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Indeed it was, and a very humble mea culpa! When I used it above, I must have forgotten reading it in your post from last week, or you'd have received well-deserved attribution. Imagine, me forgetting something!

As well it should be! Not to pry, but did this happy event take place in a club or in a more - er - 'intimate' setting?

And for not defining chazerai I get potched?

Sounds fine, but wouldn't that take a lot of work? I'm really happy with the way you guys run this website, and I like the fact that you participate fully in the forums. I'd hate to see you spend your time on housekeeping chores, and not be able to enjoy the site yourselves. Not sure what issues it would avoid, and it sounds like you've thought this through more thoroughly than I have. In all events, I'll be fine with whatever you decide. As they say, different strokes for different folks.

I love the pictures! I'll be happy looking at them no matter where they appear. Is there a problem, though, with a separate forum? It seems to me they would stand out better on their own, but maybe I'm missing something. Anybody care to smarten up a chump?

I would too. Splitting them off would also keep topics on the main page of both forums for a longer time. In addition to Lucky's Place, we could have The Zipper Zone. Good point. Another of my favorite things about this website is the ability to upload pictures, in addition to linking to pictures from other websites. To have those uploaded pictures appear in the post without logging in would, as you say, be another good way to attract new viewers. Great ideas, Matrix!

From the article: "Keep in mind that investors ultimately bought a deal almost exclusively based on the rating, and not the issuer's decision [regarding] what loans to put in or what loans not to put in," Cecala said. "Historically there's been very little recourse back to the issuer for problems with securities down the road and the bottom line is if you can get it past the ratings services you're more or less home free." The three big credit rating agencies that dominate the market -- Standard and Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings -- had a chance to use Clayton's information during this time, but declined, Johnson testified. Not yet taking their share of the responsibility, in my opinion, the credit rating agencies put the lipstick on these pigs and provided cover for the issuers. They then proceed to duck responsibilty by saying they relied on information provided by the issuer, who paid them for the rating. I think the whole cockamamie system is due for another refresh.

You may want to pack some smaller sizes too. A recent German study showed that overweight men lost an average of three pounds after just a week at high altitudes. No excercise, no dieting, just being high made them lose weight. Funny, it usually has the opposite effect on me.

I may be a little late, but will definitely check in when I get home. It's a nice idea, FourAces. TY and OZ, do you think the programmers could give us an Easter egg if we hit fifty? If not, I'll see if I can get hold of one.

To cleanse her pores, the Modern Miss Will often douse her face with piss. And should she find her eyelids droop, She'll sometimes add a bit of poop.

Well, it appears that not all roads lead to Rome. When you follow Oz's link, you get to the Forum's Main Page, and the Top Posters band is right at the bottom, just as he said it would be. But when you click on the 'Main Category' link from 'Lucky's Place', as I am wont to do, you'll go to a page that looks like the Main Page, but it isn't the same and it doesn't have the Top Posters band at the bottom. And check the URL. It's different too. It ends with '/142-main-category', which Oz's link does not. I've come to the conclusion that the programmers are still hard at work patching up the recent software upgrade, and are just tryin' shit out to see what works. I bear them no ill will, however, as a.) I'm not paying them, and b.) I kind of look forward to seeing what they'll try next. If I were paying them by the hour though, I'd seriously consider kicking a little butt. Sure hope they both return soon. Their contributions are missed.

That did the trick! Send me an email, and I'll give you info so we can meet up. I tried sending you one, but not sure if it got through. Here's some good news: the weather's supposed to be excellent starting the day you arrive. Don't forget your layers though, as the fog and the Bay will conspire at some point to cool you down.

Try making your font size smaller. The bands separating each poster seem to stay fixed on the page, and cut off information that doesn't fit within the space allowed. With a smaller font, you should be able to see it all.

I believe this question is what they call a 'softball' in the Q&A biz. Thank you! 1. "Buffalo" Bob Smith 2. The Peanut Gallery 3. Clarabell. Horn. (He was also proficient with a seltzer bottle.) 4. Princess SummerFallWinterSpring There were quite a few other characters, but my personal faves were Phineas T. Bluster and the Flub-a-Dub. Oh, and Dilly Dally! Needless to say, not much homework got done in my house until after dinner. Not sure why, but Lamb Chop irritated the hell out of me as a child. On the rare occasion when I couldn't get to the TV quick enough to shut it off before that cloying voice intruded upon my otherwise peaceful meditations, all I could think of was clamping its sweet woolly head in a sturdy vice. Honestly, I did not need the tsuris.

I saw the headline and was all ready to jump in. After all, 'Old TV Trivia' is right up my alley. But you're talking seventies and eighties, when I was otherwise occupied, rather than the fifties when I did most of my watching. I got a couple of them, but petered out right after 'I Love Lucy'. Now go back a couple of decades, and I'm your man. Go ahead, ask me anything about Howdy Doody!

They do it, of course, for the money. According to Wikipedia, U. S. citizens spend somewhere between $14 billion and $49 billion on drugs coming into the country. Most of our efforts are focused on cutting off the supply, but the results have been marginal. We can point to a 50% increase in the street price of cocaine, but it's not clear that higher prices lead to lower demand, and certainly not to a complete drying up of demand. We like our drugs and we're good at figuring out how to pay for them. Kinda makes me wonder what would happen if we shifted our efforts toward reducing demand in the U. S. That would certainly take some of the money out of it. And, as long as we're just talkin', I wonder what would happen if we legalized everything, produced it here, and sold it at cost plus a reasonable markup plus tax. That would take nearly all the money out of it, and all the drug smugglers would be free to go find other ways to spend their days. I know, I know, legalizing all drugs would make us a nation of day trippers; our economic engine would sputter to a halt; our elected officials would sit around listening to reggae instead of making up new laws all day; and our kids would all tune in, turn on, and drop out. Or would they? There was a time, a century or so ago, when all drugs were legal in the U. S., and we seemed to get by OK. And there are other countries in the world today where drugs are fairly easy to come by; the Netherlands hasn't fallen apart after decriminalizing marijuana. I wonder what would really happen if we took the government out of the drug war business, and let it focus on helping those who have an addiction they want to overcome. Would it be any worse than what we have now? How big a pile of bodies do we need before we try a different approach? Much to ponder.

Done and done. Personally, I'd never heard a word of Yiddish before I went off to college all those many years ago, and now I can't imagine how I'd get along without it. Sometimes, as you may also be discovering, nothing else will do. But, in future, I will try to put in a link whenever appropriate. Anything to stop the kvetching. Oy!

Last November, while the health care reform package was being debated, my insurance company decided to raise my Medicare Advantage plan cost from $0 to $1000 a year. They didn't know what any possible reforms were going to cost them, but they were pissed, and decided to reach into my pocket for an extra thousand bucks, just in case. I sent the info off to the state insurance commissioner's office as an example of abusive practices, and let them deal with it. Of course, the insurance companies couldn't justify their rate increases, and were forced to back off. I'm sure the banks are pissed off too at the very idea of someone telling them how much they can charge, and they're making some preemptive strikes of their own. I haven't heard from my large bank yet, but I'm sure I will. So I'm in the process of finding a smaller regional bank I can move to, just in case. It wasn't easy changing insurers at the last minute, and it won't be easy changing banks after twenty-five years. But I will. I agree with you that there will be a bunch of less informed, less flexible, customers who will just have to sit still and take whatever these large companies try to shove up their ass, just as they have been bending over for the last decade or so. Sadly, I don't think the average consumer is a match for some of these large financial institutions. So who will be their advocate if they can't advocate for themselves? I'd like to think that the insurance companies and the banks will have a change of heart and balance their need for profits and bonuses against their customer's need for a fair shake. I'd also like to think that the Republicans, including the Tea Party, will include consumer protection as part of their economic platform. But I'm having trouble finding evidence of that right at the moment. Any encouragement you or anyone else can provide will be most welcome.

Well said, MsGuy, and I'll add my own latest blooper to the list. Last night, I was struggling with a post, trying to get the formatting right, and I went back in to make one tiny little adjustment - no more than erasing an extra space as I recall. When I hit "Preview", phoot!, the entire post became festooned with formatting characters, ampersands, quote marks, and more brackets than the shelving section at Ikea. Worse, there was nothing I could do to to get rid of them. I tried backspacing over everything so I could try again and, while my gibberish was gone, the machine gibberish remained. I even tried typing "Sorry, need to start over.", but it was unreadable with all the formatting characters hanging off my every word. I finally tripped over some kind of a 'clear all' button that seemed to get rid of the chazerai, and I was able to start all over. All this to say that, much as I love this new software, it is not as forgiving of minor user errors as one might hope. I have a hunch we're going to be seeing lots more double posts, and probably much worse, until we can eventually wrassle it to the ground. Of course, now that I realize that letting my errant post stand and enduring the inevitable teasing would have provided me an opportunity to top the initiator, I would have held down the 'Reply' and 'Post Again' buttons all night long. Such welcome topping opportunities do not present themselves every day. Not to me anyway. Matrix, I hope you will complete your off-site considerations successfully, and return in record time. I'm glad to see the Politics Forum getting more active, and your posts are an important reason why. Plus, I'd never have found Randy Rainbow without you. Still very much obliged!

Larry Summers was one of the gang, along with Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin (Geithner's mentor), and Arthur Levitt, who put the kibosh on Brooksley Born's 1998 plan to regulate the $25 trillion derivatives market. They won that time, and the ensuing financial excesses nearly cratered the economy ten years later. These guys do not like regulation. Good. If they don't know what a safe speed limit looks like, they shouldn't be driving anyway. Again, these are the same hand wringers that said regulating credit default swaps and all those other cockamamie derivatives would bring the financial market to its knees. If you ask me, better it stay on its knees for a while instead of hurtling us all into another ditch. I'm with you, TampaYankee. Obama deserves a thumbs up for trying to rein these guys in. Given what we've learned during the past two years, I think he'd be irresponsible to let them get behind the wheel again before he puts some guardrails up.

You rang?? But seriously . . . The guy is very funny. Seems like a pretty simple concept, but I don't recall seeing anyone else doing this kind of stuff, and he delivers seamlessly. Wonder how long it takes him to put one of these together? I could easily see him doing a daily or weekly bit on TV. Thanks for your patient persistence.

Many thanks, guys! Excellent advice, as usual. My thoughts may have been colored by an experience a few years ago in Budapest, where a friend and I spent our first night in a very nice hotel, and then another week in an apartment we found in a local guide. It was a spacious two bedroom apartment, with a helpful manager and his cute 'assistant' who showed us where to find everything we were looking for and how to get around. The apartment was quite a bit cheaper than the hotel, much more spacious, and was in a neighborhood that put us among the locals. We felt free to have guests, and we could roll out of bed in the morning for cereal and coffee while still in our jammies. I guess that's the experience I was hoping to capture in Rio. I'd certainly spend the first night or two in a hotel, but also leave open the option of relocating to a nice weekly apartment if there was one to be found. If nothing good turned up, it sure sounds like the Atlantico is the place to be. (When I'm not otherwise occupied, that is. ) You folks are incredibly knowledgeable and very gracious in sharing your experiences. And the pictures in the other threads are definitely stoking my desire to put it to good use. Thanks again for all the tips!

And I love your avatar. Friend of yours?

So sad, but so true. I once toyed with the idea that a good campaign finance reform package would prohibit all 30-second TV and radio ads in favor of print media. Not only would sound bites be a thing of the past, but we'd get back to digging deeper into the issues. Not to mention that campaign expenditures would be a fraction of current levels, and somebody besides millionaires could afford to run. Very thoughtful post, by the way. Thanks.

Reminds me of a joke that's too good not to share. We all wept together . . . As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper's cemetery in the Kentucky back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man. And as I played 'Amazing Grace,' the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, we all wept together. When I finished I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, "I never seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years." Apparently I'm still lost . . .