive-scale fraud going (it concerns about half a billion Danish Kroner or $85 million). Overall, sources assess that up to 90 percent of IT Factory’s turnover had been based on non-existing or false contracts. There’s also talk of a scam where non-existing IT equipment and other stuff was sold to leasing firms, and the cash was sent off to shady offshore companies.

In October, executives from Entellium, a Seattle company  were charged with fraud — cooking the books to make up revenue in order to raise millions from venture capital firms.  From the Seattle PI:

FBI agents arrested the chief executive officer and the chief financial officer of a prominent Seattle software startup on fraud charges that, if proven, would constitute a $50 million betrayal of the venture capital community.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Carl Blackstone, head of the complex-crimes section, said the men kept “two sets of books.” One set was “the cooked books for the board,” which included principals from Ignition Partners, a Bellevue venture capital firm populated in part by former Microsoft executives. 

The books contained inflated revenues used to attract investors such as Ignition, which has sunk more than $19 million into Entellium, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. A spokeswoman said Ignition executives were not available for comment.

Techdirt added:

since 2006, the company made less than $3.8 million, but told the board it brought in $15.5 million. That’s not just a slight fudging of the numbers — that’s extreme fraud, which was used to help the company raise that $50 million. 

The biggest question, though, is where were the board and the investors on this. It’s difficult to see how investors would hand over more than $50 million without ever conducting an audit. They simply believed the two execs. It’s also worth noting how the fraud unraveled. Apparently, the VP of HR was cleaning out the desk of the former head of sales, and discovered the bogus set of books that the CEO & CFO had been showing the board. She turned them over to the company’s comptroller, who gave them to a board member — which resulted in the board pretty quickly calling the CEO to let him know that they were sending over their own “contract” CFO to “check some things out.” That was the point at which the two execs resigned. 

TechFlash continues to update the Entellium saga.

Requiem for a Maverick, about the lame McCain campaign, has the sub-title “John McCain ran one of the most incompetent, schizo campaigns in history.”  Worthy read.

Look! 70’s Rock Musicians and Their Parent’s Homes, a fun time-waster from Apartment Therapy.  Love her matching boots and shirt. Or do I like the wall paper better? Check out more photos including the fun purple living room of Frank Zappa’s mom.  These are from the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.