OK, a few months back the idea was we're headed into a recession and if we just buck up and deal it'll be over in five to six months. Suck? Certainly.

And we keep getting fed adjustments to try and compensate and pick up the slack and make changes and blah, blah, blah.

And now it's looking like we could be headed towards a depression, which is quite a bit of a bigger deal than a recession.

I'm no expert, but some part of me feels that it would have been better to just let it set in and have done with it. Maybe I'm completely off-base there, and completely out of touch with reality, which wouldn't be the first time, but damn this constant trying to fix what's essentially become a self-moving phenomenon. The markets will do what the markets will do, no amount of bandaids will stop the dam from breaking.

Good thing I'm not in charge.

BREAK

Mom and her husband just got back from another free trip to Vegas. It's their second trip so far this year. The other one was to Acapulco.

And when they got back, they promptly bought two new vehicles for themselves.

It's nice to see that the insurance business has that kind of money to throw around. No wonder they can't afford to actually pay-out on health claims.

Last year was set up with free trips to Rome, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, Hawaii, and I think there were a couple other ones in there.

In a down-turned economy, the scum-suckers always find a way to keep piling on.

BREAK

The unholy quest set me looking at violin forums over the weekend. Somehow I stumbled a cross a thread dedicated to violins in rock and metal. Came across a number of interesting bands that do weird things with violins.

Lyriel was probably the oddest. Folk metal. Now, while I've heard of that before, I'd never quite heard it done this way. Sounds like what would happen if Loreena McKennitt got together with early era-Metallica. Listening to it I kept trying to get a picture of what the audience would look like at a live performance. All I could come up with was a bunch of people in business casual wear, some of them dancing folksy and some of them getting a pit going and destroying each other.

Devil in the Kitchen was another weird one. Also considered folk metal, their music appears (from what I heard) to be instrumental only. The violin pulls folk music duty, while a steady battery of guitars/bass/drums pulls metal riffs in the background. What should be a mish-mash ends up sounding pretty good.

Last, but not least, my whine-cellar entry over the weekend, self-proclaimed String Metal band Judgement Day. A cello, a violin, and drums. Nothing else. And probably more metal than most guitar/bass/drum bands these days. Crazy good instrumentalists rocking out like nobody's business. Whereas Apocolyptica has a nice mellow sound due to always holding the lower end of the spectrum with the cello-only approach, Judgement Day ends up with a much bigger sound from only two instruments as they cover a larger portion of the sonic spectrum.

All of that, and I still haven't heard anybody doing what I have in mind. Which either means anyone who's tried it found it just didn't freakin' work, or nobody's tried it. I guess we'll see soon enough.

BREAK

ATTENTION FUCKERS WHO STILL OWE ME MONEY INIDELS!

Thanks to most of you, but that one straggler? Die. You're the most work out of any of them and you're only wanting thirty bucks worth of stuff?

You've got a day fucker. Pay or eat it. I'm done granting you special premissions just because you SAY you've got special circumstances.

BREAK

Mrs. NFB has taken to wine on Sundays. No problem, so long as it isn't too much.

Yesterday was too much. For both of us.

And the dogs got into it when we weren't paying attention. Come back to the living room to find Pup1 drinking from my glass and Pup2 drinking from hers. They didn't get much, but apparently it was enough. Pup1 turned into super-spaz happy-go-lucky girl and Pup2 turned into . . . well, a somewhat more serious, yet more laid-back version of herself.

By that point in the evening I felt like complete shit. Something to do with the red wine I think. Something about that stuff just got to me.

Anyway, I went to bed early because I just felt horrible. I slept fitfully. Didn't help that Pup1 kept waking up, throwing pillows from her bed everywhere, whining about it, throwing them around some more, then plopping down for a few minutes of tossing and turning before doing it all over again. Not that I would have been sleeping anyway. First I was hot, then I was cold, then I was hot, then I was cold. . . .

Tossing, turning. Ugh. What a night.

And then I woke up to six inches of snow. And Mrs. NFB saying, "don't worry about it. It'll melt."

But according to the weather, it'll turn to rain at 1 this afternoon, then flip back to snow around four or five and dump another eight inches.

It's gonna be one heavy fucker to shovel off the driveway, that's for sure.

BREAK

We watched two movies this weekend.

Blood Diamond - not at all what I was expecting. Pretty serious movie about a pretty serious theme. How the diamond trade is often supplemented by bloody conflict. Even when you think you're getting conflict free diamonds, they're likely just being smuggled into a conflict free zone and mixed in with the actual conflict free diamonds. It was quite the movie.

Return of the Living Dead 4 - Necropolis - I was told it would suck. It most certainly did not suck. OK, it wasn't terrific, but it was cheap, cheesy fun. A little too much on the modernized bullet effects, but whatever. You want to see a suck-fest? Day of the Dead 2: Contagium. It has nothing in common with the other dead movies, and pretty much leaves you wondering how bad the meds were in the writing room.

BREAK

So, I don't even have my coat off and Zippy pisses me off this morning. I check my email and the boss has left me a retardedly stupid message about a person who's either too dumb to use the auto-send feature on the web-filter, or is flat-out lying about being denied access to a site by the web-filter. BB comes in the door and is attacked by Zippy with the same problem he tried to come after me with. BB and myself are now on the verge of saying fuck it all to everything and it's not even 9:30 yet.

All in all, it's shaping up to be a good week.

Laterz.