(Underscore mine.) Plainly, these folk were not doing everything that they could. There was an established problem of the animals being spooked by the fireworks, but no one was there to care for the animals during a time that fireworks were to be expected. The staff failed grossly, but they're pointing their fingers away from themselves. I don't know whether they're just too stupid to recognize their own failure, or proceed now from a lack of integrity.

English Leather used to be a major brand of men's grooming products. The English Leather brand was introduced by the House of Dana in 1949. I'm not sure exactly what happened to the brand, but in 1995, les Parfums de Dana was acquired by Renaissance Cosmetics, Inc, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999 and was acquired by Fragrance Express, Inc, which creäted New Dana Perfumes Corporation with the portfolio. In 2003, Dana Classic Fragrances, a company closely associated with New Dana Perfumes Corporation and principally owned by the CEO of New Dana Perfumes Corporation, bought the fragrance brand portfolio of New Dana Perfumes Corporation.

And yester-day, in my mail-box, I got a different sort of indication of the fate of the brand.

The junkiest of the junk-mail that I get comes in a form rather like newspaper inserts. On the back page on such an assemblage, was an advertisement for English Leather® hats. Here's a version that I found on-line of pretty much the same advertisement: I don't know how English Leather comes to be used to brand extraordinarily tasteless hats, whether this be a hijacking or Dana having left a back-door unsecured. But this is a brand either in free fall or in grave danger of becoming so.

Relatively speaking, it has been cold and raining a great deal in the San Diego area. Certainly it has been raining more than in most of the Decembers through which I've lived here, and possibly more than any other.

One good thing is that I get to wear my duster.

But my understanding is that Babycakes has been taking a hit from the weather, with fewer customers. I think that part of the issue is that, while the efforts of the owners to attract new customers have produced some positive results, the new customers whom they have attracted don't have a sense of attachment to the place; in the meantime, changes have weakened the sense of attachment held by the established customers.

For example, most of the indoor seating for customers is in a single, long room. The owners have tried to give things a cozier feeling be partitioning that room with curtains. But the rental computers are on one side of those curtains, and the tables used by those with note-book computers are on the other; practicalities divide friends, and thus the sense of the place as one where one is with friends is eroded.

I don't know how much actual business, over-all, is associated with the WLAN, but the quality of that network has been poor for weeks. The router was moved into a back-building to allow for renovation of the room in which the router was previously located. And that back-building seems to work largely as an insulating cage. In the front half of the main building and on the front patio, there is no longer any meaningful access to the WLAN. The signal is degraded even on the back patio, and it's only there that the WoW folk can get a sufficient signal for their purposes.

Anyway, in the absence of a stronger sense of attachment and in the context of the bad weather, people just don't come. (And the people who need a solid 'Net connection aren't typically going to set-up their computers where it is cold and wet.) I don't know where the balance is to be struck, but I think that the owners need to improvise quickly, to restore at least somewhat the relationship of their business to its established customers. I think that the baristi should be told to open or to close the partitioning curtains according to their judgment about what sort of customers are present, and I think that the wireless router needs to be moved out of the back building and into a more central location, perhaps in the second story of the main building.

(Underscore mine.) The selection of Warren is, one way or another, an illustration of Obama as triangulator — someone who cobbles-together a plurality based upon a reading of demographics and of polls, with little regard for the vision thing.

I don't know to what extent the present rank-and-file of the Democratic Party will tolerate an alliance with social conservatives of any sort; but, again, politics tends to be tribalistic. Many Democrats will find formulæ to rationalize cleaving to the Party as it now further intrudes into the bedroom as well as into the boardroom. Some will argue that the Republicans have forced such alliances upon the Democrats. Others will persuade themselves that they have to stick with Obama or lose any chance at progressive policy in any area.

If the Democrats succeed in forging such ties, the Republicans will have considerable trouble off-setting the lost numbers with classical liberals, who have been terrifically alienated by what the Republicans actually did while in power. Not, though, that there's really anywhere else for the classical liberals to go now, since the Libertarian Party sold-out for a cupful of thin, red stew.

I'm not sure whether das Erwerbslosen Forum Deutschland believes that it is better to pay affluent people than poor people, or believes that die Ratten should be left unmolested. I am, however, sure that, if a €1 bounty is placed on rats, then people will raise rats for the bounty.

I haven't followed everything that has been said about the proposed bail-out of the major American automobile manufacturers, and I don't know whether the principal point that I'm going to make below has been much noticed.

It is quite natural for people to hold that, if the manufacturers are given a major infusion of financial capital, then they should surrender some control to the creditors; that if the manufacturers are given a bail-out by Congress, then Congress ought to be able to impose some changes in practices and in policies, to ensure that tax-payers are in some way repaid.

But ownership is no more or less than a right of control, and to the extent that control is transferred, ownership is surrendered. What we are then discussing, however we might put it, is nationalization, albeït perhaps only partial nationalization, whether it is called this or not.

Once the automobile industry is nationalized, management of that industry becomes another government programme, with a large bloc of voters fairly directly dependent upon that programme for their incomes. A sizeable portion of this bloc will insist upon indefinite guarantees concering employment and income. The industry would likely become another third rail of the political system, virtually untouchable unless it is to expand the benefits received by the beneficiaries. Further, conceptualizing what amounts to a transfer programme (welfare) as a manufacturing programme will consume additional resources, which really ought to go into other projects. It would literally be more efficient to pay some or all of the automobile workers to stay home than to pay them to make some or all of the vehicles that they would make; but, by golly, the illusion of productivity will trump the reälity of waste.

Because the political significance of a transfer programme is positively correlated with its direct economic benefits to recipients, the stronger are the initial guarantees of employment and of income, the more powerful will be the abiding political effect of the programme. The Republican insistance that a bail-out provide for swift wage cuts probably speaks to some awareness that the bloc of voters in-question would more naturally align with the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the White House discussion of doing an end-run to provide a bail-out from other funds may be an attempt to head-off later action by Congress when the Democrats assume the more sizeable majorities from the last elections. Giving money to the manufacturers with fewer strings attached puts less of a programme in place.

I wonder just how long it's going to take the typical Obama supporter to move on from Denial to Anger…

…or if, indeed, they ever will. Much of politics has a sort of tribalism to it, under which people care far less about policies than they do about whether the coälition with whom they have identified themselves is in power. My friend Ronald once noted that, in some political factions, a willingness to turn on a dime when it comes to doctrine is often seen as the true test of merit.

A 4.1 'quake hit at 33.498°N 116.865°W, at 12:35:42 UTC. I felt it here in Hillcrest, and started checking the USGS SoCal 'quake map, fearing that a population center had been hit by something big. Fortunately, the 'quake wasn't all that strong, and the population density at the surface above the epicenter was very low (even before the 'quake).

[Up-Date (2008:11/21): I was asleep when a 5.0 'quake hit Baja Calfornia yester-day, and don't recall feeling it.]

As previously mentioned, one of my Corsair Voyager 8GB USB flash drives has failed.

Christophe Grenier's TestDisk was unable to locate a partition table. But his PhotoRec is racing through the drive recovering various sorts of files. I am quite pleased and impressed.

Unfortunately, the program has no way of identifying the file names! So the files are all being given new, opaque names.

Addendum (2008:12/17): A recent entry by oddharmonic reminded me to note here that PhotoRec reässembled video files like Frankenstein Flub-a-Dubs. Mind you that there was really no practical way for the program to know what bits belonged together, and the resultant files could be fixed by using a decent video editor to re·splice them.