Today was an extremely irritating day. Here’s a short list of all the things that irritated me today:

• Pervasive smell of popcorn at work. I hate the smell of popcorn, and when somebody makes it at work it’s impossible to avoid. Plus, burning popcorn is the number one cause of false fire alarms at work. Popcorn should be banned!
• Guy in men’s room talking on his phone at urinal throughout his entire “visit.” I have no idea what the guy on the other end of the call thought was going on. To cap it off, cell phone guy didn’t wash his hands on the way out. And, he needed to wash them. The phone was tucked under his shoulder; not held in hand.
• Women on train burbling into her cell phone and giving some poor victim an extended review of the wine tasting she went to last night. Ever since I worked in a wine store in college, I have hated having to listen to idiots go on about “blackberry undertones” and “woody elements.”
• Insane Russian woman in next seat who used the excuse of asking if the train stopped at Palo Alto to launch into a 45 minute monologue on the unfairness of asking her to take an AIDs test before she came to America.
• Old guy sitting next to me who was not only a serial cougher who never covered his mouth, but was also apparently a student of the Larry Craig wide stance school of sitting.
• Lastly, myself, for being too stupid to think of changing out of my work shoes prior to cleaning up fifty pounds of rotting apples from my garden.
• In addition, an honorable mention goes to Mager for tweeting about how pleasant his train ride was during my train ride from hell.

In any event, tomorrow can only get better.

So, Orly Taitz has released a picture of what is purportedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. You can see it at WorldNet Daily. Before everyone gets too excited, here’s a few things to consider:

• Kenya didn’t become a republic until December 1964. The birth certificate is dated in February 1964.
• Reportedly, the name of the certifying clerk, E.F Lavender, is also the name of a common detergent in Kenya
• The certificate# 44 0 47 is laughable: 44 = he’s the 44th US President, O = Obama & 47 = his age.
• The book number listed is 44B. That’s 44 – he’s the 44th US President, B = Barack.

All in all, a lot of suggestions it’s a fake.

J. G. Ballard died today aged 78. Ballard was one of the most innovative writers of the Sixties. He shared with Philip K. Dick an awareness of the fragility of normality, and expressed it powerfully in all he wrote. As a teenager, Concrete Island and Crash had a profound effect on me. Later, my favorite work of Ballard’s became the short story collection The Terminal Beach. Although Ballard’s later work became increasingly repetitive, I still consider him one of the greatest writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Rest in Peace, J. G. Ballard.

Here’s a good obituary.

If you want to understand why the stimulus will fail, just read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s article in the Telegraph entitled Bond Market Calls Fed’s Bluff As World Falls Apart. As Ambrose points out:

The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds – the world’s benchmark cost of capital – has jumped from 2pc to 3pc since Christmas despite efforts to talk the rate down.

The Fed has stepped into the breach, up to a point. It has bought $350bn of commercial paper, and begun to buy $600bn of mortgage bonds. That helps. But still it recoils from buying Treasuries, perhaps fearing that any move to “monetise” Washington’s deficit starts a slippery slope towards an Argentine fate. Or perhaps Bernanke doesn’t believe his own assurances that the Fed can extract itself easily from emergency policies when the cycle turns.

Now, the stimulus is going to add another $800 billion to the borrowings, and who knows how much Geithner’s “Bad Bank” plan will add in addition. Borrowing of that much money is bound to increase interest rates even more. And that increase will directly counter a stimulus bill that is already badly constructed to produce immediate benefits.

According to the ego killing feedburner badge, writing about stuff other than burritos is steadily driving down my readership. I’ve dropped from 12 readers to 7. So, I’m giving up on cars and I’m going back to burritos.

UPDATE: Just promising to write about burritos has brought back two readers.

My next car:

The Maserati M12 Corsa

According to Feedburner, there are now eight people subscribed to this blog’s RSS feed.

UPDATE: Dissing your RSS readers, doesn’t pay. Now, I am down to five.

UPDATE: Apparently, it does pay to diss your RSS readers, I’m back up to ten.

As always, I urge a write-in vote for William Howard Taft. A policy of trust-busting, dollar diplomacy, an increase in the corporate income tax, and strong tariffs is just what the times demand! It was right in 1908, and it’s right in 2008. So, get out and vote!