4am in my room

Okay, finally some proof that I don't have to pick serious topics all of the time.



My cat, T'Reese, wakes me up around 4am almost every day to get me to feed her. She does the paw-on-face maneuver just like the video. She doesn't knead my back, she just walks all over me back and forth for maximum annoying coverage. No baseball bat either, just head-butting like Stampy the elephant (from the Simpsons).  On some rare nights, she does lots of meowing too.  When I finally get employed again and can afford toys, I want to buy her an automatic feeder so she learns that the human isn't responsible for keeping her bowl full of kibble... it just magically appears on its own mysterious schedule.

yep, it's a recession

As I mentioned earlier, the economy seems to be limping badly. Today, the BBC is reporting that "Recession in the US 'has arrived'".

Merrill [Lynch] said that the current consensus view on Wall Street that there is a good chance of avoiding a recession is "in denial". It also objected to the use of euphemistic terms for the state of the economy. "To say that the backdrop is 'recession like' is akin to an obstetrician telling a woman that she is 'sort of pregnant'," the report said.

Using terms like that has way too much political impact, though, so government agencies have good motivation to keep tight rein on them.

An official ruling on whether the US is in recession is made by the National Bureau of Economic Research, but this decision may not come for two years.

I wish we had a government that was believable. *sigh*  What's it going to take?  A "Citizen Oversight" agency that reports only to the people instead of to other agency figures?