TriumphAnt

I read on Saturday (September 20) that US President George Bush is seeking Congressional approval to push the US debt, if required, as far as 11.3 trillion dollars to accommodate current and possibly still-to-come Wall Street bailouts. Which of course immediately sent me to Google. And there are lots of fun facts out there aimed at helping one get a handle on just how staggeringly big that number is – to measure anything, not just dollars. It’s only appropriate to open this brief review with a nod to the late Douglas “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Adams to put the scale into perspective:


"Space is big - really big - you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Here are a few bits culled from various internet returns to my Googled query.

So just how big is eleven trillion? Well, first a couple bare facts: One trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 — 10 to the 12th power, or a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand. To put that into some perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.

$11 trillion would be enough money to buy about 11,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every person in the United States. Eleven trillion barrels of oil would — at current consumption levels — fuel the world for about 363 years.

Rendered as pennies, 11 trillion pennies would weigh almost 34 and a half _million_ tons. That number of pennies stacked would yield a column 10.8 million miles high.

11 trillion seconds is almost 350,000 years.

Rendered as miles, travelling 11 trillion miles would get you about halfway to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to earth (after our own glorious sun, of course), about 24,935,791,229,221.34 miles away.

(About? That number, carried to two decimal places, looks like something that Star Trek’s Mr Spock would produce after hesitantly advising the Captain, “I shall make my best guess.”)

Bottom line? Continuing with the Trek theme, the US treasury is about to go where no man has gone before. I think that at the very least it's going to have to come up with something other than “treasury” to call itself, given that the word still implies something to be desired. The US Federal Bank of Black Holery, perhaps? (I would have suggested a three-letter synonym for “donkey” in place of “Black” there, but I understand the White House quietly rebranded itself with that moniker about, oh, eight or so years ago.)

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A quote for the ages (CBC reporter Neil McDonald celebrates his obviously successful graduation from metaphor school...)

Introducing an item on the September 16 CBC-TV Newsworld evening newscast about the triple whammy collapse of Lehman’s Bank, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the US government’s emergency loan to help stave off the rumoured bankruptcy of IAG, Mr McDonald took a deep breath and (I am not making this up) intoned, “As Wall Street’s necrotized corporate flesh sloughs away, anxiety is spreading outward like a virus...”

Leslie and I looked at each other with a shared, “Did we just hear that?” expression on our faces, and we both burst out laughing.

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And while we’re on the subject of thought-provoking quotes.

I recently finished reading, “The Rape of Europa”, by Lynn H Nicholas, which BD readers with even moderately working memories will recall was the book that inspired the really interesting movie of the same name reviewed in a recent Ducknote. The last chapter deals in considerable detail with the enormous logistical problems faced by those – people and governments alike – who sought to undo the continent-wide looting by the Nazis and Italian fascists of the great and lesser-great works of art from the literally thousands of museums, galleries, churches, businesses and even private homes of the countries they occupied – in addition to works “liberated and repatriated for safety” by the Allies as they pushed into Germany from the East and the West. Discovery, recovery and redress is a process still going on to this day, made all the more difficult by the ever-fading provenance archives and ever-shrinking population of those with clear memories. In one section, the author documents some less than scrupulous efforts by art dealers in the occupied countries to hold on to what they had acquired through their dealings with the Nazis.

One’s first thought is to think of them, “You traitorous bastards!”. But then you read a brief paragraph like this one, about a dealer who was found to be in possession of either traded works known to have come from other collections, or profits from the sale of several significant Dutch Masters to the Nazis:

“De Boer hid nothing and maintained that all his sales had been forced, pointing out that his wife and many of the colleagues he helped were Jewish. He said he had charged the Germans ridiculous prices in order to keep the good things in Holland but they had bought anyway. He was not further prosecuted. Who after all was to say where survival ended and collaboration began?”
(p.427)

Who indeed?

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What do you think when you read this headline?:

“CBS Politicians Get Pay Raise”

Well when I read it, I assumed it meant that the network’s political “talking heads”, who interpret political news for us lesser-knowing mortals, had decided that in the torrent of coverage flowing from the current US election campaign, they weren’t getting what they felt they deserved.

But here’s the story – in its entirety – that ran under that headline:

“The politicians who run the Town of Conception Bay South have given themselves a pay raise. The nine members of council will see their salaries go up by about twenty per cent. Mayor Woody French says, while it is a part-time job, he usually logs between 35 and 40 hours a week in the town of 25,000. The mayor will now receive about $27,000 a year. He told VOCM Night Line with Linda Swain, they looked at salaries in other municipalities, and says they fall somewhere in line with Paradise and Mount Pearl.”

I can just see the newsdesk at VOCM Night Line, where the editor read the headline and glibly observed, “No, just run it as ‘CBS’. No need to pad it. Everyone knows it means ‘Conception Bay South’.” Of course, what would you expect from a news service whose own call sign, “VOCM”, is the abbreviation for “Voice Of the Common Man”?

Why yes, we are the centre of the universe in fact. Thank you for asking.

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(It’s dead, Jim.)

As part of the process of gently improving the look and liveability of our kitchen, we recently decided to buy a small flat-screen TV for which a countertop corner is ideally positioned. It’s amazing how much time we spend there in the act of preparing, or cleaning up after meals – not to mention actually consuming them, so we figured why not. (We’ve had a tiny standard TV for years and, like a great many others, have succumbed to the infinitely better picture quality offered by the flat screen. Not to mention the much smaller volume of space required to support a comparative screen size in flat screen vs the much heavier, bulkier standard picture tube box.)

The first one we bought was, I am told, a reliable name: LG. After taking it out of the box, setting it up (a process that involved assembling and fastening the support stand to the underside of the screen) and turning it on, in about a second and a half, we noted the appearance of a tiny, but persistent, red dot in the lower left corner. It was harder to spot when that part of the screen was awash in brightness, but whenever the scene turned dark, that little red dot assumed the visual predominance of a professor’s lecture theatre laser pointer.

After muttering darkly, I completely disassembled the TV and repackaged it for return to the store.

(Oh, and a warning: whenever you unpack brand new electronics, do so with only minimal destruction of the original box and packing material. And pay attention to the order in which everything comes out of the box. Because it’s conceivable that you’re going to have to put everything right back into the box again in very short order, in the reverse order in which you removed it, after running your new, quality appliance through its post-installation warm-up.)

So back to Audiotronic I went (I mention the name because I have nothing bad at all to say about these guys – they’re good and readily attentive to a customer’s specific needs. And I now can vouch for an outstanding minimal-questions-asked return policy. Granted, it was the very next day, but the ease with which they sent me on my way with a replacement – a SONY Bravia – was greatly appreciated.)


But back to the LG’s little red dot. When I described it to the tech who fielded my return visit, he said, “Oh yes, that’s a dead pixil.”

I recall the good old days when a product went out a factory door only after it had been thoroughly inspected, often with an “Inspected by Number XYZ” slip inside the packaging when you opened it. Given the sped with which I spotted it, something like a “dead pixil” should have set off alarm bells right at the flaw-detection station at the exit door at the end of LG’s assembly line. But no; into the box it went and out into the great wide world o’ retail.

(And, I might add by way of closing this story, back into the box and back to the store it went, and now LG sits way down my list as an electronics brand I will consider in future. As Tom Peters once observed in remarking on the gleaming seat tray he folded down on a flight, “Had that tray been dirty, you might see just a coffee stain; but more likely you will see an airline that can’t be trusted to manage the really important things like engine maintenance if they can’t even handle keeping their seat trays clean.” If LG lets such an obviously dead pixil-infected TV leave their factory, what does that say about the myriad other features of all their sophisticated electronics?)

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Guys, if your story is about education, fer chrissakes!...

“Immigrants’ kids top univerasity grads”

(Headline – exactly as rendered – on an education-related story in the Regina Leader-Post, September 23)

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A random wondering, Given that it does mean “possessed of excellence”, why do wristwatch manufacturers never refer to their upscale chronographs as “timeless”?

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And finally, under the “WTF is the MATTER with people?!!” title this time,

"City councillors approved a Montessori school on Jockvale Road yesterday, ignoring objections of neighbours who said they didn't want to hear the noise of children." (Ottawa Citizen, September 24)

Thank heavens cooler heads prevailed:

"City planners supported the rezoning, saying, 'The sound of children playing is not an unacceptable noise for a residential neighbourhood.'"

I guess if curmudgeonly old farts pushing their lardy butts around on their rider lawnmowers during daylight hours is OK, then so too is the sound of kids at recess. A hip and a hip and a hooray to the Ottawa City Council.

À la next time.