Marathon Day

It's Sunday morning. I went downstairs to get my usual expresso from May's shop and was greeted by a line of dalmations. Well to be more precise, a group of people who had ignored the sun over the yardarm rule, blackened one eye with kohl, and dressed in b&w spotted pajamas with a fuzzy dog's ear hat. It must be S.F. marathon day. A group of German tourists were in the corner, their little girl zipping in and out the door and giving updates to everyone. Conan and a princess, with a ray gun! Poor Albert got so busy serving everyone that he drew me three cups before he realized he was done, handed me the results, and returned more change than I'd paid in the first place.(yes, we'll sort it when he's had a chance to sit down) I followed a group dressed as watermelon slices back to my door and now it's time for a link-list. I'll start with culture and places.

• Starting Friday, Walgreens will begin selling Insight personal genetic testing kits, becoming the first major retail chain in the U.S. to offer home tests that say they assess the risk of developing one of dozens of different health conditions. (Hypochondriac alert)
• Cadillac Ranch was created in 1974 by the Ant Farm and installed on land owned by Stanley Marsh 3 (it was relocated to a more remote location in 1997).
• In 1917, William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes, stepped across the threshold of the Georgian manor he had built 30 miles south of San Francisco. Bourn, heir to California’s Empire Mine gold fortune, had sited the estate on 654 acres and surrounded it with 16 acres of formal gardens. (I did a jazz series at Fioli for JK sound. The place was beautiful)
• Good lord, it’s all just sort of sitting there publicly available on the Internet as an actual no-kidding “planetary data system.” Y’know, what the planetary instruments actually and factually showed about actual planets.

And now the money, honey portion of the show. If you like your economics on the dark side, consider the idea that last week's stock market hiccup wasn't the result of a fat finger, but was a denial of service attack by a player that wants something in return: i.e. go investigate the janitor's union, not me. It is the future, after all and I have no doubt that the system is riddled with backdoors, left slightly ajar, for those special side deals that insiders like so much. William Gibson may have another notch on his prediction gun.

• News on Thursday that New York State prosecutors are examining whether eight banks hoodwinked credit ratings agencies opened yet another front in what is fast becoming the legal battle of a decade for the big names of finance.
• Wacko as some of the theories were, the impetus to search desperately for a mistake is understandable. Much better to find a flaw in the math or a problem with the computers than to confront the far more troubling possibility that fear and greed worked exactly as they have always worked, except that their effects were amplified by a jittery and fast-moving marketplace.

And of course politics. As a sidenote, in the kitchen, the cook is responsible if he or she burns the toast. If you write a check for more than you've deposited, you get the penalty. In government, nobody knows nothin, or if pressed, it's that darn janitor's union again. Is it any suprise that both major parties are having an anti-incumbent year?

• For Jack Matlock, Giulio Gallarotti, and Christopher Preble, the authors of three new books about power and U.S. foreign policy, the essence of "the power problem" is that the United States has too much of it.
• Red Tories are really “red” only in that they believe we have obligations to all of our countrymen, and they hold that social solidarity is a vital part of love of one’s country. They regard the landscape as part of the nation’s heritage no less than its customs and institutions.
• Try convincing the world that U.S. technology companies are your new ambassadors, out on a noble mission to spread freedom and democracy around the globe (things not to mention: oil, Iraq, Dick Cheney). Send their CEOs to Siberia, have them play beerpong with the locals. Don't dare mentioning how these very companies abuse freedom and privacy at home, on their own sites.
• Clemens August Count von Galen, the bishop of Münster, was a "perfectly ordinary fellow, with quite a limited intellectual endowment, who therefore had not until very recently seen where things were going, and therefore was always inclined to come to terms."