cool school

Saw this on the white board at the entrance to the school where my boy is going to summer camp this week, the same place he went to pre-school back before he started attending the village K-6 school:

"This week we're working with heros and sheroes. How are you all your own Superheros?"

I love it. The woman who owns and runs the place has adopted, I believe at this point, 8 kids from an Ethiopian orphanage she works with. She also happens to share my birthday. Gotta watch out for those crazy Pisces, can do some bizarre stuff ;>

boob tube

I have to admit, I could probably just do without the TV entirely, except for movies via Netflix. But you know, when you've got a bunch of people in the house splitting the cable bill, that gets it down into the $10-$15/month range per person, and perhaps that's worth it for the few times I watch in an average month. And you can't have a cable modem without paying for digital cable, dammit. And one member of the household who shall remain nameless is an occasional Law & Order addict, and there's the occasional Sci-Fi or History Channel special, or the late-night bizarre TV channel-surf competition (whoever can find the strangest or most surreal thing on TV in the middle of the night -- I almost always win the remote, seeming to have a certain flair for turning up the truly bizarre). Whatever.

But when our new housemate moved into the room where the TV was, we, after some hemming and hawing and protest on my part, moved the TV up into the living room, in front of the Catheter Couch (so-named because it is so hugely sinfully comfortable, with the addition of a catheter and an IV saline/glucose drip, you'd never need to move again). So far I haven't taken the time to run a live coax cable over to that part of the room, so we have movies and no TV, which suits me fine. But I have to admit, I've been spending more time staring at the boob tube in the last week than I have for quite a while. And the reason is four little words. One is "Firefly." And the others are "The Muppet Show." We've been working our way through the 4-DVD Firefly set, and it just keeps getting better. Intelligent, witty dialogue, good plots, strong characters...of course they had to cancel it. Still, I'm thankful for it -- proof positive that someone, somewhere, for some brief duration, can get paid to write well, direct well, cast well, and so on.

And then there's the 4-DVD set of the full first season of the Jim Henson's Muppet Show, just released after what, 25, 30 years? Still, 24 episodes of pure fun, much of which is delightful and intelligent at the same time as being unabashedly goofball, and none of which I have to censor for my kid. If you saw these and loved them, you'll appreciate seeing them all again, years later. If you haven't seen them, do yourself a favor and get a copy. You'll laugh, a lot.

future oil prices

The link below leads to a long, but interesting (to me, anyway) interview, if scary. I sure hope Simmons is very wrong. 5-10 times increase in oil prices? And he's not talking 20 years from now, he's talking about worst-case, starting as soon as this winter. I can't even conceive what that would do to the world. Even a doubling from current levels would be an economic disaster. Oil and gas prices are again at record heights this week (Crude touches another record, breaks $65), in part because of a series of accidents and issues with U.S. refineries, highlighting the fact that the refining and transportation infrastructure is pretty much running 24/7, tapped out at 100%+. Things are so tight that any significant constraint in either supply, refining or transportation will tend to cause prices to skyrocket. Anyone who's a student of economics, systems science, or Murphy knows that if you have no leeway, no room for error or happenstance, a crisis point is a matter of when, not if. Everything breaks, everything fails, and often at the worst possible time. CNN had an article today about near-misses in running out of aviation fuel, due to some of the same infrastructure issues.

We have got to get a government fully behind conservation and alternative energy, and pushing for local work towards lowering our individual and community energy footprints is absolutely essential.

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TRANSCRIPTION OF INTERVIEW

August 6, 2005
Matthew R. Simmons, President
Simmons & Company International
author: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html

JIM PUPLAVA: Joining me on the program is Matthew Simmons. He’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based investment bank that specializes in the energy industry. Mr. Simmons serves on the boards of Brown-Forman Corporation, The Atlantic Council of The United States, he’s also a member of the National Petroleum Council and The Council of Foreign Relations. He has an MBA from Harvard University. And he’s here to discuss his new book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.

Matt, I want to start out the discussion from the back of your book in Appendix B. Several years ago you did a study of the world’s major oil fields. What did you find?

MATTHEW SIMMONS: It was really an incredible exercise of trying to collect the data no one had ever actually thought of doing before, and that’s, what are the top oil fields in the world – field by field. And the background for me doing this is that I’ve participated 2 years in a row in an energy supply workshop, conducted by the energy analysts of the CIA in Washington, where they got about 10 of the best oil experts together, and we’d spend a day doing a discussion of all the key countries, and how much oil capacity they had in place over the course of the coming 3 years. I sat there listening aghast at all of these experts with their laptops that kept looking at their supply models, and it’s how China will be producing 3,217,000 barrels/day this year, and 3,281,000 barrels/day. And I basically said: “how do you all even know that. What are the 3 or 4 top fields in China?” And no one had any answers.

So I decided it would be interesting and educational to see if you could actually put together a list of the top 20 oil fields by name. And I thought somebody must have done this before, and the more I dug the more I realized that no one ever had.
[snip]
full article: http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/Simmons.html