Happy Holidays!

“Happy Holidays” is a nice, safe greeting for this time of year, but, really, it's not distinct enough. Greetings like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Chanukah” are reasonably unique. But 'Happy Holidays' isn't even unique in its first three syllables, as I discovered the hard way today. I'm still cringing, every time I remember what I said to my supermarket clerk this morning: Happy Halloween!”

Acting alone ...

As I started reading about Bernard Madoff, I told my wife that something didn't make sense here. The guy's seventy, but he would have to be a computer whiz to pull off what he did. But it seems he probably IS a computer whiz. He was an important pioneer in forcing the the big exchanges to computerize trading.

But I do not believe he acted alone. Sheesh!

Just so you know where I'm coming from: I don't believe in big conspiracy theories. If more than a few people are involved, the whole thing becomes known. But I don't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, either.

Oh, one more thing: Someone tell the New York Times to stop using that Hang Dog Picture they keep using of Madoff. There have to be pictures that make him look as evil as he's alleged to be.

And one more thing: Keep your eye on that $50B estimate of how much money his scheme was worth. That estimate comes from the master of befuddlement himself, Bernie M. The real number might have a different number of digits.

I come to bury Car Czar, not to bail him:

I come to this party a little late, but I want to complain about the idea of a “car czar”, because you can rule this silly idea out on purely managerial grounds.

The American automobile companies are large companies. Companies. I'm emphasizing this for a reason. They each have a fairly hierarchical structure that enables them to make decisions with an audit trail for responsibility. As everyone who has studied companies knows, it's important to avoid kicking decision-making high up the ladder. Empowering lower level managers enables the people who understand the problems to solve them efficiently. If the leader of your company (or division) makes all the important decisions, then the whole company (or division) cannot advance faster than the work of that single manager. Requests for decisions pile up and the company plods along like a tortoise.

Now you may be asking, what about the president of each company? Doesn't the buck stop with him? (Or, outside the American auto industry: her?) No, most of the bucks stop way below the top. For example, Peter Drucker has said that the job of the president of a large company is to decide what that company should be doing in five or ten years. That's plenty of work right there.

If we have a car czar, then some of the most important decisions of the three large companies will get stuck waiting for his or her attention. These won't be simple decisions requiring a quick flip of the coin, either. The Car Czar is likely to give each issue the attention it deserves, plus the coming-up-to-speed that it deserves. You can pretty much guarantee that any auto company waiting for the car czar will fall far behind the rest of the industry.

A simpler way to elect the president by popular vote:

In a Nov. 20 editorial, “Flunking the Electoral College”, the Times asserted that in order to ensure that presidents are elected by the majority popular vote, we must amend the constitution. But that extreme action is not needed. Instead, both the Democratic and Republican parties can require their electoral candidates to take a pre-election oath: that if they go to the Electoral College, they will vote for the winner of the popular vote. Electors have great freedom in exercising their vote. If the majority of electors keep this oath, the popular vote will decide the election.

Now the really neat part is that both parties should be willing to do as I suggest. Election by popular vote means that each party can campaign where its votes are, instead of campaigning in the swing states. That's got to be cheaper to do, and a lot more fun for the campaigners.

Podcast Parity:

I've been following the podcast world for almost three years. The podcast universe is a trifle more organized than the blogiverse, because it takes more effort to assemble a podcast item than a blog entry. There are incredibly casual podcasters, but at the other extreme, there are podcast people who are trying to get enough respect to monetize their casts.

Remarkably, those serious podcasters have caught up to the more traditional print media. Here's how things stand: podcasters are making little to $nothing$, while newspapers and magazines are losing hundreds of million$. Not bad, not bad.

The passing obituary:

If the newspaper business starts to die, one of its terrible casualties will be the star obituary. You've surely noticed, unless you can't bear to read an obit, that as soon as a famous person dies, newspapers print a wonderful, long, well-researched obituary. These articles are prepared in advance, and kept up to date, by reporters who somehow have time to work on them. In many cases, the featured people have been contacted about their obits, and may even have helped to write them. These short bios can be quite wonderful to read, so I'm sorry to say that I don't know who will write them in the future. Perhaps Wikipedia will fill this void, but even then, I doubt it will be the same.

Entertainment Value:

The goal of professional sports leagues is to make money by providing entertainment. The sports rulers have thought up some beauties for us to enjoy, but it's not easy to top the Plaxico Burress adventure. We will have a few months to wonder why he is pleading Not Guilty to shooting himself in the leg. Theories abound.

We can discard the idea that since his leg was already injured, he had to put it down. A more logical possibility is that he was wrestling with himself, trying to take the gun away when it went off. Or ... gee, I don't know. But the next time I'm stuck on a long checkout line at the supermarket, I'll be trying to think of some reason, instead of planning my next novel.

Plaxico, you have the best name in professional sports; maybe you have the best name, period. Why did you have to try to top yourself?

The Solution to the Financial Crisis

Henry Paulson announced today that he is lending $800 Billion to himself, to end the financial crisis. Skepticism has been expressed, but Paulson says, "Please give my plan some time. Hey, it might work."

Routine Versus Glasses:

When I go to the health club to swim, I follow a regular routine. It's pretty rare for me to vary from it. What fascinates me is how much my habit militates against my glasses, which spend most of the time in my locker. I'm very near-sighted, but I like to look at what's going on. Without my glasses, my field of interest gets very narrow and boring. Here's what happens in my routine:
ONE: I shower. No glasses here. If they get wet, it will be hard to read through them.
TWO: I sit in the hot tub for ten minutes and read. (Of course I read second-hand cheap, cheap or free books here, the wet heat ruins them.) I wear my glasses, but only because little bits of interesting things happen all over the pool complex. I can read just as well without my glasses here, because sitting in the hot tub makes me tilt my head back to use the bifocal reading portion of the lenses.
THREE: I swim. I used to wear my glasses while swimming. I have wrap-around ear pieces that hold them on. But the first time I swam fifty minutes, I discovered that the chlorinated water is hell on my eyes. Now I wear prescription goggles.
FOUR: I spend five minutes in the steam room. No point to glasses here. I could just set the glasses down beside me, but they would be easy to sit on in the fog.
FIVE: I shower. No glasses.
SIX: I dry off in the sauna. If I had glasses now, I'd have to hold them while I dry. I wouldn't set them on the hot, hot benches.
SEVEN: I weigh myself. The scale readout is above my waist; no glasses needed here.
EIGHT: I dress up, including my glasses.

Was this entry boring? If so: I'm sorry.

Blackberry USA:

Columnists are having a lot of fun with their expectation that president-elect Barack Obama's Blackberry will have to be removed from him when he enters office. The democrats won't be like the current administration was, they will play by all the rules for secure, backed-up-and-saved Email, so the Blackberry has to go. Ah, so shortsighted ...

Now it seems to me that R.I.M. could have seen this coming, months ago. They've had all the time in the world to figure out how to harden their Blackberry communications, for certain designated government people, to conform to all the government regulations for presidential email. Their servers can treat certain people specially; they can manufacture a special model for the president and his special contacts to carry. It appears that R.I.M. is missing their chance to become the “President's smart Device.” Four years from now, I expect one of the smart-phone companies to be ready.

Should you worry about getting a Pink Slip?

In these dangerous times, many people are losing jobs. TV reporters refer euphemistically to people getting "pink slips." I listened recently to a TV personality who stated that millions of Americans are afraid of getting pink slips. I've been laid off a few times, but I've never seen a pink slip. Do they still exist?

By the way, whatever we call it, I hope you all keep your jobs, or soon find even better ones.

SixSexMyths SixSexMyths SixSexMyths ...

Digg linked an article called "6 Sex Myths" at Cracked.com. This article has a peculiar title (not surprising for Cracked.com) because according to them, some of these items are not myths. But I think this is the interesting part:

"Six sex myths" is an awesome tongue-twister. Try saying it fast several times. It ranks up there with Theophilus the thistle twister.

Java Script Helped me a lot yesterday:

Every modern programing language makes it easy to display a message box with a question and a few stock answers (yes, no, cancel, etc.). And this is wrong. Every programming language should make it easy to display a question with the answers appropriate to the question. Programmers get lazy and try to fit the stock answers – somehow – to every situation. That's how I got this awful message box from Mozilla Firefox:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. Stop the script now or continue to see if the script will complete.
The message box offered me these two alternatives: OK and CANCEL.


I wish my choices had been: STOP and CONTINUE.

Why am I in bed with Windows?

Last night I suspected I needed to shut my Windows laptop down and reboot, to fix a problem. So I clicked SHUTDOWN and went off to do some other things. I figured I would give the PC a little rest in its "off" mode

I came back an hour later. Windows had not turned the PC off. It wanted to tell me that the MIM program, about which I care not, did not want to stop. So I had to turn it off manually. I then waited ten minutes and finally decided that Windows was not shutting down properly. I had a blue screen, and power was still on. So I pressed the On/Off button. Ten seconds later, power went off. I rebooted. Windows insisted on running a disk check because of the manual shut down. It found no problems, but it took a good eight minutes to check my whole disk.

Then the laptop came up and desired me to install some windows updates. I checked them out to decide what to do, knowing that if I took the updates, I would probably have to reboot again. After I rejected these updates, Adobe Flash and my anti-virus program both requested updates. Oh, F*** them! I just wanted to do some work.

Hey, thanks for listening!

Google Image search:

I occasionally use Google's Image Search, but for me, it's mostly a curiosity. However, I just used it to solve a serious problem. For the jewish holiday of Sukkot, we build a Sukkah, a temporary structure, to eat in, and -- maybe -- to live in, for a week. The structure consists of aluminum poles (8 and 12 feet long) held together by three-way pipe joints. Several of my joints are "frozen" -- the holding screws cannot be coaxed to turn -- so I decided to buy some more.

Web sites that specialize in sukkah materials will sell the joints to me for $15 apiece. I suspected that was much too pricey, so I went to an enormous hardware store to find my joints. At the hardware store, I discovered that what I want are not plumbing joints and not electriccal joints, and not normal hardware store products. My only hope was to find them on the web. I did a series of image searches. I needed to find a picture of the joints I wanted, because I had no idea who might sell them, or what to call them.

The winning search was: pipe structural fittings "allen wrench" .
(I might have used "joints" but I did not think of that.) The picture popped up at The Diamond Aluminum Company, which sells these joints and the same pipes for do-it-yourself construction projects.

My best playlist ever:

Most Tuesday mornings, I produce a classical music program on WPRB radio from 6 to 8:30 a.m. (Eastern time). You can hear me all over the world. We are on the air at 103.3 FM in much of central Jersey (etc.), but also: You can catch us online at http://www.wprb.com/listen.php, where we offer three easy to record (and even time-shift) audio streams.

I try to put together programs with a lot of variety, good music and good performances. Sometimes I feel that I have created an exceptional playlist. But election day was different: I'm sure I produced my best playlist ever, and now, I'm going to tell you all about it.

My great challenge, which I was unable to solve for days, was: what is classical election day music? I had no idea. But Tuesday morning at 5:20 a.m., I found a theme for my program. No matter who you wanted to win, you felt great pain at the thought of loss; you wanted revenge on the other guys; and you dreamed of unalloyed victory. So that's what it says right in my playlist: WHOEVER WINS: THE PAIN! THE VICTORY!! THE REVENGE!!! I selected music for pain, for pure vengefulness, and for the delight of victory. Here's what I played:

Overture: la forze del destino (Verdi): Fate and vengeance personified in music.

Dissonance quartet, k. 465 in C, 1st mvt (Mozart): Those dissonances were great for the theme of pain.

Ride of the Valkyries (Wagner): On to victory!

der Freischutz, overture (Weber): That free-shot, the bullet that will go wherever it is aimed; great for revenge.

Vallee d'Obermann (Liszt): This music personifies despair. Great for the pain theme.

A song: Ich grolle nicht, from dichterliebe (Schumann): Some of the words: I'm not complaining, even if my heart breaks.

Don Giovanni, overture (Mozart): Revenge!

Funeral march: 1st mvt of symphony #5 (Mahler): The pain.

Requiem, excerpts (Verdi): I played the 'Dies Irae' (day of wrath, day of anger!) and lacrymosa. I used an explosive performance, in which the vengeance of 'dies irae' jumps out of your speakers: The philharmonia orchestra and chorus, conducted by carlo maria giulini .

The Anfortas Wound, from Harmonielehre (John Adams): After a long period of agonizing writer's block, Adams wrote the first movement of his Harmonielehre. After that, he wanted to depict the pain of his writer's block, and he chose to illustrate in sound, the pain of being pierced in the testicles. Very appropriate for my program.

Don Giovanni, cenar teco m'invistasti'. D.G. descends into hell (Mozart):Revenge. I got a little carried away here. I told my listeners that near the end of this music, they would hear the wails of the election loser as he descended into hell. But of course, it was only Don Giovanni wailing. Sorry about that.

A song: Belsatzar, op. 57 (poem by Heine, music by Schumann): Belshazzar curses God, and he doesn't get away with it.

After all that, I felt it was time for a little healing, so I concluded the program with the last movement of Beethoven's 9th.

Please feel free to re-create his program whenever you need it.

Save Energy: Burn Leaves!

Now that I've got your attention, I want to ask: how much energy do we waste by burning leaves? In my little town, I've watched leaf blowers push leaves off of streets and out of parking lots. The blowers burn gasoline of course. Why is it necessary to waste gas to tidy nature up in this way? We have laws limiting the use of water on lawns; why not limit the use of leaf blowers to actual necessity? Many leaves decompose just fine when left on their own.

Full Disclosure: I HATE it when somebody turns on a leaf blower, while I'm trying to record my novel.

How Detectable is Voting Fraud?

Today's timely posting is by a guest author, JG Fellow.

Today, we are holding elections. On November 5th, we will likely be debating the existence of fraud. I believe that we have the tools demonstrate the likelihood that such fraud has taken place. Throughout the elections, via Pollster.com, I have watched the results of every single state and national poll. I have been struck by the stability of the results over the last two weeks. To be sure, two polls of the same state may vary, but there are few states where the projected winner is uncertain.

Based on this wealth of data, we know what to expect on November 4th, but we are, by no means, certain to get it. Pollsters occasionally miss biases, or run in herds. We witnessed this in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary this year. But New Hampshire stood out as an exception. Most state's primary results followed the pre-election polling.

So how do we evaluate those results that differ from our expectations? How can we tell the fraudulent from the unexpected? By examining the results at the voting precinct level. It is certainly possible to falsify election results. But while it is possible to lie, it is very difficult to lie well. It is incredibly difficult to generate a fake set of data that continues to look real upon scrutiny. How do I know this? Experience.

Both professionally and personally, I have performed hundreds of Monte Carlo simulations. This is a process whereby you define some rules and roll some dice. If I roll a 6, David Ortiz hits a home run. If I roll a 1, unemployment rises. I have simulated baseball, basketball, football, car accidents, occupational injuries and even terrorist activity. The tragedy of my experience is that I can always find some level on which my generated data fails to replicate reality. While my hitters may meet my expectations, Mariano Rivera ends up as an average pitcher. While the average cost of a car accident is correct, the chance of a $10,000,000 car accident is too high. The first, second and third test of my data may look reasonable, but there will always be a fourth, fifth or sixth.

I have faith in my fellow Americans, and even more faith in checks and balances. But most important, I have faith that such fraudulence could not be done in secret. I would urge major news outlets to work with statisticians to validate the reasonability of the outcome of this election, and I look forward to today with no fear that a crime shall go unwitnessed.

Somebody Else's Risk (2):

Ender left a good comment on my post about Somebody Else's Risk. There's an interesting counter-argument to my posting: you could say that since I believe myself a good programmer, I SHOULD take on these life-risk programs, because I will do them better than the other guy. At the time, I instinctively mistrusted this argument. After the many years that have passed since then, I think I know why. It's the nature of computer products that every good one is duplicated many times. People rush to fill every perceived niche to overflowing, whether it's an operating system, blogging software, or an email system. Each time I decide to take the risk of writing software where people's lives are at risk, I am ADDING one more approach to all the others. I'm not doing it instead of someone else, and there's little risk that the software I contribute to will be so good that it chases all the inferior ones away. And the bugs I leave in my software may affect some unlucky person.

Writing software, or doing any work, where the quality affects people's lives, is simply a grave responsibility that has to be taken seriously.

Supernatural Cleaning Methods:

Joyce Wadler has written a delightful piece in the New York Times about getting ghosts out of houses, called Supernatural Cleaning Methods. As you read it, I think you will suspect that you are enjoying it almost as much as the editor who wrote the subheadings.

She wanted a divorce:

When I was twelve, I read a thin book of funny letters that people had written to lawyers. I remember exactly one letter from this book. Unlike everything else in it, this one caught my attention enough to make it come back to me, every dozen years or so:

I want a divorce. I'm not sure my husband is the father of my children.

Well, duh. Who could be that dumb? At age twelve, I knew the facts of life better than she did. Now why did this letter stick in my mind? Setting aside the possibility that the entire book was fiction – a possibility that never occurred to me in my youth – the letter always bothered me. There had to be some other explanation. Nobody is that dumb.

Perhaps the letter kept coming back to me as a demand that I must solve its puzzle. Well, I think I've solved it. The only fault of the woman who wrote the letter is that she did not have the capability of expression by writing*. I will explain by rewriting her letter, and then I will explicate. I'm adding exactly one word:

I want a divorce. I'm not sure my husband is only the father of my children.

In other words, the woman suspects that her husband is also the father of other women's children. Definitely grounds for divorce! I feel much better now.


* By the way, in 1974, when I needed to hire a hardware designer, I read many resumes, including one that ended thus: I also have the capability of expression by writing. We didn't hire him, even though he was able to design hardware.

Somebody Else's Risk:

Throughout my forty-six year software development career, I have tried to avoid working on products that can kill people if the software has certain kinds of bugs. I deeply sympathize with the programmer of the Three-Mile Island alarm detection system, who failed to anticipate how the alarm terminal would work when the software was overwhelmed by hundreds of concurrent alarms. (The terminal printed a stream of question marks, rather than any sensible error message.) Some years later, I interviewed this fellow for a job; I think he's a good programmer and a nice guy. But an unanticipated disaster really put his work on the spot.

In the current financial crisis, I've been reading complaints about how people must have underestimated the most extreme (very unlikely but real) risks that their deals created. But I believe that most of these people understood the rare risks. They also understood that these risks were other people's risks. (I believe that most of the financiers who brought us to our current crisis are still better off than 99.9% of the US population. For them, this disaster is mostly 'other people's disaster'.)

The bottom line of this meandering introduction is that it's praiseworthy to be concerned, in your work, about risks to others that you may create; but an awful lot of people don't worry about other people's risks. That's human nature, and it's very hard, as China with its tainted milk supply is discovering, to do much about it. And now, my story:

In the 1970's I worked on a computer system, one of the first of its kind, to automate Electro Cardiogram analysis. This work came to me, I didn't choose it. I worked at it carefully, always worried about the chance that my software would cause someone's EKG analysis to produce a false negative. (A cardiologist always reviewed the results of the computer analysis, but you never know: what if the doctor was distracted that day?)

One customer came to us with a special request: that we program our computer to receive EKG data from some old EKG machines the customer already owned. We did not like those machines because the data they produced was very noisy and led to many incorrect results. We pointed this out to the customer. Our customer contact felt that this was our problem. He worked for a big company that manufactured many high tech products, and he brought in the company's top trouble-shooting team to figure out why our analyses, using his machines, were poor. The troubleshooters argued convincingly that there was nothing wrong with our software. The culprit was the noisy data coming out of the old EKG machines. The customer paid us for our work, and then, holy s—t! He set up a service bureau to process EKGs using his noisy machines.

I and my coworkers felt that whatever happened would not be our fault, but the situation really bothered us. Our name, and the prestigious name of the guy who developed the analysis program, stood behind this faulty service bureau. Who was going to die by relying on the quality of our work? I wondered if we had a moral obligation to try, somehow, to expose this faulty service bureau. Any such action could produce nasty litigation, and could only be a desperate last resort. But what should we do?

Our salesman nosed around the industry, talking to cardiologists and other EKG service bureaus. He reported that the poor quality of the analyses by this worrisome service bureau was obvious to everyone. They were getting business, but only of a special kind: medical schools and some hospitals used their system for training purposes, to get people used to processing remote EKG analyses. We breathed a great sigh of relief.

Lefties Rule?

Here's a picture of my new PDA, the Nokia N800. You can easily see most of the “real” buttons on this device. A few more are not quite visible at the top left edge. I've found a game I like to play on this machine that requires quick reflexes. The game is controlled by pressing some of the “real” buttons. I play moderately well, but the buttons I must use are a problem because they are very close together; I often press a wrong one by accident. But here's the real problem: Why was this PDA built for lefties? If the buttons were all on the right, my better hand would play more skilfully. I'm sure the guy who designed the N800 package is a lefty.

Big Foibles

Last July, I blogged about the silly efforts I always make to avoid picking out a thin towel at the fitness club; I prefer newish towels with thick nap that will dry more efficiently. I regarded my efforts to select desirable towels as mere foibles, because it was unlikely that there was any variation in the towels at all.

Well.

Today I casually grabbed what was obviously a “thin” towel. It lay flat, without the thick fold I always prefer. I knew it looked thin, but my tired mind said “for goodness sakes, what difference does it make?” And you know what I got? An old, thin towel. Almost napless, a pitiable thing to dry a wet body. From now on, I'm going to follow my own advice.

The Entrails of Vacuum Cleaner Bags:

An earring disappeared inside our home, and shortly afterwards, the whole house was vacuumed. I spread out a set of newspapers and emptied the vacuum bag over them. Then I went carefully through the ash, sifting – unsuccessfully – for that earring.

I've hardly ever done that before, but examining vacuum cleaner detritus struck me as a most natural activity. My father did it every the time the vacuum was emptied, when I and my brother were young, because we were little devils about putting small things in inappropriate places. I don't know what he found, but it sure was enough to keep him looking.

Ladies (and men) with Earrings and Earbuds:

From time to time, I uncover some problem in this universe, and I'm pleased when my proposed solution creates new jobs, new work for people, and even new professions. I've done this before, and I might be about to do it again:

My concern is directed to those who love to wear lovely, dangly earrings. People, I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, but your earrings clash hideously with the cheap plastic cords that hang from your earbuds! Have you ever thought about how this clash demeans your excellent jewelry?

The next time you buy earrings, insist on matching earbuds and cords. Color coordination is everything these days, and despite whatever you've been thinking, earbuds are jewelry. I'm serious about this! As a confirmed geek, I hate to see any aspect of electronics detract from anyone's appearance.

Should I join GRUG? Or how about a RUG?

Noblestar has just invited me to join GRUG. Or, they suggest, I might even want to join a local RUG. I think these acronyms are right up there on the embarassment scale, so I hasten to share them with you. I guess they are memorable, anyway. "GRUG" is the Global Rational User Group, and the acronym makes sense when you consider that 'Rational' is a valuable tool for developing complex software. In this case, I plan to remain one of the Global Rational User Non-Group Egalitarians. Just see if I don't.

Construction; and flipping the ticket:

There's a lot of construction at the local University. I saw a sign today on a road that's normally two-way. It said: Warning: One Way Traffic Ahead. Drivers approaching the sign were laughing about having to guess which 'one way' the University had in mind, because there was no arrow.

And speaking of finding our direction, here's Frank Rich on Oct. 4, about how convenient it might be for the Republicans to flip McCain and Pailin, to get more votes. If you don't believe what I wrote about Sarah Palin last Thursday, please believe it now.

Shopping While Jersey:

Dear New York Mayor What'sYourName: I know that this is a difficult time for New York City. You can no longer count on a great flow of dollars from your Wall Street minions. You must want us New Jerseyans to come into New York and spend whatever we can. I specifically remember mayor Giuliani asking us to help out after 9/11.

But I'm also staring, in infinite sadness, at the “no standing” ticket for $105 dollars that was just mailed to me, for picking up my wife next to one of your fine stores. Your zealousness in enforcing parking regulations for brief stops is most shortsighted. My wife and I have lost almost all interest in shopping New York. We will spend our money in New Jersey, where most stores have places to park. Too bad for you! We are disgusted.

Palin in 2012 or 2016:

The pundits are trying to assess how well Sarah Palin did in the debate tonight, but I say: that's not the point. She has just shattered a glass ceiling, and American politics will never be the same. Whatever you think of a woman's credentials for high office, Palin reminded us that television just loves a pretty face. If Palin had more experience and understanding, just put her on TV and she would blow away most men in a presidential race. I'm not the only person who's figuring this out. Palin can spend the next four or eight years in training. She'll still look good, too. She, and a few other pretty women – smarter and more experienced women, I hope – will be the new candidates for president in the coming elections. I just hope and pray that their “TV faces” won't be their best qualifications.

Millionaires of our part of the world, Unite!

This would be an awfully good time for all those executives of Immense USA Companies -- who've earned millions of dollars per year in return for destroying our economy -- to get together and pool some of their dough into funds for rescuing people who can't pay their mortgages. These wonderfully rich people have at least a few weeks to act on their own before people who are losing their mortgages start to feel really nasty.

The failure of the first bailout vote in the House was blamed -- at least in part -- on people's visceral anger against giving these money-suckers any more money. But why should those rich people appear so awful to the public eye? Why aren't they forming very visible organizations to use some of their wealth to rescue some of their, ahem, victims?

Filthy rich people, where are you? Can't you afford to be generous right now? How long do you propose to ponder the question? You may not have a handy $700 billion among you, but you can make a difference.