Years ago, when I was pursuing a master's degree at IUPUI, I routinely listened to WTTS, which transmitted out of Bloomington but usually came-in quite clear, and which had one of the best play-lists of the many radio stations to which I've listened in my life.

They occasionally played a grim song, with lyrics such as

You've got nothin' but bad intentions
You've got somethin' to prove
You've got nothin' but bad intentions
Baby, it's your move

(or something very close to those) and made repeated use of a sample from Body and Soul (1947) where Charlie Davis (John Garfield) says What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies.

But I couldn't remember who performed it; and, over the last several years, my googling of the lyrics or of the sampling have not identified the song.

Yester-day, I telephoned WTTS for help. I was told that the man to ask was Todd Berryman, but that he was on vacation until to-day. This morning, I called again and was promptly connected to Mr Berryman. He didn't have the answer at his finger-tips, but he ran various checks against references to which he had access, and gave me a short-list of candidates, one of which was Bad Intentions by Robbie Robertson.

To-night, I found that Robertson's Bad Intentions was part of the sound-track for Jimmy Hollywood (1994), and was released to radio stations to promote the film; and IMDb says that Jimmy Hollywood referenced Body and Soul.

There's still a tiny chance that this song isn't the one that I've tried to identify, but I'm really quite sure that, thanks to Mr Berryman and to WTTS, my question has been answered. (I've ordered a copy of the promotional CD, so you'll read about it if I'm mistaken.)

While I was visiting the Woman of Interest during the second week of May, I had a hold placed on my mail. During that time, a CD arrived dall'Italia. Unfortunately, some time between then and when the carrier attempted to deliver it, it went missing within the local postal facility. Finally, on Friday or on Saturday, I found a note in my mailbox declaring that they'd made a final attempt at delivery — the package requiring my signature (rather than that of the apartment complex manager) for some reason — and would hold the thing until 22 June. I wasn't thrilled, but I had two other reasons to go to the post office to-day anyway. I had a package to send to the Woman of Interest (which package holds two devilish rubber ducks and a fair quantity of jelly beans), and needed a small money order to pay for a purchase made by way of eBay.

Also in my box on Friday or on Saturday was a note that the complex office had a package for me, which package contained A Drawing Manual by Thomas Eakins, a volume of lectures by Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises that had been absent from my collection, and a DVD of In the Heat of the Night (1967).

At Bronx Pizza this evening, someone spotted a dollar left on the floor; I knew who had probably dropped it, and gave it to her. Not exactly the scenario of one of my polls, but quite close.

Later, at David's Coffee Place, I noticed a group of four people whom I've seen there on prior occasion, again discussing a business venture built around a social networking site. I won't name their site here, because I really don't wish them ill, but to me, they seemed foredoomed to failure. First, centralized social networking already has some heavy hitters, and if this new site has useful innovations then they are going to have a hard time avoiding imitation by those established players. Second, the group of four only have one actual programmer, and the others don't seem to have a prior background in the business side of any similar venture; further, the programmer doesn't seem to have the personal connections to the other three that they have to each other. Third, I over-heard mention of a failed attempt to secure funding, which would have stuck them with a 35% APR — such debt doubles in less than 2 years and four months.

During the first weeks of May, my hummingbird feeder didn't get much use. In the last few days though, the sugar water has been depleted rapidly.

The hummingbirds that I now see at it appear to be a different variety from those that I saw at it previously through the last year. These are much smaller and more plainly colored. They also seem more willing to accept the possibility that I have no aggressive intentions.

Yester-day, one arrived at the feeder as I was stepping out of my apartment. I paused and said hello (which is actually a way of trying to distinguish my behavior from that of a predator hoping to be unnoticed before it strikes). It decided to drink. It hovered for a while as it did so, but eventually sat to drink, with its back to me. It was too small to reach the hole if sitting on the circular rest at the bottom of the feeder, and so it sat on the rim of the floret around the hole.

After it finished, we went on our respective ways.

My latest review of Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) has been deleted from Kudzu and when I tried to repost it now, instead of absurd messages about failed searches I got this message:

We're sorry

Your previous review of this business location has been deleted by the Kudzu.com team.
You won't be able to write another review for this location.

For more on our rules regarding reviews, please see our Visitor Agreement and Guidelines for Writing Reviews.

So, plainly, Kudzu is an advertising site masquerading as a review site. No big deal. The more significant result of the exercise was earlier catching Geek Available lying about not using parts got from eBay; I'll be using that later.

On 27 May, after Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) moved their page on Kudzu, I posted a new review:

Beware!

Instead of buying repair parts through reputable channels, Rodrigo Pereira (owner of GeekAvailable) uses eBay account "rodrafael" (which, as you can check, used to be named "geekavailable"), to buy questionable parts from unreliable dealers, without telling his customers that he is doing so. When things go wrong, Rod doesn't take responsibility; he lies and stalls and misses appointments. My computer was supposed to be repaired in about 72 hours; thanks to Rod Pereira I lost two weeks.

To-day, Rod Pereira posted a new response with a new version of events:

Dear Daniel McKiərnan, this kind of part can be found with the same 6 months warranty for $30 on ebay or way more through Dell (not even counting on the waiting time). We didn't lie when we told you that we would be on shop on Saturday, but as you can see on our business hours, we don't open on saturdays and unfortunately you got to our shop too late without any calls in advance. We could never realize you would still come and couldn't wait for the whole day as we were only organizing the shop. We told you to come as we wanted you to have your laptop back ASAP. And actually, you didn't lose 2 weeks. You dropped your computer on May 15th and instead of having the parts here on 72business hours (on May/20th) it got here on May/23rd,^[1] the same day you called yelling at the lady that you wouldn't wait anymore. Following my instructions, she just told you that would return the computer back to you as you demanded since you were extremely rude and unpolite. Regards, Rod

So I've tacked-on an addendum to my review:

Geek available lied to me about when the part was ordered; at one time (and this can be documented) they lied about not using eBay; at another time (and this too can be documented) they lied about having been open until 2:30 on that Saturday. I was there at 2:10 because I was told that they'd be open until 3:00 that day. (Had they instead said that they'd not be open, then I'd have gone on later Friday afternoon.) They lie now when they claimed that I yelled. And on the 23, the day that they claim that the part arrived, I called after mail delivery, was told that the part was not there. So either they were lying then (which would have been weird even for a dishonest business) or they're lying now.

---

^[1]Mind you that Rafael Schneider Pereira told me on Tuesday (27 May) that he thought that the part had come-in on 24 May. (I rather doubt that it was even mailed by originalpartsglobal before 27 May, as he'd promised them tracking, but on 23 May they said that he'd not provided a tracking number.)

Last night at about 20:00 PDT, on my way to David's Coffee Place, I glanced into the Brass Rail, a San Diego night club. On a Friday night, there were no customers. That had changed by the time that I headed homeward, but it still wasn't particularly busy. Nor was it yester-day. David's Coffee Place has also been slow the last few days. Carlos, one of i baristi, suggested that this is largely an artefact of the increased price of gasoline. I think that he's correct. I also think, as I told him, that current petroleum prices are a bubble; but I don't know when the bubble will collapse, nor what will trigger the collapse.

Locally, there are various store-front locations in Hillcrest that have been vacant for months. It's an inescapable that there is some price at which someone would be willing to rent any given one of these sites; but landlords are evidently unwilling to drop rents to such levels. This refusal might seem simply unreasonable, and perhaps in some cases it truly is, but all landlords (reasonable or unreasonable, renting or refusing) are unavoidably gambling. Any who enter into an arrangement at the market-clearing price of to-day is gambling that those prices won't rise to-morrow enough to off-set revenue forgone by waiting. At the same time, those who are refusing to lower their prices are hanging tough on a theory that prices will rise in such manner, or that they'll connect with someone who'll pay their price in spite of generally prevailing prices.

---

I don't know what the national economy is doing right now.

Apparently, growth figures for the first quarter were revised upward; I read mention of a 0.9% annualized rate (rather than 0.6%) yester-day. This is still low — one normally expects growth of about 3%. Some respected economists are predicting that the annualized rate of growth in the second quarter will be about 0.4%, followed by 2.2% in the third quarter. Since that would suggest that we would avoid a recession altogether, I can safely predict that present efforts by pundits to redefine recession will intensify.

There has been some yammering about consumer confidence, which has dropped to levels not seen since the economic down-turn during the Presidential administration of GHW Bush. The consumer confidence measure seems to be a garbage statistic to many economists, including me. Further, it hit that previous minimum at the end of a down-turn, rather than leading a worsening of conditions. (And the down-turn in question didn't even qualify as a recession proper, as it did not last for two quarters.) If the statistic means much of anything, it doesn't mean what journalists seem to think that it means, nor what they want their readers to think that it means.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that the worst of the credit-crunch has passed. That means, however, that the Federal Reserve System will counter-act the pressure on prices creäted by the measures that it took to loosen credit; those counteractives are, unsurprisingly, things that will re-tighten credit — the hope being that a credit crunch doesn't resume. I don't think that they'll get to have their cake and eat it too; prices will rise, or the economy will go into recession, or both.

On top of everything else, Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) had misdiagnosed what was wrong with my computer display. But the computer should be back in working order some time on Monday.

And to-day's additional Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) datum is that the fellow who goes by the name of Rafael Schneider is in fact Rafael Schneider Pereira.

(A datum for yester-day would be that the Better Business Bureau informed me that they had forwarded my complaint to Geek Available, and would again contact me in two weeks, or sooner if Geek Available replied within that time.)

It is possible for LiveJournal users to effectively beFriend me (in spite of my having deleted my old LJ), by adding external identity profile oeconomist.com to their Friends lists, and by adding the syndication journal oeconomist_rss to their Friends lists.

External identity profile oeconomist.com corresponds to my OpenID, and beFriending it would allow me to read and to comment to Friends-only entries. I have been pondering whether I should allow the profile to abide, because to me it looks uncomfortably like a LiveJournal account, and I of course chose to delete my LJ account in response to LJ policies. But I've decided that the distinction is sufficient that, at least for now, I will allow the profile to remain and will use it.

Most or all of you know about the syndication journal oeconomist_rss; it pulls the non-protected entries from this 'blog and temporarily makes them available on LJ such that they will appear on Friends pages. (The only present way to get the protected entries is to log into the 'blog using an ID and password got from me. Anyone who was on my old LJ Friends list can be assured of being given one upon request.) The syndication journal itself is actually not my creäture but that of 28bytes. Comments to the syndication journal itself are not registered here, and may therefore escape my notice.

Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) would not release my computer without my first paying an alleged evaluation fee. Rodrigo Pereira himself was not there; I spoke with Suelen dos Santos Ferreira and with Rafael Schneider. I told them that they wouldn't get to keep the money, because I would recover it by way of the Better Business Bureau or by way of the courts. Mr Schneider claimed not to know much of what happened, and for all that I know he may have been telling the truth. I related events to him, emphasizing that I could document essential points, and explained that, in the context of the delays and lies, and failure to let me know that they were attempting to obtain the part by way of a dubious channel, they were not entitled to any fee. Mr Schneider called Rod Pereira, who apparently insisted that they charge the fee. (Of course, things having played-out in this way precludes Pereira being able to claim that he hadn't intended to charge the fee.) Mr Schneider said that, as an employee, he was compelled to take the fee, and that I could do what I thought was fair in response. I told him that what I thought was fair and intended to do was to see to it that the business failed. I advised him to look for employment elsewhere.

So I paid the fee — writing under protest above my signature on the credit card form — was given my computer, and left. I paused in the hall to put the computer in its back-pack. As I did so, Ms Ferreira came after me with a form, telling me that she needed for me to sign it, to show that I'd taken receipt of my computer. I said I understand. and left without signing. While I of course won't pretend that I didn't recover my computer, I really had no reason to facilitate their paperwork.

Meanwhile, the review that I had most recently posted to Kudzu was again deleted, and when I attempted to repost it I twice got an error message about Kudzu being unable to understand my search. I wasn't attempting to search, but I figured that perhaps Kudzu might stop behaving oddly if I used a different account. That worked.