Enron Losers

So who loses in the Enron debacle? The news is full of weeping and wailing about the poor stockholders and the poor employees, who have lost millions while the Big Shots cashed in their stock for huge profits. They're not necessarily losers. When something gets this large, it's Government Bail-out Time. When a small company goes bust, nobody cares. When a company gets as big as Enron, it simply can't be allowed to go bust. At the very least, the employees will almost certainly get some kind of reprieve. As to the stockholders, tough bananas. Anybody promising "guaranteed results" is probably running a Ponzi scheme of some kind. There will be all sorts of lawsuits against anybody who has money; the outcome is not at all certain.

The potential big losers here are the Enron execs, especially Enron CEO Ken Lay, the Bush administration, and Arthur Anderson, Enron's auditor and financial advisor.

Enron Execs

Kenneth Lay, Enron CEO, and others are probably headed for jail. They'll spend a couple of years in a Federal country-club prison and retire with their multi-hundred-million dollar profits. There are two things that they might be charged with: misrepresenting Enron's financial state and "insider trading". Misrepresenting the financial state is basically plain old fraud. They said everything was hunky-dory when things were really falling apart. Bad.

"Insider trading" is one of those technical crimes that can be really hard to define, like off-sides in hockey. However, bailing out of the stock based on unpublished and totally unexpected bad news is a definite no-no.

The Bush Administration

Much as I dislike them, the Bushies seem to be playing this one exactly right. Yeah, Enron asked for favors, but didn't get any.

There are, however, a couple of unanswered questions.

• Georgie Bush says the last time he saw Ken Lay was a year and a half or so ago at a charity fundraiser. Probably true. However, there are such things as telephones. Nobody has asked about the last time he talked to Ken Lay. Note that Ken Lay "communicated with" Cabinet members. This is a whole lot more general than "seeing" him.
• What about VP Cheney? It seems that he talked to the Enron folks a lot in putting together the Administration's energy policy. This could get interesting, especially since Enron's business model translates into English as "fishing in troubled waters". With stable energy prices and sufficient supply, Enron doesn't make any money.

Arthur Anderson

An accountant friend of mine tells me that AA will probably go out of business. Some of their execs will probably go to jail too. Shredding documents? Accountants are the ones who are always telling their clients to keep every scrap of paper.

However, AA accountants have a very good reputation in the profession. While AA may go away, the folks who work for them probably won't be out of work very long. Especially since a lot of companies are going to be looking really hard at their current accounting procedures.

Two Sets of Books

The traditional form of accounting fraud is "keeping two sets of books". This means that the accountant shows one set of numbers to Management and another set of numbers to the tax people or to investors. Very illegal. Also very difficult to do -- there are a lot of numbers that have to be "cooked", and they're kept in a lot of different places.

What the nightmarishly complex accounting schemes that AA cooked up did was act as "two sets of books". It enabled Enron execs to shuffle money from place to place so that it showed up on whatever line of the balance sheet they wanted it to. Unfortunately, they overdid it. It got so complex that nobody could figure out what was going on.

The whole point of accounting, after all, is to give management a picture of what is really going on with company finances. Without this, management would be working blind. I suspect that the collapse at Enron really did take everybody by surprise. With proper accounting, this shouldn't happen. Unexpected losses, shifts in values of investments, etc, should show up in time for management to take notice of them. With Enron, this simply didn't happen.

The Biggest Loser

The accounting profession as a whole.

For years, the accounting profession has claimed that their internal procedures are all that is necessary to keep their clients honest. That stance is crumbling. The latest revelations are how various professional organizations for accountants have lobbied Congress to keep them from passing laws that would have outlawed some of the more odious practices that the Enron collapse has uncovered. In particular, the practice of having the same people set up all the fancy derivatives, shadows, etc, audit them is right straight out. Auditors are supposed to be independent fa cryin' out loud. I'm sure that the professional groups will be slapping together all sorts of new rules to try to stave off Government regulation. I suspect that it won't work, and that accountants are going to find themselves looking at a whole lot of new regulations, written by people who have no idea of what accounting is. Just like everybody else, in other words.

Learn to pound sand like the rest of us, guys.

Brainless

So here I sit. Sunday morning in an "assisted care" facility in Arizona. I should be writing things. I should be doing things with computer programs. I should be phoning people, who should be up by now, but I really don't want to wake anybody up. I want them to be in a good mood when I call.

There's no TV. There's no Internet. Unless you count the TV from next door. Seems to be some sort of preacher. I can't make out words, but the tones are distinctive. Probably middle of the road, like everything else here. Not subtle theological points, but not "death to Democrats" either.

That "middle of the road" is subject to interpretation; this is Arizona, after all. I am not interested in any more explanations of how Bill & Hillary Clinton are the Embodiment of Evil. I'm from DC. I hear all the political rumors first. If I haven't heard it, somebody is making it up.

Dad is taking things rather well. Donn has things under control. I'm worried about finances; Donn talks a good show, but doesn't seem to be making any money. Odd for a supposed expert on robotics, assembly line automation, AI, and computer graphics. He seems to get whatever money he has by helping people set up their computers. Donn is not good with money. However, if he's going to continue helping Dad, he will need power of attorney on Dad's money. He already has medical power of attorney; when Dad broke his hip, Donn was able to take care of everything before Dad regained consciousness.

Solitaire on the computer. What music I have recorded onto the computer. I bought some headphones at Fry's. Nice sound, but not comfortable for long term listening. The speakers on the laptop are lousy. I bought some DVDs. Not comfortable to watch on the computer. In any case, I get really irritated trying to watch something more than once a year or so. My memory's too good. "Yeah, yeah. Get on with it."

I know that this is drivel, but it's the only thing I can seem to come up with. I should be writing up a paper on what's really going on with the stock market (the story the Powers that Be don't want you to hear). Or doing a formal write-up on my ideas for a new operating system (Unix is not the ultimate OS). Or a "diff" program for XML (a SAX parser would let us handle files of any size) The brain doesn't seem to be working that way.

It's Sunday. The service is on Thursday and I leave on Friday. Counting the hours. I only hope that all the Fiesta Bowl folks have left by Friday. I don't want to have to spend two hours standing in line at the airport like I did on the way out.

The Funeral

Well, she died. I suppose I should be singing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead". I don't have the heart. Dad loved her (in my cynical mind, for all the wrong reasons). Her two sons are great guys.

There were five of us at the graveside service. Don and Fred, her sons, Diane, Fred's wife, Dad, and me. The service was kind of "out of the box" generic Protestant, with nothing to show that it was Presbyterian. We were all standing up. After the preacher was done talking, Fred put her ashes in a little hole in the ground next to a fountain. He tried to get Dad to help; Dad can't bend over too well after the hip replacement. Don took a video; he doesn't think it will come out because of the lighting. I thought the lighting was fine but I have never done videos. Don is a pro.

At some point, they will plant roses around the fountain.

She was loud, bossy, opinionated, ignorant, and bigoted. The last time I talked to her, she did her anti-Italian rant to my Italian wife. I dropped the ball -- I'm so used to being ranted at, cursed, and insulted that it just bounces off of me. My wife doesn't have that kind of crust. I simply didn't pick up on what was happening. After all, isn't that what everybody's elderly relatives do? Tell you how you are the scum of the Earth and deserve to be taken out and shot?

I brought up my wife's ancestry in conversation. From the looks on faces, apparently they had never picked up on this -- even though I'm sure I explained why my wife's family has three different last names. They could have asked before this. Nobody cared enough to ask why we were upset.

The Fisher King, the Guardian of the Holy Grail, was wounded by a spear through the thighs (PG version) or testicles (real version). He can only be free from the pain when a visitor to the Grail Castle asks the cause of his distress.

My father cannot bear to utter the words "I don't know" or "I was wrong". But why is it that hard to ask "what's wrong"?

Santa Claus

When you think of it, Santa Claus is a rather unlikely figure. Living at the North Pole, flying around on Christmas Eve, going down chimneys to deliver presents to good little girls and boys.

Everybody knows that the presents are actually from Mom and Dad. Everybody keeps up the pretense, and when the "deception" gets revealed, it can be a bit traumatic for the kids.

Why does this myth persist? Why do kids believe in Santa Claus in the face of vast evidence? Why do parents keep it up? It seems odd that marketing alone could explain what's going on.

A Trip to Arizona

The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest have a colorful religion called the Kachina Cult. The best known of the pueblo tribes following the kachina cult are the Hopi, of northern Arizona. Good information on the kachina cults is hard to come by; most info I've found on the Web seems to be either from art galleries selling "kachina dolls" or first year anthropology students with no real clues. Beware -- studies of "primitive" religions almost always slide into the quagmire of "mine's better than yours" or "lookit the funny people".

Anyway, everything, in this religion, has a spirit, called a kachina. They're not Gods to be worshipped, but rather spirits that may be helpful if treated right. You can't communicate directly with a kachina; you have to communicate with something else that has somehow gotten a part of the kachina's spirit. One way to do this is through dance. Dancers put on masks representing particular kachinas. The dances represent interactions between spirits and humans and hopefully will influence the real kachinas to to what the dancers want.

All very photogenic. The dances are complex, the costumes are spectacular, and everybody gets a lot of nice pictures. At least in the public version ....

So?

Think of what this looks like to children. Their village is being visited by these spirits, who will determine how well everything in the village does for the next year. The spirits are great and mysterious, with awesome powers. Not like anybody we know, surely.

Now think of a boy being introduced to the cult (it's men-only). For the first time, he is allowed "backstage", and sees that all of the "spirits" are "really" the men that he sees every day. Now, he is expected to help maintain the illusion for the women and children.

Santa Claus is the Kachina of Christmas

Everybody does it for the kids. When a kid gets old enough to stop believing, he or she is old enough to help in maintaining the illusion for the younger kids. As to why the illusion doesn't really bother anybody (and kids aren't bothered by a zillion different shopping mall and advertising Santas), well, it's a kachina dancer. None of the Santas that you see is the "real" Santa, but each has (hopefully!) some small fragment of the spirit of the "real" Santa. And it will only be there if everybody works at maintaining the illusion.

The Hopi are definitely onto something here.

Note -- This isn't my idea. I don't remember where I first saw it, and I can't find anything on the Web. Anyway, for whoever came up with it, thanks for a really good idea.

The Emerald City

About half an exit up the Beltway from where I live is the Maryland Mormon Temple. (Note -- this picture doesn't do it justice. Anybody knows of a URL for a better picture, please drop me a note.) I heard someplace that it's the biggest temple in the world outside of Salt Lake City. Personally, I think it looks like a fantasy castle drawn by Kelly Freas. Others have different ideas; for a long time, "The Washington, DC Area's Favorite Graffito" was on the railroad bridge over the Beltway right next to the temple; some wag (or wags) painted "Surrender Dorothy" on the bridge. The Powers that Be would paint over it; a few weeks later it would be back. It hasn't been back in a while; I suspect the PtB put the word out that It's Not Funny Any More. They obviously were worried about somebody either falling off onto the Beltway or getting hit by a train. However, last time, the PtB painted it out with nice fresh silver paint that's almost as readable as the graffito version.

At some point, some Mormon with a sense of humor (no, that's not an oxymoron) started slipping green theater gels over the floodlights. First time I saw it, I nearly drove right off the Beltway.

Yeah, we get doorknockers. Impression I've gotten is that they may be getting out of the habit. Reason for doorknocking is to reinforce their status as Outsiders -- if folks know that you're going to preach at them, in general, they won't be very nice to you. This lets the Church say "See? Everybody hates us. We have to stick together". We've come a long way since the 1840s, when it was legal in Missouri to kill Mormons. Nowadays, if most people think about Mormons at all, they assume they're just another bunch of Protestants. To non-Mormon Christian theologians, of course, Mormons are the worst sort of heretics. Their problem; nobody else cares.

Aside -- my wife actually found a new way of getting rid of the doorknockers, (without mentioning their underwear, which isn't really very nice). Let's just say that they were ready for anything except literary criticism.

Anyway, every year they have a Festival of Lights. I've never been; I'm not enthused with the thought of a recreational traffic jam. The pictures are nice, however. Problem is that this Temple was not designed with road access in mind. It's not normally a problem; we are not inundated with huge swarms of Mormons. But at Christmas, they have the lights. Think mile-long jams. Tour busses.

One year, I encountered a tour bus that tried to take a "short cut". Think large cork, small bottle. The driver should have tried to back out; it was only a quarter mile or so. He didn't. Got stuck rather thoroughly. This year, the bridge in that direction is out. I dunno if this is good or bad.

A Descent into Hell

Christmas time is here, by golly!
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when"!

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again!

-- Tom Lehrer

Everyone has their own vision of Hell. Mine is a shopping mall the week before Christmas. I have to by gifts for a whole bunch of people whom I barely know. Family members I don't see often, business collogues, friends met briefly at social events. Each gift must be a unique expression of that person's individuality, while staying within the bounds of their taste and my budget. Everybody else at this mall has a different idea. Their purpose is to run around like human bumper cars, using baby strollers as weapons. Parents are yelling at kids, kids are crying, salespeople are either twitching maniacs or sullen zombies (defense mechanisms, I'm sure.) Over this, the sound system is stuck repeating a syrupy mixture of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

What's that, you say? This sounds like a normal mall? Not my own private visit with Satan Himself (Satan is wearing red long johns with white fake fur trim and is surrounded by hundreds of whiny, sticky children)?

A time of peace, generosity, and brotherhood? Bag that. Save it for the Christmas sermon, on the one day each year that most "churchgoers" actually make it inside a church. More like rudeness and greed, with a side order of aggression.

The surest sign of Christmas is not the mall decorations. Those go up before Halloween. No, it's the sudden, drastic increase of road pushiness. Last year about this time, I got a crease in the fender of my brand new car from somebody in a Ford Godzilla SUV who just had to cut in front of me in a construction zone. Hurt him worse than it did me -- I think he hit the Jersey barrier. A couple of days ago on a normally quiet run up to the local Home Depot I saw two people pull out into traffic from sidestreets without warning, or a hole in traffic. Fortunately, I was not one of the ones who had to take severe evasive action to avoid running into them. Must be Christmas.

I have a big advantage in Christmas shopping. I don't mind walking. Most places really do have enough parking if you're willing to walk a bit. The Christmas road mania extends to parking lots, with cars following shoppers on the way back to their cars, ready to lunge. For a Good Time, walk down a row of cars, and then cut between cars over to the next row. If you want to see a real example of Parking Lot Rage, just put your packages into the car trunk and go back to the mall. In both cases, the people following you feel that you have cheated them out of their birthright of a Parking Place and are furious about it; in the first case, you're out of the way and they don't know where your car is.

Selecting gifts? After five minutes in the mall, everything I see looks like trash and I can barely remember the names on the shopping list, let alone their personalities. I want to take an ax and start chopping up tacky decorations, yelling parents, screaming children, and anybody else within reach. Including myself (Note to self: Don't take ax to mall.)

I don't do well with shopping, anyway. I have trouble buying things for myself; I'm totally clueless as to what other people need/like/want/won't throw up at the sight of.

Oh, well, the lights are nice.

Somebody wake me up the first week in January.

Sneakers, update

Got a comment from a correspondent that's worth repeating. The idea in "Sneakers" is that Web pages are so bad because Web designers can't read. Seems it's even worse than I thought:

Another problem with the graphic designer not paying attention to the text is that, to the extent that the text is important, the graphic design should guide the reader's attention from one part of the screen to another in some reasonable way. The text isn't just blocks of stuff to be moved around.

Unfortunately, it too often is. Try to follow a (paper) magazine article some time. You'll find little snippets of text all over the place. Like Web pages, I suspect that they're trying to get the maximum number of ads in front of your eyeballs.

Hmm. I guess graphic designers for paper media can't read either.

On Splitting Firewood

It's nice to deal with a problem that really can be solved by hitting something with an ax.

If it doesn't work, you really do need a bigger hammer.

Quote of the Day

"A mango is what you would get if the Department of Defense designed fruit."

-- Dave Barry

(If you need this explained, go down to your Friendly Neighborhood Grocery Store and buy a mango. If they don't have mangos, you need to find a new Friendly Neighborhood Grocery Store. They're best when they're just starting to get a bit soft. Then (snicker) take it (giggle) home, and (hysterical laughter) eat it! Delicious. Really.

One of the traditional ways to eat mangos is in the nude. In the bathtub. After you eat one, you'll know why.)

The Harvest of the Moon

All the husbands and the wives
We were dancing for our lives
All to the tune of Elsie Marley
Instead of gathering up our differences
And throwing them in the air
And giving them to the wind that shakes the barley

And the children they were watching
Every girl and every boy
As we danced to the tune of Elsie Marley
But they'd heard another tune
From the harvest of the moon
That rides upon the wind that shakes the barley

Then Bridget she declared
That she was not prepared
To watch us dance to the tune of Elsie Marley
She said I'll sing you all a song
And you'll want to sing along
If you listen to the wind that shakes the barley

And the song that she sang
Could be heard for miles around
The air was full of harmony
You should have heard the sound
As we gathered up our differences
And threw them in the air
And gave them to the wind that shakes the barley

All the husbands and the wives
We were dancing for our lives
All to the tune of Elsie Marley
Until we gathered up our differences
And threw them in the air
And gave them to the wind that shakes the barley

Then all of us declared
That we were not prepared
To dance our lives away with Elsie Marley
For we'd heard another tune
From the harvest of the moon
That rides upon the wind that shakes the barley

And the song that we sang
Could be heard for miles around
The air was full of harmony
You should have heard the sound
As we gathered up our differences
And threw them in the air
And gave them to the wind that shakes the barley.

-- Recorded on Time, by Steeleye Span.

Nuthin' more I can say. Nuthin' more needs be said.