A variety of useful items from the cluttered garage that is my mind:
• The Economist offers a cogent summary of California’s budget problems, making some points I haven’t seen elsewhere. Like this:
“The immediate cause of the budget crisis can be traced to Wall Street. California depends on income taxes for almost half of its revenues. Its tax code is so progressive—that is, rich-soaking—that in 2006 the top 1 percent of earners paid 48 percent of all income taxes. Since the wealthy derive much of their income from bonuses, capital gains and stock options, the state’s fortunes rise and fall with the markets. California’s economy is as wide and deep as the ocean, but much of its revenues come from froth. That froth has simply blown away.”
• Is the bacon phenomenon proving to be a flash in the pan? (Tip of the porkpie to Webmaster Eric Kelsey.)
• How digital printing might help save the newspaper business.
• With that bullet point, I plan to remove myself from the topic of newspapers. Minnpost.com’s David Brauer is the go-to guy for local media news, and my office colleague Adam Platt opines upon it much better than I ever could. This post from Adam, for instance.
• So I’m sticking to stuff I know. Like Diet-Rite cola! My calorie-counting parents drank this with dinner back in the day, and I’d have sworn this brand evaporated years ago. The other day, I saw an empty cardboard container (uncovered by the February thaw) that once held a dozen cans of DR by a bus stop. A little research revealed that the brand is owned by Cadbury Schweppes Americas. So what’s the demographic here?
• When you think “bloviate,” think of me. That quotation in the American Heritage Dictionary really comes from your no-longer-humble scribe, under the youthful semi-pseudonym he used when he wrote for the Utne Reader. It’s not the kind of quotation he wants to be remembered for, alas.


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