Jobs Report -- Quite Remarkable -- That Seasonal Adjustment Really Helps -- October 15, 2015

From Department of Labor:

In the week ending October 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 255,000, a decrease of 7,000 from the previous week's revised level.

The previous week's level was revised down by 1,000 from 263,000 to 262,000.

The 4-week moving average was 265,000, a decrease of 2,250 from the previous week's revised average. This is the lowest level for this average since December 15, 1973 when it was 256,750. The previous week's average was revised down by 250 from 267,500 to 267,250.

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Illinois Halts Lottery Winning Payments Over $600

Fox News is reporting.

Seriously.  In a statement, the Illinois Lottery said that its account for writing out checks to winners would be exhausted as of Thursday, and the agency does not have the legal authority to replenish its own funds. According to the Chicago Tribune, officials say the legislature must authorize the state comptroller to release the funds.

Despite the payment delay, lottery officials have continued selling tickets.

Last month, the Illinois comptroller's office announced that without a budget for the July 1 fiscal year, the agency didn't have the authority to write checks of more than $25,000 and payments would be delayed.

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New Album 

I've been looking forward to Lana Del Rey's new album. I saw the vinyl at Barnes and Noble about a week ago but did not see the CD. I found it at Target.

I think this is one of a handful of CDs I have ever purchased without listening to any soundtrack first, or reading reviews or knowing anything about it. I'm going to check the reviews in a few minutes. I've been playing it pretty much non-stop -- while driving -- and absolutely love it. I put it on shuffle so I don't fall into that typical trap of getting hooked on a particular order, though I suppose the artist had a reason for putting them in the order she did.

Fourteen tracks, all of them written by Lana Del Rey and her co-writer, except for three of the tracks, I believe. I think the CD is very, very different from her past two (or three albums). It's hard to believe she did not produce this album as a demo to compete for new James Bond movie theme song. (The new James Bond movie is due out this October -- Great Britain; November -- United States; and the theme song is not by Lana Del Rey.)

24, Lana Del Rey
This is a nice review. Having spent my coming-of-age years near Chinatown, the Dodger Stadium, and west LA, I can connect with this:

She has been transfixed by, and riffing on, America since the beginning, but Honeymoon pushes past easy Kennedy kitsch and undulating flags to mine something more specific. In the opening track, she sings "We could cruise/ To the blues/ Wilshire Boulevard," and the name check is shrewd. One of L.A.'s earliest thoroughfares, a locus of establishing the city's car culture, Wilshire runs sixteen miles, and as architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, "can take you from a world-famous piece of architecture to a weed-choked lot, from a realized ambition to an abandoned one, in the space of a few blocks."

In the following verse, she replaces blues with "news" and substitutes "Pico Blvd.", which is working class for its duration, bi-secting Koreatown and running through Ecuadorian, Salvadoran, Russian, and Mexican communities. The juxtaposition is startling and canny. In the space of one lyric, she posits the invisible, real city running parallel to the gleaming, manufactured one, sketching an arterial map of a city coursing with ambition. It reminds us of something that was the very issue with Del Rey that irritated some early on—she knows exactly what she is doing.

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived. 

I have driven both those "roads" many, many times.  By the way, it appears no reviewer particularly cares for the song featured above.

Another review here, and any review mentioning Anaïs Nin will get my attention.