Saturday Morning -- Nothing About the Bakken

The calendar was misread. The Mayan end-of-the-earth might actually be tomorrow. I can't make this stuff. 

Hold on to your doomsday fever, folks, the Maya calendar date celebrated Friday as the “end of the world” might actually be off by two days – or a full year.

The end of the 13th baktun cycle of the so-called Long Count of the ancient Maya’s intricate, interlocking calendar system might correspond to Sunday, not Friday, said Carmen Rojas, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

As “end of the world” hype swept the globe Friday, scholars pointed out that the Maya calendar hasn't been decoded enough to make exact correlations with the Gregorian calendar that we use.

Rojas stressed that the Maya not only calculated baktun cycles of 144,000 days, but also had systems that measured the marches of Venus and the moon. Other scholars note some Maya glyphs mark dates thousands of years further into the future.

Speaking of meaningless deadlines, if "we" go over the ObamaCliff on December 31, 2012/January 1, 2013, the new deadline immediately becomes December 31, 2013. If there is no deal by midnight, December 31, 2012, the new tax rates and spending cuts take effect the next day. But Congress has all year then to rescind them, make them retroactive to January 1, 2013. Kinda fun, huh?
 

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It could be a very, very slow morning for Bakken news. I will probably spend most of my time going back and updating some previous posts. I did provide an answer to an enquiring mind.

So, starting with the WSJ (I'll will update posts as I go along) and refresh periodically.

WSJ Links

Section D:

• Big-Box Barolo: The wine surprises of Costco. I haven't read the article. I will read it later. But yes, Costco wine department was a huge, huge surprise. Even their selections of Scotch. I think I wrote about that some time ago. Nope, can't find that story; must have been at one of my other blogs.
• Ford ST: Why should Europe have all the fun?  My older daughter introduced me to the Ford Focus some years ago. I bought her a used Ford Focus; it lasted forever. Then we bought a second brand new Ford Focus, which we gave to our younger daughter; that one, too, is lasting forever. If the Honda Civic did not exist, I would buy the Ford Focus. It really does have European handling.

Section C:

• Book reviews. I will come back to this later. Maybe.

Section B:

• RIM jolts market with fee change. Now that's a real good example of a "dead cat" bounce.
• Big bonuses for auto workers. Union employees at GM will get a $7,000 profit-sharing bonus. And that's why they call if "government motors." If I recall correctly, GM does not pay federal corporate taxes for ten years following the bailout.  Cue up Connie Stevens.

Section A:

• How ObamaCliff talks hit the wall. The MDW follows the story here.

And that's about it. Pretty quiet.

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Comments and Observation From All Over

Starbucks, San Antonio, Texas: five six laptops. All MacBook Pros.  What more can I say. Even Starbucks Harvard Square cannot top 100% Apple laptops at any given moment. Speaking of which, Apple reclaims the lead in smart phones. In the process, Apple set a new high with 53.3% of the US smartphone market:

Last month, research firm Kantar Worldpanel reported that Apple had retaken the lead in U.S. smartphone sales from Android over the August-October timeframe, topping Android by a 48.1%-46.7% margin on the strength of the iPhone 5 launch.

Bottom line: in the US, it's Apple and Android, ATT and Verizon. Everything else is trivial, quantitatively.

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Glacier National Park upset with Blackfeet Indians drilling for oil twenty (20) miles away.

The tension has existed since the drilling began in earnest more than three years ago, and it continues despite no significant oil production to date and a recent lull in exploration. There are dozens of wells drilled across the 1.5-million-acre reservation, with at least 18 within 20 miles of the park.

The park service is calling for a comprehensive, detailed study on the cumulative effects of all existing drilling to date, future drilling and what would happen if the wells start producing oil and gas.

Glacier Superintendent Chas Cartwright said he has no desire to stop reservation development, but wants to make sure it is done right.

I guess big white man know what best for injun.

From earlier this year, same subject:

“While tribes were told they would have a seat at the table with federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management excluded them from the process of drafting a rule with a potentially devastating impact on their sovereignty, and their economies. Tribes were not afforded an opportunity to provide input on, let alone the time to analyze, the draft rule,” said Subcommittee on Indian and Alaska Native Affairs Chairman Don Young (AK-At large). “New jobs – especially year-round, high wage jobs available in the oil and gas industry – can and will have a dramatic effect on reducing unemployment and poverty on Indian reservations. But if the BLM rule goes into effect, kiss these tribal jobs good-bye. Thanks to the Department of the Interior, while non-Indian landowners will prosper, the tribes will lose. This would be nothing less than another breach of the United States’ trust responsibility to Indians.”

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Illegal aliens arrested for minor crimes will not be "targets" of deportation -- Obama. Cue up Connie Stevens.