Not A Mystery

August in the Sacramento area is hot; and I don’t mean in a cultural sense.

So Leslie and I tend to get in the car and spend some time on the California Coast where it’s cooler; not necessarily in a cultural sense.

Last week we found ourselves in Santa Barbara, part-time home for Oprah and other Big Names. The last time we were down there we drove around Montecito and looked at the snazzy mansions. They, most of them, had a sign in the main driveway pointing towards a smaller drive with the sign “Trade Entrance”. When Leslie and I got home we put a sign in the driveway pointing to our front door with a sign “Trade Entrance”.

Facts matter, and sometimes they surprise even me.

I guess I’m lucky in that I didn’t know Bankruptcy Court was actually a physical place. I had thought it was just a term for something that went on in a regular courtroom.

But when we found a parking spot on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara and I got out of the car and looked up, there it was. And they offer free parking, plus a Job Hotline.

After walking around town for a bit we returned to pick up our car and I noticed another car parked in front of the Courthouse. So I decided to take a picture “for the record” as they say in the legal biz.

Bankruptcy Is For The Little People

It’s perhaps appropriate that we would find a Volkswagen sitting there by the Bankruptcy Court. What’s not perhaps appropriate would be the particular marque of VW. Specifically that would be a Bentley.

Bentley Motors Limited is a British manufacturer of automobiles founded on 18 January 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley (known as W.O. Bentley or just “W.O.”). Bentley had been previously known for his range of rotary aero-engines in World War I, the most famous being the Bentley BR1 as used in later versions of the Sopwith Camel. Since 1998, the company has been owned by the Volkswagen Group of Germany. The firm is based in Crewe, England with their Central Production Facilities being based there.

Not being even close to a car afficionado it’s hard for me to identify the specific model, but it seems to be a Continental GT which goes for something like $150,000. Each.

Even more surprising is that nobody had ‘keyed’ that puppy.

Probably a cultural thing.

It’s not a secret that California is fiscally challenged, with the legislature locked in partisan battles and unable to compromise on a budget.

California [began] a new budget year … without a spending plan in place and with no agreement imminent between state legislators and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on how to close a $19.1-billion deficit.

State employees and others who depend on government money were bracing for the possible fallout … Community colleges and vendors that do business with the state are on edge, their payments in jeopardy because of the budget delay.

Source

So it’s nice to know that they can still get the really important things done. Like stripping Serpentine, the State Rock of it’s rights.

The bill to defrock the [state] rock — which recently passed the full State Senate and is awaiting a vote in the Assembly — is sponsored by Senator Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, with the strong support of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Declaring that serpentine “has known health effects,” the bill would leave California … without an official rock. Asbestos occurs naturally in many minerals, and indeed some serpentine rocks do serve as a host for chrysotile, a form of asbestos. But geologists say chrysotile … would be a danger — like scores of other rocks — only if a person were to breathe its dust repeatedly.

“There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock,” said Malcolm Ross, a geologist who retired from the United States Geological Survey in 1995. “Unless they were breaking it up with a sledgehammer year after year.”

Source

It could be worse. They might have passed a law requiring that any officer engaged in a lawful stop, detention or arrest should, when practicable, ask whether that person is carrying a serpentine rock, when a reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

But that would be rock profiling, which might be going too far.

When you are Goldman Sachs ordinary words take on extraordinary meanings:

Lemonade: A structured-financial deal Goldman mixed up to make bad loans go down easy on investors. Used in a sentence, from a Goldman email: “They structured like mad and travelled the world, and worked their tails off to make some lemonade from some big old lemons.”

Source

Then we learned that the Synthetic CDO’s over which the SEC is suing Goldman don’t actually contain any real bonds, but just mathematical representations put together by Goldman’s rocket scientists.

But let’s be honest, Synthetic CDO’s are so 2008. And we know from listening to Lord Blankfein that Goldman Sachs merely makes a market for whatever commodity their customers require.

What can we expect next from those Goldman wizards that would up the ante?

Wait for it … drum roll please … OK, here we go.

Genetically Modified CDO’s to replace those (now discredited) Synthetic CDO’s.

Yes! And these would be the lemons for their new batch of lemonade.

Such A Deal

Pass the vodka.

Note:  Believe it or not, these “lematoes” are actually real and were created several years ago by a team of Israeli scientists as part of an experiment in genetic engineering.