A fresh look?

I thought it would be amusing to shake things up with a skin change — also a WordPress upgrade broke the plugin I was using to generate the excerpt for my stories on the front page, so this was a move of necessity more than whimsy. This little number is called Head 1.5 and it’s by Priss. It’s quite pleasant once your eyeballs stop hurting (it is a rather bright template).

Talk about fiddling while Rome burned!

Bank of America executives have recently expressed shock at the bad state of recent acquisition Merrill Lynch. Maybe they would not be so surprised if they had considered Lynch CEO John Thain’s $1.22M renovation bill for his office last year, which featured an $87,000 rug and $15,000 sofa — even as he cut expenses for others and laid off staff. After all, the CEO sets the tone for the rest of company, right?

Time for a Chrysler Death Watch?

I just went to the Montreal Auto Show this evening. All in all it was a fairly staid affair, but one shocker is the Chrysler display which, frankly, might as well have smelled of impending protracted death. Seriously, they have huge space, but couldn’t actually be bothered filling it, so that you have a few well-spaced-out cars, few visitors, and an atmosphere that fit a funeral better than a marketing event. Maybe Fiat can use that space to show off the 500 and their Alfa-Romeo line next year…

Are we about to witness life as a disaster-porn TV special?

Not that people should panic or anything, but there has recently been a large cluster of seismic activity around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. And Yellowstone is already known to be a supervolcano which is overdue for an eruption by about 40,000 years.