Seriously

Why can't the American public/marketmakers just have a slow decline instead of the up-down-up-down nonsense? Everyone knows we're in a recession and we didn't need any PPI or formal consumer spending numbers to tell us that. So settle down! You're just making everyone crazy, including me who has to listen to people at work note every uptick and downtick during the day. OMG the Dow's up 50 points..now it's 52..come on you can do it!!

Ugh.

This was a total WTF day

• 900+ points to the good for Wall Street
• the Giants are letting the Browns march up and down the field (maybe that's just a MNF 2008 thing)
• most of my day at work

I'm not even going to try to explain points #1 or 2 since I haven't been paying complete attention to the game. I don't even know what made work so bad, except just a combination of everything. Marketing made a mess of a bunch of artworks that need approved by tomorrow, I have to give a presentation on the seminar I went to where I didn't enjoy or learn anything, and people kept talking about our group lunch tomorrow. That's not going to be a good time.

Like I said to LP earlier, I hope I can get uncranky in time to kick some butt at volleyball tomorrow night. We're playing the team that is tied with us for first place (13-5). She's bringing her videocamera to tape the games so I had better get my blocking in order before it gets on film! This could be a really good learning tool for some of the people who don't have as much of an organized volleyball background.

They're all just paper losses

I was doing pretty well today until I opened an article and saw that today's Dow plunge was the worst percentage loss since October 1987. The good news is that today's loss was (only) 7.3% while Black Monday checked in at -22.6%. I suppose that's good news anyway.

In actual good news: football tonight, tomorrow is Friday, football party at Susan's on Sunday (Sunday Sunday). I have to figure what to make.

Why in your right mind would you ever want to work for the Raiders?

I'm watching the Al Davis press conference at the top of SportsCenter and am just absolutely amazed. Al Davis is crazy.

Also on the crazy list is the stock market (duh). It rebounded almost 500 points today after dropping almost 800 yesterday. Being a poker player, I understand variance, but it would be nice if the roller coaster would settle down. I have some idea of how things work and know it's not possible, but it would make things a lot easier for everybody.

I found the clear lenses for my Oakleys in the laundry. I think they were in the pocket of my favorite blue shirt. Good news for me so I can go back to wearing them at work tomorrow instead of the horrible regular safety glasses.

Not quite Black, so about 75% Gray Monday

I'll at least start out with something positive. The Cowboys are up on the Eagles, 7-3, on a 72yd play to T.O. I have L.J. Smith tonight and am playing against Jason Witten and Patrick Crayton so Cowboy scores that do not include those two are welcomed by me.

We played 1.5 good games of volleyball tonight: the whole first game and half of the third. Unfortunately, it was the first half of the third game. We were up 9-0 and somehow gave that away. I think the final score was 15-13, but I could be wrong. Liwayway was upset that she didn't set well, so I told her: a) that she sings waaaaaayyyyy better than Cat Deluna did the national anthem tonight; b) to have some rainbow sherbet; and c) we'll practice some more on Wednesday since we're all still getting used to each other. I'm trying to be a little too fancy, especially when I set and I have to keep reminding myself to keep it simple.

There's a ton of cheering and I missed a 98yd kickoff return. I just went to the kitchen to get some Code Red! This game is getting ridic awfully quick. I'm not sure I want to leave to get dinner; what am I going to miss next!

Brian Westbrook, staple of past fantasy teams of mine, just scored after the Eagles were the beneficiary of a godawful defensive PI call. I'm definitely not going out until halftime, especially after the Eagles recover a Tony Romo fumble in the end zone. Hope you took the over tonight.

I hope Ana made it home with her new Mazda3 tonight. I helped her decide on new vs. used this afternoon. I wanted to push her toward used, but I know she had so much trouble at the end with Blue and I've always been more comfortable with the knowledge that nobody had a chance to do any damage.

I'm kind of putting off the inevitable followup to this morning's post about the lullaby of Broadway misery on Wall Street. Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 and their share price was $0.21 at close, $0.19 in after hours. There's going to be a mess trying to unwind some of the credit and derivative transactions that I'm not even going to try to begin to comprehend. AIG was down to $4.76 at close, $4.90 after hours. I was home at lunch and was reallocating some assets from some foreign ETFs to IVE and debated dumping the shares of AIG that I have. It was bouncing between $6.10 and $6.30 while I was here and decided that there had to be more upside than downside, although I think I read that if you get to that line of reasoning, you should be selling. I saw news that Berkshire was considering buying some AIG assets, but nothing has come of that so far. It looks like there will be some loans, possibly from their equity departments which I think violates a Fed rule, but again, I'm no expert here. A bit of good news: The way this year is going, I'm going to pay a lot less in taxes for 2008 than I have for the past couple years.

One thing I may be an expert on is that you have to have to break the plane of the goal line with the football in order to score. Good job DeSean Jackson -- I hope you get benched for the rest of the game.