Friday, October 03, 2008

Pigsquatch, Whales & the Economy

We love My Name is Earl at our house. Watching the final fate of Pigsquatch last night had us rolling on the floor, despite my not being that big a fan of gross. Then in the midst of gasping for air, Tall Person suddenly flashed on a news story he remembered from when he was at KOMO "way back when".

It seems a reporter at KATU, their sister station in Portland, wound up covering a strikingly similar situation in the early 70's. Sure enough, searching YouTube for Oregon whale, he immediately came up with exploding Oregon whale. Bingo!



Our other conversations of the evening turned to the economic crisis, understanding the innate problematic nature of sub-prime lending and how we got into the stinking mess in the first place of trying to decide to do a bail-out or just let nature run its course, and don't forget too the whole "money as debt" issue on top of it all (thanks to Brad for pointing that one out - when I find the exact post, I'll link to it).





We appreciate the dark humor in September Madness, but even so, the whole matter is definitely a stinking whale carcass on the beach and a giant hairy pig in the middle of a trailer park. Stinks to high heaven and no one wants to touch it.

It could be that just like with Pigsquatch and that whale in Oregon that there only seems to be one viable option because everything else is so much worse. If so, history would seem to indicate you do the best you can to avoid the most obvious problems, and then make sure everyone is as far out of the way as possible from the fallout. Of course, the other possibility may simply be that the cure really is far worse than the problem.

The trouble is, how do you ever know for sure? And how do you prevent that uncertainty from paralyzing you in your tracks?

What works best for addressing the stinky problems in your own life?