Morning Briefing — It’s Back!

Well hey there! Since it’s 7am out here in Boise, it’s still technically morning out in the real world too, so let’s do some briefing, shall we? I’m up so early because I’m going to hockey practice today, not to play, but to watch a player about whom I’m writing a profile. Go Steelheads!

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Please feel free to go and read this lengthy and substantial story about Boise’s minor league hockey team. Just kidding! It’s like three sentences posted by a high-school intern about last night’s game!

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Speaking of Boise, apparently no one wants to come and see our little Bowl football game between turtles and vandalizers. Well, that’s not technically true. Twenty-four people want to see it.

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This couple is goddless and penniless on Christmas. Let’s face it, who isn’t?

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BSU is desparately looking for conservative voices to print in its student newspaper. So all 19-year old right-wingers, please respond quickly. Because The Onion only publishes once a week and we get so bored around here.

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The best newspaper correction of 2008? We vote for the Badger Herald’s:

Due to a reporting error, the Feb. 7 article “‘Porn Nation’ to present tonight” erroneously cited a pornographic website as the sexual addiction survey. The correct website is www.mysexsurvey.com. We regret the error.

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Boise Airport now has the fastest internets in the fucking world! You have no excuses left not to come see us.

Go buy a book

This from the AP:

Powell’s Books is asking employees to scale back their hours or take sabbaticals to cope with disappointing sales.

Powell’s is one of the nation’s largest independent booksellers. But like many other retailers, it is seeing the impact of the recession on sales.

Paul Constant of The Stranger rightly reminds you to shop at local, independent bookstore.

The money you put into local bookstores stays local, and it keeps us all from sitting, pasty-faced, in our apartments and waiting for another drab cardboard box full of books to be dropped at our doorstep. I cannot emphasize this enough: This is important.

That said, I finally found a good used bookstore in downtown Boise. Trip Taylor Bookseller is on 10th Street and completely worth hitting up. It has that air of organized disorder that all good used bookstores have, one that I cannot capture with my own books. Plus, I got out of there with a paperback Joan Didion joint and a hardback Calvin Trillin for less than $17.

Oh, and within their photograph section, they helpfully break out all the naked pictures into the “Nude Photography” subsection, which I thought was a nice touch.

Obama wants to give you a job

Will work for necklace signs

In my piece abut the economy, The Upside of the Downturn, here’s one positive I found in the coming economic clusterfuck,:

When the original Great Depression hit, New Deal economists seized on the loony idea of putting unemployed people to work on the Fed’s dime by having them do jobs essential to the nation’s well-being. Instead of, you know, pumping billion after billion directly into the industries that precipitated the entire crisis by using the wrong Excel spreadsheet to assess risk.

The creation of the Works Progress Administration turned us all into socialists, of course. But nobody seemed to care because redistribution of wealth isn’t that big a deal when there are no more bankers, on account of them all jumping out of windows, this fact according to our most reliable historic cartoons. So we fixed bridges and built roads and documented our society, a society that was quickly, it surely must have seemed, going none-too-gently into that good night.

As the The Greatest Depression begins to take hold, socialism will inevitably make a comeback, due to us recently electing one of those socialist guys. And this could mean big things for not only the nation, but for Charlottesville as well.

And, today, this from The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama committed Saturday to the largest public works construction program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half-century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.

Of course, this only means one thing: I am an economic genius able to look into the financial future. Give me $50K and I will manage your portfolio. Don’t ask questions. Questions are for the simple-minded. Just hand me all your money and watch it grow. Questions don’t get you 200-percent returns on your investments.

I do.

The Upside of the Downturn

Well hey there! Remember me?

Let’s pretend I haven’t posted anything here for like, one million weeks, and all turn our attention to this piece of mine that just ran in C-VILLE Weekly–The Upside of the Downturn.

Wherein I take numerous cheap but funny shots at our current economic mess, pointing out that even totally fucking financial collapses have, you know, their benefits and stuff. It looks like the staff over there in Charlottesville put together a nice art package with the story, which is not all that surprising, because that’s usually what they do.

Here are just some of the benefits our upcoming Greatest Depression Ever will bring you:

• No more credit card debt
• Better health and education
• Better music
• Less assholes in coffee lines, and …
• The reemergence of the WPA

So if you haven’t figured it out, this story is kinda full of shit, but hopefully in a good way, like Ween or Divo or something. If you really want a good update on the mess that we’re in, I recommend This American Life’s “Another Frightening Show About the Economy.”