Amy Langfield has outstanding blackout reportage. Here’s some banter from the subway car where she spent two hours. “One guy realizes the cop is taking out the pregnant women to exit first and the guy says: ‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘Me too,’ another guy says. ‘Me too,’ says a woman. ‘It just happened. Just now.'” Read the whole thing.

An investment banker friend points out that the CEO of the Internet phone company I use — Jeffrey A. Citron of Vonage — paid $22.5 million to the SEC in January of this year for participating in “an extensive fraudulent scheme” in the nineties. Hmm.

Wonder why this doesn’t get mentioned when magazines like US News & World Report write about Vonage.

Amy Langfield digs into NY and NoCal animosity to Southern California. Steve Locke digs up summer memories.

The country’s first and last waterbed-only shop is run by a guy named Roland — wait for it — Formica, reports the NYT. After waterbeds were invented in 1967, sales peaked around $2 billion in the mid-1980s and now have plunged to $456 million. Creatures of fashion, people have foresaken an improving product. “The modern water bed is soft-sided and looks exactly like a conventional mattress. A virtually leak-proof water-filled bladder is held in a foam case, instead of wood, and a thick pad of ticking is zipped over it. The mattress can be placed on any standard platform bed or on top of a box spring, is nearly waveless, uses standard sheets and, once emptied, is far easier to move than a coil-filled mattress.”

My favorite Formica sales line: “You may just wake up in exactly the same position in which you fell asleep, never moving once all night.”

I just got a nice note from a girl who, nearly a decade ago, interned at the paper I then edited. She did translations and wrote some shorts and artful opinion pieces for us. She’s grown up and still writes nice essays like this one about cooking with Grandma and this one about “stuff.” Great to hear from you Zsofia.

Having just moved, I’m also pondering the meaning of stuff. In fact, I am appalled and astounded by the volume of detritus that gets pulled along in our wake. Once-worn shirts, notebooks with just a few words scribbled within, half balls of twine. We’re like garbage scows that can’t unload.

Expecting that her parents would find wonderful artifacts in the mysterious office of her now dead grandfather, Zsofi’s disappointed. “I wasn’t there when my parents cleaned out his room after his death. But I often wondered about what they would uncover, the family mementos, silly souvenirs from trips, or secret diaries. I was hoping for some stuff that represents who my grandfather was and wasn’t. When my parents were done, the picture was sobering: My grandfather left behind 20 bags of trash and about $900 in a bank account.”

Yep, I sometimes long to be a monk who travels through life with nothing but his toothbrush and boots. I guess this side of me was first articulated by Colin Fletcher’s Complete Walker, which I read like a bible when I was 14. I remember being enchanted with the idea that drilling holes in your toothbrush handle could trim hundreds of pounds from your total hike. OK, perhaps this afternoon I’ll throw out some of those boxes of computer wires and notebooks. Perhaps.

Triangle weblogs. And more. And answers to the infernal NC driver’s license test.

Sat in the stands along the third base line last night, watching the Durham Bulls defeat the Richmond Braves 5-2. Deep blue sky and 82 degrees when we got there, 79 when we left at the top of the ninth. Fastest pitch was 91 mph. Our guy threw 81mph most of the time.

The big excitement came at third base in the fourth inning. As Mike Potter reports, “The Bulls had a chance for a big inning in the fourth, but a baserunning mistake killed it. With one out and Brooks Badeaux on second and Lombard at first, Jason Smith singled to right. Bulls manager Bill Evers held Badeaux after a big turn at third, and Badeaux was caught in a rundown with Lombard continuing to third. With both runners standing on third, Lombard was tagged out, and Badeaux was then tagged out after leaving the bag. That precipitated an animated argument from Evers, who was ejected by plate umpire Don Goller after covering up home plate.” Actually, Evers kicked dirt, with great child-like spite, on home plate after he was ejected.

The US Treasury is flooding the market with debt sales as it seeks to fund the booming budget deficit. As the Washington Post reported, the government has revived 3 year note sales, having stopped selling this type of security in 1998. Further, “five-year notes, which used to be sold quarterly, are going to be sold monthly, while the 10-year notes, which have been sold quarterly, will now be sold eight times a year.”

In all, the government will sell $230 billion in the second half of the year, more than any other six month period in the nation’s history.

Interest rates are headed higher. This isn’t rocket-science, folks. When supply rises and demand stays steady, prices fall. Lower bond, note and bill prices mean higher interest rates. And higher interest rates means… lower housing prices.

As mortgage rates rise in tandem with US treasury rates, mortgage demand is swooning and may soon be comatose.

A smart Democratic challenger to Bush would be banging this issue hard.

Ben Hammersley gave us a nice plug in the Guardian, calling Blogads “a very simple way to sell space on your site.” And Nic Howell gave us a good mention as he chewed on the nuances of thin media in New Media Age. Unfortunately, it’s password protected.

Ironically, while Nic quoted me correctly, I’m wrong. Here’s the relevant extract: “Blogads customers are typically entrepreneurs, says Copeland. ‘Testimonials from advertisers say we have exactly the 500 or 5,000 people they’re trying to reach,’ he says. But despite opening up a new channel to customers, Copeland hasn’t had interest from ad agencies. ‘They’re part of the whole ecosystem of people which we’re trying to disintermediate,’ he says.”

OK, I’ll eat those words: we’ve seen some good interest from ad agencies in recent weeks and are realizing Blogads can fit well in their ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is like ice-sculpting, right?

We’ve moved to Chapel Hill. Whew. Unfortunately, my new cable provider, Time Warner, seems to have been swallowed by a worm, so I’m on dialup and accessing the Internet only intermittently until cable is live.