A Pep Talk

Not cool, Robert Frost!

Burrrr!

This has been a cold week...NASA agrees.

Walking

Here's my most recent walking video, from last Friday. After some time off over the holidays, I'm back at the three days a week, three hours per visit of physical therapy. It's been feeling pretty good lately - my leg muscles loosen up quickly, making the whole process smoother, and usually I can get a few steps at the beginning that I do the lion's share of the work on. It's not quite totally self-initiated, they're usually reflexive pulls from my ankles, legs, hips, and core being in the proper alignment, but hey, anything that's coming from me and not being done for me is a good start. We usually walk around 300 feet, about a good pitching wedge for all you golfers out there, and by that time I'm breathing pretty heavy.

The guy in the Bosley Hair Restoration toupee scam commercial says "80% of feeling good is looking good", but he must be using Mitt Romney's pollsters, because even with pants rolled up and '90s-era New Balances on, I am feeling good!

Crazy Wheelchair Guy Rushes Court

Hey, it was against Duke, what do you expect?

 

The craziest part - NC State's best player CJ Leslie probably saved this guy from a sure trampling and held him 'for a couple of minutes' while they located his chair. Talk about a game-winning assist!

Dolphin Stampede

How cool would this be to see in person? A thousand dolphins, leaping in concert, in some sort of race to the all-you-can eat seafood buffet a few miles down the coast.

Great Prank

This is awesome.

The Art of the Steal

I thought this video was cool - it shows the art, and it really is the art, of master pickpocket Apollo Robbins. It accompanies a captivating New Yorker piece on Robbins that explains how he uses persuasion, sleight-of-hand, and psychology to complete steals that seem nearly impossible.

Curious about the fiscal cliff?

After almost 2 months of a master class in how not to negotiate, a nasty expletive directed at Harry Reid by John Boehner, not once but twice, and finally two grizzled veterans coming to the country's and market's rescue at the eleventh hour, we finally have a deal to keep our fiscal bus from careening over the fiscal cliff. Ah, painful metaphors.

It looked like we'd be hurtled over the cliff, lying bloodied and broken on the rocks of higher taxes and draconian austerity measures proven by the British to be idiotic, but...look, is that...it can't be...it is! Turtle Face and Big Teeth (their spirit names) have emerged from behind the glaring sun of Medicare cuts, swooped down and grasped us in their talons (their spirit animals have eagle bodies...duh) and deposited us, bruised and slightly bloodied but still breathing back on the road above. Seriously, McConnell and Biden pulled this off.

Is their result worth shouting from the rooftops? Well...

An in-depth look at the final four tense days shows that McConnell and Biden resolved the crisis through old-fashioned backroom bargaining. With each call and each new offer, they pared away a little more of the grand ambitions each side had once held so dear, until all that was left was a modest measure that raised some new tax revenue and left most of the deficit problem intact.
 

The mind-bogglingly pathetic-ness of this whole scenario (At fault - Boehner:75%, Obama:15%, Teabaggers:9%, Sarah Palin (just because):1%) is amplified by looking at the resulting deal. Little cuts, little stimulus, a modest, leveraging-mangling tax hike, and a two-month can-kick down the road that ensures that this exact same scenario will repeat itself in late February, except the Tea Party will be even more emboldened to stand their ground, and the economic damage they can cause by hijacking the debt ceiling, something Jesu-, whoops, Reagan himself raised 18 times, to huge spending cuts will be much, much worse.

But maybe then they can set up a 'Super Committee' to come up with a 'Grand Bargain' that instead fails and sets up huge automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that kick in if no deal is reached...oh sh*t, that was 2011. And history repeats itself...

My homey David Brooks says:

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters. The average Medicare couple pays $109,000 into the program and gets $343,000 in benefits out, according to the Urban Institute. This is $234,000 in free money. Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way.
 

Good luck ever changing that.