Gauging The Year Ahead

Stock up on throwing knives! Invest your money in freeze-dried food and shotguns! From an economic stand-point, 2009 is going to stink!

Luckily, economic indicators exist in any work-place environment that can help you determine how your company will fare in the year ahead.

Firstly, what is the quantity and quality of the Xmas munchies your company put out this season? Where I am, it was nothing but unshelled peanuts, and people ate 'em and liked 'em. Thats a bad sign.

At your Xmas office party, how many people were slipping extra slices of meat into their pockets or purses? Did women-folk battle over the last ham-bone, for the "young 'uns" back home?

And if you see a guy wandering around asking about your HVAC system, you're fucked. The place is being sold out from under you. Something everyone should be thinking about, especially if you work for the feds.

I Got One Of Them Cheap

The Museum of Nature, which contains 25 dinosaur skeletons and 500 bird specimens, is among the list of cultural institutions the government could put a "for sale" sign on

Some of the fossils in the Museum of Nature that are potentially up on the chopping block include a specimen of Megacerops,

...an extinct genus of North American brontotheriid mammal. All of the species had a pair of blunt horns on their snout (the size varying between species), with the horns of males being much larger than those of the females. This could indicate that they were social animals which butted heads for breeding privileges.

In fact, the museum includes a life sized model of a Megacerops family. They will look good in your drive-way for the low, low price of $64.95.

And this, Ambulocetus, was, believe it or not

...a whale,

...an early cetacean from Pakistan that could walk as well as swim. It lived during early Eocene some 50-49 million years ago. It is a transitional fossil that shows how whales evolved from land-living mammals. Having the appearance of a 3 metre long mammalian crocodile, it was clearly amphibious, as its back legs are better adapted for swimming than for walking on land, and it probably swam by undulating its back vertically, as otters and whales do.

Hey! You got $2? Sold for $2. Hand it from the ceiling in your living room. The kids will love it.

Conventional wisdom has it that you build up fat during the good years, and live on it when times are lean. On the other hand, when you cut taxes during the good years, you're stuck selling off the family jewels when things get a little bit rough. That seems to be the predicament we are in today.