Angst Report

Masters of the Universe don’t believe in crackpot theories like the world ending on May 21, 2011. But they do believe in the price of gold, which is pretty much saying the same thing.

Gold, which is where investors put their money when they don’t believe in more theoretical investments like real estate, stocks and US government bonds, hit a record $1,500 an ounce in intraday trading today.

Meanwhile, the Angst Report is happy to report that we sold the gold crown that formerly graced tooth #2 for $25 at a local gold-buying event on Saturday. Which either means that 1) We brilliantly played the market in gold, selling almost at the high, and our gold crown weighed less than 2/100ths of an ounce or  2) we got ripped off.

The Angst Report prefers to believe the former.

Next stop for the smart money: under mattresses?

Gold bullion picture: Wikipedia.

A few weeks ago, our kitchen was suddenly overrun with ants. The little ones. Marching all over the sink and countertops, making themselves perfectly at home. I discovered, to my surprise, after leaving an almost-empty can of tuna in the sink, that ants are huge fans of tuna fish. It looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

That was when I caused my first ant holocaust, wetting a paper towel and swiping up a few hundred of them, and turning on the faucet to flush the rest down the drain. I felt bad while I was doing it, wondering if to the ants I was their tsunami — a cruel and powerful force of nature.

I didn’t have any moral qualms when my husband brought home baits and set them out. Didn’t think twice about it. I was just relieved when, almost overnight, the ant armies began to disappear. The violence apparently happens offstage, back in the ants’ nest, where the whole colony, including the queen, devours the poison and dies. Kind of like Jonestown.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two words you really don’t want to see in the same sentence: bloody and minivan.

Spank, curse, use the F-bomb. But please, angry moms, don’t drive your kids into the river.

The funeral business is creepy enough without hearing stories like this.

There’s just something profoundly wrong about the suicide bomber who hugged the tribal elder as he detonated the bomb. I mean, more than usually profoundly wrong.

It’s always open season on prostitutes, but a serial killer who then taunts their little sisters?

Today’s Angst Report post is written by Jon Bonesteel.

We’re told inflation is in check and the CPI is only rising slightly – in the land of QE2 (not the ship) those who pull the levers of macroeconomic cash supply are mostly keeping the economic ship between the extremes of pain. That’s not to say things couldn’t turn south any day and I certainly may consider taking the odds of a double dip recession. But I’m telling you where I first saw the sneaky version of inflation that’s been more prevalent than the numbers show. It was on the can, yes I was sitting on the toilet when I noticed that the new roll of 1000- sheet Scott Tissues seemed to roll a bit better than it had in the past. Odd I thought. So, as one who is curious is to do, I dug around in my linen closet for the last set of Costco standard issue that preceded the current lot. Here’s what I found:

Read the rest of this entry »

I had an upper GI series yesterday: an xray procedure that required forgoing my morning coffee in favor of two gigantic radioactive milkshakes. We already know that my small bowel isn’t — as my husband likes to say — worth the paper it’s written on. We also know from my adventure in the ER last Thanksgiving and my subsequent colonoscopy, that the connection between my small intestine and my big one is like the Jersey Turnpike being narrowed down to one lane right at Exit 7A. But my gastroenterologist wanted to know how traffic was further up the road.

Ok, so fine. No coffee. Dowdy cotton gown. I was a little alarmed when the technician took an initial pre-barium xray and came back to my closet with a concerned look and asked how recently I’d been chugging the stuff. I told her Thanksgiving and realized that apparently I was still glowing in the dark. I would have worried more, but there was barium to drink and Twitter to attend to, and finally an actual M.D. came into the room with the gigantic machines, put on a lead apron about an inch thick, took some close-ups of my gut and proclaimed that except for the narrowing we already knew about, my small bowel was looking pretty good.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is one good kind of angst, and that is the angst that happens to someone else. Particularly a someone else that is large, corporate and deserving. For example — let’s just pull a name out of the air — AOL.

If I ran a hardware store, I’d want a special place in hell reserved for Home Depot. If I owned a bookstore, it would be Amazon. If I ran a luncheonette, it would be McDonald’s. If I just owned some generic Main Street store, it would be Walmart.

But since I run a local news site, my particular enmity is for AOL, which set itself up about a year ago to be the world’s biggest mega-marketplace of online “content” and whose Patch empire has been busy replicating the brand I created in 2004 and elbowed into my territory last year. Can I hate them just because they’re big, they have deep pockets, they’ve poached talent and they can run at an operating loss while I have to stay in the black? Sure, why not? I’m David. They’re Goliath. But I also hate their corporate soullessness: the suitification of the blogosphere, the scaling of local.

I get Google news alerts for AOL, and my day is made whenever I see the first complaint by someone complaining that AOL sucks. Which these is just about everybody but Arianna Huffington. AOL’s daily angst is my daily smile. I just can’t help myself.

These days, it’s a daily schmorgasboard of Schadenfreude: lawsuits from from HuffPo bloggers and AOL freelancers. Massive closings of popular blogs and the backlash from former staffers and fans. Then there are thought pieces like this — “Why Facebook is AOLifying the Internet — and That Sucks.” And my all-time favorite, published on AOL’s own TechCrunch blog: “Aol to Journalists: You Be the Rock Star, We’ll be the Mark Chapman.” (That’s so cool, even getting acquired for $25+ million doesn’t make TechCrunch pull its punches.) And for kicks, there’s always the Twitter search “AOL sucks.”

Yes, Tim Armstrong still has those CEO good looks, the high cheek bones and the expensive suits. He made $15.3 million last year, which is a great deal more than me. But I bet, when he falls asleep, he has nightmares in which Arianna kills his pet rabbit. At least I hope he does.

Photo: All About George via Flickr. All opinions in this post are entirely my own.

Today’s guest post is written by Kit Schackner.

Every time I think I’m getting on with my life after the disaster that is Japan, another aftershock happens, and I have to dive back into the latest breaking news over the reactors, the power outages, the people stranded. What did these people do to deserve this? And why am I so obsessed with it? I have watched every tsunami video there is, weeks later. I tune in to CNN every day after work, looking for the latest on the reactors: absolute proof, without religious conviction, that the end of the world is nigh.

After five weeks of quitting smoking, I resumed on the day of the tsunami. Granted, owning a real estate-sensitive business, we were facing our own private small-scale tsunami. Maybe it struck a balance in me to remind myself how much worse it could be. Maybe it’s because I’ve been practicing Ikebana for ten years and feel a kinship with the culture. Their government may not be effective, but the people are amazingly stoic and civilized. And the dog videos! Grief like butterscotch syrup. Too rich, not good for you.

I did the same thing after 9/11: stopped to watch planes for weeks, read every single bio in “The Lives They Led” in the Times, even when I had read that if you were obsessed and couldn’t shake it, you shouldn’t keep reading all about it. I couldn’t stop. I saved the papers.

I suffer for Japan, but not enough to do their suffering justice.

UPDATE: 10:44 PM EDT The Japan nuclear authority has just increased its threat rating for the doomed nuclear power plant from a 5 to a 7, the same level as Chernobyl.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with Torquemada. Oh, did I say Torquemada? I meant, the dentist.

My fear of dentists — and the sharp instrument known as the explorer, in particular — was established in a period of about five minutes around 1967 in the reclining chair of a suburban pediodontist whose wallpaper featured bright jungle scenes. In that short amount of time, he probed my four back molars, found a pocket of decay in each, and hit a deep nerve in in every single one, sending me to the ceiling in pain. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Which is why I avoided dentists for a long period in my late 20s and early 30′s, why I cover my face at any movie or television scene involving a dentist (not just “Marathon Man”), why I have put off getting a crown in Tooth 3 for three years, and why I had to acquire Xanax and arrange the chauffeuring services of my husband, which in addition to the laughing gas, Novocaine, iPod and headphones should swaddle my angst enough to be able to tolerate two hours plus in the dental chair, much of that at the business end of a drill. Read the rest of this entry »

This post, by Martta Rose Kelly, is the first in a series of guest posts for the Angst Report. If you’re interesting in writing a post, send me a note here. But best get that column in by mid-May.

If your birthday is May 22, you’re out of luck. In fact, if you’ve planned a June wedding, a vacation to the shore in July, or have signed up for a triathlon in August, fuggedaboudit.

May 21, 2011 is the end of the world as we know it –Judgement Day, according to Project Caravan, a group from Oakland, CA, consisting of members of the Family Radio network who travel around the country to bring this “awesome” message of Doomsday to as many people as possible. All of these folks have given up jobs, families, and possessions to join this final mission.

According to their predictions, the world will be shaken apart by a massive earthquake on that day. The True Believers (those who believe in Jesus) will be brought into the Kingdom of Heaven—this is known as The Rapture–while the rest of mankind will endure 153 days of Hell on Earth before the world actually ends on October 21.

Read the rest of this entry »

I fell into bed yesterday about 5 p.m. and, aside from a venture downstairs for cereal and The New Yorker, didn’t get up again until 7 a.m. today. I did read for a little bit, but my brain was fried. Absolutely and utterly fried, just like those old “This is Your Brain on Drugs” commercials from the 1980′s.

This is your brain on data.

What had I been doing all day to earn my exhaustion? Nothing and a thousand things. I wrote a couple of posts for Baristanet, wrote a post for the Angst Report, dealt with the daily deluge of emails, paid bills, cruised Twitter and Facebook. When my husband comes home and we talk about our days, it often seems like I have nothing to report. And yet I know that my brain was responsible for dozens, maybe hundreds of small digital transactions. The accountant emails: What is the cost basis of some mutual fund sales for my nephew and niece’s trust fund accounts? I don’t even know what this means, but I go on Schwab, find it, and send it to him as a PDF. That’s five minutes. Multiply that by about 100 and there’s my day.

I’m looking for a copyright-free image, resizing it. Five minutes. I scroll through the latest comments on Baristanet to find one to feature on the front page. Five minutes. We have a new deal: 86% off on a family portrait from a local photograph. I post it on three separate Facebook accounts. Five minutes. Katherine Carter of the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office writes with a verdict in the schoolyard shootings case. Fifteen minutes.

Read the rest of this entry »