Funny quote from Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency:

I was invited to give a talk at Google headquarters down in Mountain View last Tuesday. They sent somebody to fetch me (in a hybrid car, zowee!) from my hotel in San Francisco -- as if I had any choice about catching a train down, right? Google HQ was a glass office park pod tucked into an inscrutable tangle of off-ramps, berms, manzanita clumps, and curb-cuts. But inside, it was all tricked out like a kindergarten. They had pool tables, and inflatable yoga balls, and $6000 electronic vibrating massage lounge chairs, and snack stations deployed at twenty-five step intervals, with lucite bins filled with chocolate raisins and granola. The employees dressed like children. There were two motifs: "skateboard rat" and "10th grade nerd." I suppose quite a few of them were millionaires. Many of the work cubicles were literally modular children's playhouses. I gave my spiel about the global oil problem and the unlikelihood that "alternative energy" would even fractionally replace it, and quite a few of the Googlers became incensed.

"Yo, Dude, you're so, like, wrong! We've got, like, technology!"

Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme -- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet).

This just ain't right. Just when you thought the Connecticut eminent domain case couldn't be any more wrong:

In the adding insult to injury category, the city officials that triumphed over a group of Connecticut homeowners in a landmark Supreme Court property-rights case are expecting those residents to pay the local government rent dating back to the year 2000.

We've started maintaining a blog over at Terracotta. Check out this article I just contributed on why Terracotta DSO is a big win for Java developers:

I thought that in the wake of the London bombings we'd be at Triple Red Alert or something. My vision was that the instant a somebody dropped buttpack on the floor, SWAT teams would stream in with bomb-sniffing dogs and a big robot that would encase the possible bomb in a metal blast box.

Well, I hate to spoil it for you, but it doesn't happen that way. Not even close.

Grace and I took her friend Olivia to SFO the other night. On the way to the gate, I saw a large, very full backpack sitting on the middle of the floor.

I mentioned this to an official-looking guy nearby. It should have been unnecessary since the bag was plainly within his view and there weren't too many people around. He gave me a weird look, a look at the bag, another look at me, and then got on his walkie talkie.

We were killing time and I decided to wait for the SWAT team and the robot to show up. I'm not a particularly paranoid person, and I thought it was really unlikely that there was a bomb in there. But we took cover behind a nearby column, just in case.

The walkie talkie guy went out to take a look at the bag...

...but then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he took cover behind this sign while a little girl started dancing nearby:

5 minutes passed, then 10. After 12 minutes, a lone cop showed up and stood by the bag. It's not clear how much good that would have done if it had in fact been full of C4.

Another 5 minutes passed, and finally another cop with a bomb-sniffing dog came. The dog gave the all-clear, the cops rifled through the bag for 5 more minutes, and soon it was all over.

All told, it took over 25 minutes for the bag to be removed. And who knows how long it had been sitting there before I saw it? So much for heightened security. At least they brought a dog.

Something definitely out of whack in the housing market. We've heard about the seven-figure trailer parks in Malibu, but now they're selling in that range without the land.

This is stupefyingly stupid. Biggest 'duh' goes for this part:

"The risk for buyers is whether park owners will redevelop their site into single-family homes, but Dickens said Malibu's two parks are unlikely to do so."

There will be a market correction for this; it's only a question of when and how bad. I just hope it isn't so severe it tanks the whole economy.