Today at 1:30 p.m., don't forget to tune into the livecast of the announcement by Planetary Resources about how rich people are going to blow up some space crap in the hunt for platinum and palladium. With the backing of the likes of Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, this seems like a good time to get out of the Google system entirely, you know? We already gave them ownership of all our data, and the relationship between your Gmail and now the annexation of space for mining is seriously some Total Recall prologue. In fact basically all of the movies have warned us about what [...]

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"The first person to sound the warning of the coming of the Down-and-Out Man in academia was the seventeenth-century political philosopher [Gaspard de] Réal de Curban. He foresaw that, if the aristocratic social structure were shattered and a new one created wherein everyone would be in the race for social status and prestige, then society would be filled with tensions, frustrations, and violence. This, he explained, would happen because in an open society the failed man would have no one to blame for his failure but himself; whereas in a structured society where status and prestige were predetermined by birth, a man could attribute his failure to his birth, [...]

Tom Ford, whose movie A Single Man made $216,328 this weekend in its very limited release, makes, as we have noted, excruciatingly expensive and gorgeous clothes for men. (Women's clothes coming soon-as soon as he raises $50 million to do the line, which, oh my God, it's going to be all made out of ostrich saliva and platinum leaf, I guess?) In particular, in his recent seasons of ties, not a single one of them was bad. But, while my back was turned, apparently Tom Ford just dumped a bunch of men's stuff for next season on the market? And it is REVOLTING.

Here's a fine how-do-you-do: "My mom received an $800 bill for one session of chemo the other day in the mail that said her insurance wasn't going to cover the treatment due to 'a lack of information.'"

It's a glorious goddamned day in San Francisco right now. The temperature is mild, just warm enough to be comforting; just cool enough to keep you from sweating. The sky so blue it almost looks to have been choked to death. And from where I'm sitting, I can look out my window across the Bay, over to Oakland and Berkeley and the rolling hills of the East Bay. It's not a bad view.

It's the kind of day that makes me realize why I'm still here, and why I'll likely never leave. I arrived a dozen years ago, intending for San Francisco to be but a brief stop on [...]

Here is the world's worst holiday gift guide, from the Washington Post. Bubble bath! Mediocre wingtips! (Here's a hint: if you're going to spend more $550 on wingtips for men, then you can afford to go to John Lobb and get proper ones.) And? Says one gift-giver: "My female friends are getting amazingly colorful one-size-fits-all muumuus I found in Bali." That is from boutique-owner Christopher Reiter, who is going to have zero female friends as of December 26th.

I feel bad about my Kanye. (Or, as George Bush calls him, at first, "Kanway.") Oh buddy, why'd you have to apologize for something awesome? Anyway, Kanye seems to be suggesting… something about his Bush-apologetic interview with Matt Lauer? His Twitter stream of consciousness doesn't however indicate anything other than he doesn't know so much about giving an interview.

Y2K was the thing that was going to Destroy Earth when this dumb, nameless decade began. It's hard to remember the pre-Muslim threats, but this was a big one: All the planes were going to fall out of the sky, at midnight on January 1, 2000… based on the time zone they were flying over, I guess? It was never very clear, which is why it was such an effective End of the World scenario. Also, your teevees and ATMs would stop working. Because of those rotten computer programmers! Me? I was drunk in Madrid, which had not yet been blown up by Muslims, and also airfare was incredibly cheap [...]

The most hilarious of the RECESSION OVER stories this morning-on the news that the GDP increased by 3.5% over a year ago-comes from the Washington Post. How are consumers doing? "Armed with cash from government support programs, consumers led the rebound in the third quarter, snapping up cars and homes." Really! Snapping up, you say, with their… cash for clunkers money? The other tier of our fine country's growth: "The cheaper dollar is aiding U.S. exporters, making their goods less expensive to foreign buyers. Exports of U.S. goods soared at an annualized rate of 21.4 percent in the third quarter, the most since the final quarter of 1996." [...]