A couple of years ago, a guy named Peter Schiff started making the rounds to various financial news programs with a message that seemed laughable at the time: the economy is in trouble. He predicted that problems with the housing market that would soon spread to the larger credit markets, and he decried the lack of saving by the American people. Two years later, it turns out that he was exactly right. The part of this story that is the most incredible to me was the reaction that Schiff’s fellow analysts had to his predictions. Responses ranged from disbelief to downright condescention. So next time someone runs you down when you know you’re right, remember this guy.

Found via Starpointe Marketing

I walked out to my car the other day and came across this card stuck between my car window and car door.

I was fairly amused by the irony of receiving a card advertising a $20,000-a-month job in this fashion. I mean, it begs the question if this guy knows how to make this kind of money, what is he doing wasting his time going from car to car instead of making sick money all the time? It just doesn’t make sense.

Ok, so that seems pretty cut and dried, but let’s take this even further. Let’s say that this guy is advertising what is doubtless a real-estate scheme or an MLM and is actually making this kind of money. And let’s say that he just hired some schmoe to pass out his cards. Well, the same question still applies. Why would this guy waste his time teaching someone else how to make that kind of money when he could use his time to make that money himself? Furthermore, what is his card-deliverer doing passing out cards instead of using the system himself?

Thanks but no thanks for the business opportunity buddy.

OK, so maybe hate is a strong word. But (for the most part*) I couldn’t care less about the Olympics this year. Here are a few of my reasons:

1.) Hello, Obscurity - Let’s think about it. With the Olympics, we have the weird combination of sports that nobody watches until the Olympics show up (volleyball, swimming, gymnastics) and sports that everybody usually watches but all of a sudden are unpopular during the Olympics (baseball, basketball). I refuse to inexplicably get excited about a sport just because there’s a round piece of metal at the end of it. Badminton, anyone?

2.) Sissification - My sports watching preferences and my sports participation preferences are radically different. For myself, I enjoy participating in sports like biking and rock climbing, you know, things that don’t involve catching any objects or hitting other people. But when I’m watching sports, I like to see some violence. You know, players getting smashed and beaten and otherwise physically dominated. This is why I enjoy football so much. Sadly, the Olympics are a little weak in the contact department, unless your idea of contact is getting tapped by a fencing foil.

3.) The Benedict Arnold Effect - One of the downfalls of professional sports, I think, is the lack of loyalty that athletes have to their franchises. Back in the day, it seemed like a franchise would pick up a key player and that player would become iconic for the franchise. Think Michael Jordan for the Bulls or Babe Ruth for the Yankees. Nowadays, athletes play for the highest bidder, and it’s not uncommon to see a player go to play for his former team’s biggest rival. Sadly, this attitude has somehow worked its way into the Olympics. It’s nice to see a German dude swimming for Austrailia, but it makes me ask WTF? I mean, if selling out your franchise is bad, imagine doing that to your country. In any case, way to show loyalty, fellas.

4.) Beijing? Pt. 1 - These particular Olympics bother me because they’re being held in Beijing. How’s this for irony: let’s take an event that has stood for comraderie, friendly competition, and the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and hold it in a country that is well-known for its human rights abuses, totalitarian government, and slight antagonism to the rest of the world. Great idea guys.

5.) Beijing? Pt. 2 - Oh, and let’s not forget this awesomeness: why not hold these athletic events in one of the most polluted cities in the world? After all, these athletes don’t need to be able to breathe… right?

6.) The Anti-Bandwagon Clause - Last, but not least, almost everybody I know LOVES the Olympics. It is therefore my sworn duty to provide variety to the Olympic-loving landscape.

* The whole Michael Phelps thing is interesting to me because I love to see some trash-talking Frenchies get their asses handed to them, and I think Mark Spitz is a douche and needs to not hold that record anymore.

I’ve been thinking of buying a bike for some time, and lately I’ve gotten more serious about it. As a result, I’ve spent a lot more time looking at classified ads. This has proven to be a fairly frustrating method of bike shopping because nothing is ever exactly what you want. Either the bike is missing features or the price is too high.

Anyway, I got home from work today and decided to do my regular check of the online classifieds (craigslist and ksl.com). I clicked into the road bikes section, and all of a sudden, there she was, the bike I had been looking for, at a killer price. I could hardly believe my eyes. The bike had just been posted, so I hurried and called the poster.

Me: “Hey, I’m calling about the bike.”

Him: “Wow. That was fast.”

The bike was in Park City, so I called my brother and told him that if he’d drive from Salt Lake to Park City to Provo to help me get this bike back home, I’d pay for gas. My brother hates paying for gas, and there was no way the bike was fitting in Jezebel, so he agreed.

When we got up there, I took one look at the bike and knew that this was definitely a steal. I handed the guy a bunch of bills and he handed me the keys to the bike (lock). He also commented on how quick I was to call.  “Here’s how it went,” he said. “I walked outside, took a picture of the bike, went back inside and posted the ad, and was just leaning back in my chair after publishing the ad when you called.”

I guess some things were just meant to be. Here are a couple of pictures of my new baby:

We live in difficult economic times. Soaring gas prices, troubled financial institutions, and spiraling unemployment are creating a devastating impact on our economy. But there another, far more insidious power at work here as well: the do-gooder.

This was driven home to me today when, after loading my groceries into my friend’s car, I placed our shopping cart in an out-of-the-way location for the cart gatherer to pick up. My friend made an exasperated face and trundled the cart across the parking lot to where a lonely, mostly unused cart corral sat.

“Now, Nate,” you might say.” “She was just being nice by taking the cart to the corral.” And on the surface, I might be tempted to agree with you. “And Nate,” you might continue. “There are signs all over the parking lot that say you should clean up your cart.” Again, a valid point.

But consider this: Wal-Mart, being the corporate megalith that it is, has perfected the art of überspecialization. They have thousands of employees with a very specific job function, and that job function is cleaning up the carts in Wal-Mart parking lots. Now let’s imagine that everybody decided to pay attention to those signs that Wal-Mart places in the parking lot and starts putting their carts away. All of a sudden, there’s no work for the parking lot cart attendents. Wal-Mart, always looking to pad their bottom line, decides that they can afford to fire those parking lot cart attendents to save a few bucks, and they then get the old people greeters to go out to the corral every couple of hours to pick up the neatly-stacked carts.

So really, by putting those carts away, you’ve deprived someone of a job, and furthermore, you’ve forced an elderly person to do a job that they’re probably not equipped for (if you car about such things). So do the economy a favor. Leave your carts in the parking lot.

Living in Provo, UT is quite the experience. And by quite the experience, I mean that there are a lot of times when I absolutely hate it. Take today for instance.

Back in February of last year, I wrote this post about how Provo did the worst job of any municipality on the face of the earth at any point in the history of traffic lights when it came to timing this one light in particular. Well, today, I realized that they didn’t do a crappy job of timing this one light. They did a crappy job of timing ALL the lights in Provo. That’s right, virtually every light in Provo is a veritable suckfest of poor timing. That is the only possible conclusion, because somehow, I managed to hit every single light in Provo just as it turned red. Here’s a litte play-by-play of how it would go.

I come to a red light.

I wait at the light.

I hustle off the line as it turns green to try to catch the next light before it turns red.

The light turns red just before I get there.

Rinse and repeat.

This happened at (and I know that it sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I swear to you that I am not) EVERY SINGLE LIGHT. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. FROM BYU TO OREM! Even more galling was the fact that things got better once I hit Orem. You know for a fact that Provo has the worst light signal strategy in the world when Orem looks good in comparison.

So I ask you, what incompetent, people-hating person would do such horrible job programming these lights? I’ll tell you: Someone who has lived in Provo way too long.

Given the recent rash of engagements among my friends recently, I feel that the time has come for me to write yet another post on the topic of marriage. Rather than make this a diatribe against what is unquestionably a timeless practice that is credited with maintaining stability and continuity in cultures the world over and throughout time, instead, I want to talk cracks in the shiny facade that is the Utah Valley Marriage Propaganda Machine™.

First, don’t pretend that such a machine doesn’t exist. It is very real. It is orchestrated from the highest levels: talks in conference and church about the importance of marriage. Then there are subtle reminders from parents and their married friends. And then it gets much more insidious. Your friends start to get married. And then all they do is rave about how great it is, while trying to set you up with their friends on the hope that you too can be as blissfully happy as they are. Now, at first, resistance is easy. But it’s like Chinese water torture. All the little drips keep hitting you and hitting you until, at last, you can’t take it anymore, you find yourself a ditzy blonde from Orem who’s just out of high school, and you join the ranks of the indoctrinated, basking in connubial bliss. In summation, I’m convinced that this is a massive conspiracy perpetrated on young LDS single adults in Utah Valley.

And here we come to the aforementioned cracks in an otherwise perfect mechanism. At my place of employ, I am one of only a handful of single young adults. They’ve purposely kept us all separated so that we can’t communicate with each other to find solidarity in our singleness. Fortunately, I managed to rope an intern out of our tech support department who happens to be single, so I have some comradeship. Anyway, I think because all the married people are surrounded by othe married people, they let their guard down and forget that they’re supposed to be convincing us to join their ranks. For example, a coworker walks into our office, plops down and prefaces her story by telling me and the intern, “guys, don’t ever get married.”

The CEO walks in and tells us to “enjoy being single because once you get married and have kids, your fun will dry up.”

My boss walks into the bathroom and sees me cleaning something off of my shirt and tells me “just wait until you have kids and all your shirts get throwup stains on them.”

Occasionally, there is useful advice sprinkled into the cynicism: “buy all your toys now because when you get married, you can’t buy anything fun.”

You get the idea.

My favorite part about all these comments is that, once we remind people about their duty to convince us to get married, they quickly backtrack:

Them: “Being married sucks.”
Us: “Phew, well, I guess I won’t do that then.”
Them: *clicking sound as conditioning kicks in* “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong, marriage is great. You should do it!”
Us: “Right.”

So that’s my theory. If you love it, spread it. If you hate it, it’s probably because it’s true.

Me: “But a blog post has to have a good punchline.”

Brian: “Wenches.”

As I was driving home tonight, I passed by something that smelled strongly of donuts. My first instinct was to hit the brakes and look for cops. There weren’t any, but my next thought was that my response to the smell had made sense because, after all, one never knows when one might develop a new cop-sensing superpower.

Over at TheBigBags.com, Nate has posted what is probably one of the most excruciating musical performances I have ever seen in my entire life.

As we were discussing this video while carpooling home from work, it reminded me of an experience I had a couple of years ago.

Now, I love the Internet for many things. It gives me information when I want it, instant communication with virtually all of my friends and family, and entertainment on demand. In fact, I love it so much that if it were not an abstraction, I WOULD marry it, so don’t even say it.

However, one day I was brought to realize that there is one flaw, one wart, one horrible imperfection with the Internet that threatens to ruin the love affair.

It is the existence this video. (Warning: Watch at your own risk. This is, after all, the WORST VIDEO ON THE FACE OF THE INTERNETS. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING.)

The first time I watched it, I couldn’t finish it. By the time they started rapping, I was literally about to start dry heaving. I got dizzy and had to sit down. I swear I am not making any of this up. Even now, just the thought of watching it makes me a little nauseous. It is because of this video that I will always and forever despise Microsoft marketing, no matter how slick it gets from here. Because for me, there is no forgiveness in this life or the next for a video this terrible.