Tonight I was driving Sophia, age 11, sixth grade, and her friend home from some school activity. Sophia's friend who is relatively new to American customs asked whether kids trick-or-treat in apartment complexes where both Sophia and her friend live.
I said that was a great question, and we started to explore the answer, and considered the question why, in general, kids don't trick-or-treat in apartment buildings.
Sophia had the answer. "Old people, you know, old geezers, don't like to keep getting up to answer the door."
May and I also live in the same apartment complex.
Government shutdown: looks like investors unfazed -- the general public is also unfazed -- which suggests they're looking forward to some mass firings. RIFs. Reductions in force. Perfectly legal. Dow closes at record high going into a government shutdown. The S&P 500 has a winning month.
Tracking: the blog has more viewers than the number of those watching Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic Party. Link here.
Fact: the 750,000 Federal government workers know exactly what this government shutdown is all about, and not one in a hundred will support being furloughed so that illegal immigrants can continue to receive subsidized American healthcare. Not one in a hundred. If the government isn't fully funded by next Monday, October 6, 2025, I'll be surprised.
Hegseth: I think this summarizes everything wrong with the senior officers in the US military these days -- "Could have been an e-mail," one of the generals. My hunch: he won't say that to Hegseth directly.
Holy mackerel: it's being reported that Harvard University caved and will pay the Trump administration $500 million.
NVDA: was up almost $5 / share today. Market cap: $4.5 trillion.
Phoenix Operating has permits for two Pladson wells, SESE 33-158-91;
to be sited 425 FSL and 1190 / 1250 FEL.
Permitted for recompletion:
09067, A, Galaxy Oil, Toftness 9-8, NESE 08-159-95; Williams County; Sauk oil field; t3/82; cum 77K 7/25; Bakken, minimal production; Duperow, dry; Madison, dry.; taken off line 7/24; back on line 6/25; a stripper well; 20 bbls / month;
Six permits renewed:
Enerplus: 26209, Christine Joe, Climax oil field, Williams County;
Shutdown; President Trump needs to issue an executive order, even if it's clearly "illegal," mandating that the "government not shut down." And then let the Democrats sue to shut down the government. LOL. They sue him for everything else; might as well push the envelope.
Bakken: wells coming off the confidential list this next week are tracked here.
The Detroit-based automaker this year has spent more to lobby the federal government than any company other than Meta,
using much of the money going to fight clean-air and fuel-economy
rules. GM’s $11.5 million in reported spending through June is nearly
double Toyota’s tally and roughly six times that of Ford’s.
One GM lobbyist called the office of Sen. Ted Cruz
(R., Texas) earlier this year to support his efforts to weaken
50-year-old federal fuel-economy rules that over the years significantly
reduced fuel consumption and emissions, as well as helped birth such
cars as Toyota’s Prius.
Congress
added Cruz’s measure to the Big Beautiful Bill, eliminating fines for
automakers, including GM, whose fleets fall short of Corporate Average
Fuel Economy standards.
Our only utility bill is
electricity, for a small one-bedroom-one-bath-one-den/office apartment
in north Texas. We have no natural gas. This is our total energy bill for the apartment.
Monthly bill was significantly LESS this month compared to last month, despite three more days this month than last month. With all fees, taxes, etc., we're averaging about 19 cents / kWh (18.8 cents/kWh to be exact):
three more days in the billing cycle
average use went from 25 kWh to 24 kWh / day
starting sometime this past year, I purposely ignored "severe" control of thermostat; I pretty much let my wife use whatever electricity she wants.
Wells coming off confidential list the next two weeks: link here.
Military travel: politicos in Washington, DC, are concerned about the cost of flying 800 general officers and flag offices and 200 support staff to the states tomorrow.
Let's get some perspective here. First, these folks are traveling all the time; this is but a slip in all their travel expenses. Second, every year, about 600,000 military men and women move to a new permanent change of station and a third of those moves come in the three summer months (June, July, August). And then, of course, there's all the other travel. As usual, folks are concerned about the numerator and don't even ask about the denominator. It get tedious.
Market: early trading. More records are being set.
Pending home sales: beat. Another strong housing report.
Kimmel: on Thursday, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" averaged 2.3 million total viewers — a
staggering 64% drop from the 6.5 million who tuned in for Tuesday's
much-hyped return.
Coal expansion: announced by Trump administration. CNBC's Brian Sullivan refers to Doug Burgum as Trump's vice president. Long interview at the 1:00 o'clock hour, Brian Sullivan and Doug Burgum. Link here.
Government shutdown: tea leaves -- unlikely that Trump will back down.
Trump might handle this shutdown differently. US government has twelve appropriations bills to cover all government funding except "must pay" expenses. My hunch: he directs that certain mission-essential government employees that would not be paid during the shutdown would continue to be paid. In fact, this may be an opportunity once this shutdown is resolved, to add a few more folks to the "must-pay" column, such as ATC workers; FEMA; military; TSA. There may be some other agencies.
Government shutdown: for nice summary of "government shutdown" (multiple times; longest five weeks) vs "debt ceiling breach / default" (has never occurred), ask AI this:
In a government shutdown, if the government is truly out of cash, how does the US government continue to pay "must-pay" expenses -- social security, military pension? Does the US Treasury Secretary authorized to sell more bonds to cover those "must-pay" expenses? In other words, how does "a government shutdown" differ from a "debt ceiling breach / default"?
AI: Occidental Petroleum (OXY) is reportedly in negotiations to sell its OxyChem petrochemical division for a deal valued at over $10 billion
. This potential transaction, reported by the Financial Times and other outlets on Sunday, September 28, 2025, could create a major independent petrochemical company. Some say the deal would carve out one of the world's largest standalone petrochemicals units.
College football: after another decisive win yesterday, Vanderbilt moves up two positions, to #16.
Ohio State remains #1 but Oregon moves up to #2 and the votes between #1 and #2 narrows. Three Texas teams in top eleven positions. Interestingly enough Tennessee is in the 15th position; Vanderbilt (#16) defeated Tennessee (#15) earlier in the season.
A reader recently sent me a link to a YouTube video with regard to the dangers of AI. See Geoffrey Hinton, wiki.
In the most recent edition of the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2025, p. 21, "Raking in the Chips," an essay / review of two books on Nvidia and Jensen Huang.
The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant, Tae Kim, c.2005;
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World's Most covered Microchip, Stephen Witt, c. 2025.
Witt's book emerged from a New Yorker profile. From November 27, 2025, link here.
The lede:
The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.
Huang is a patient monopolist. [But could one not say that about the CEOs of most of the "magnificent 7." The phrase was coined by BofA strategist Michael Harnett in 2023, the same year this essay appeared in The New Yorker. As Charlie Munger once said, and I paraprhase: "never stop reading."
He drafted the paperwork for Nvidia with two other people at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, in 1993, and has run it ever since.
At sixty, he is sarcastic and self-deprecating, with a Teddy-bear face and wispy gray hair. Nvidia’s main product is its graphics-processing unit, a circuit board with a powerful microchip at its core. In the beginning, Nvidia sold these G.P.U.s to video gamers, but in 2006 Huang began marketing them to the supercomputing community as well. Then, in 2013, on the basis of promising research from the academic computer-science community, Huang bet Nvidia’s future on artificial intelligence. A.I. had disappointed investors for decades, and Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s lead deep-learning researcher at the time, had doubts. “I didn’t want him to fall into the same trap that the A.I. industry has had in the past,” Catanzaro told me. “But, ten years plus down the road, he was right.”
In the near future, A.I. is projected to generate movies on demand, provide tutelage to children, and teach cars to drive themselves. All of these advances will occur on Nvidia G.P.U.s, and Huang’s stake in the company is now worth more than forty billion dollars. [Again, this was in 2023. Santa Clara, CA. Stanford. Schwab. Robinhood. SoFi.In my world, the center of interest has moved from Harvard University, East Coast, to Stanford, West Coast. Chelsea Clinton is a Stanford graduate, high honors, and graduate degrees from Oxford University and Columbia University.]
Movies on demand? I'm thinking NFL football. Sunday, Monday, and Thursday. College football on Saturdays, and Texas high school football on Fridays. Some of the financially "poorest" high schools in Texas have the best high school football teams.
In the past decade, the exact number of quarterbacks drafted from Texas
high schools varies by the source and timeframe. One MaxPreps.com article from April 2020 noted 20 quarterbacks from
Texas high schools were drafted between 2010 and 2020. More recently,
another Athlon Sports article from May 2024 stated that 12 active NFL
quarterbacks in 2024 played their high school football in Texas.
There are generally 32 starting NFL quarterbacks, one for each team, but
the exact number of "active" quarterbacks can vary as some teams have a
third quarterback on the active roster and others keep one on the
practice squad, so it would be closer to 35-40 quarterbacks on an active
roster for a game day in the 2025 season.
High school football:
Southlake Carroll Dragons, Texas
De La Salle Owls, northern California
My hunch: AI has the potential [of being used] to "examine" every Texas high school football game to "predict" NFL-caliber players.
Top generative chatbots by market share. Link here. This chart has been previously posted on the blog.
******************************* Texas And Northern California
From AI:
In the past decade, consistently performing Texas high school football teams include the
Southlake Carroll Dragons, who are often cited as one of the most consistent teams in the state. Other consistently high-performing programs identified in lists focusing on specific time frames or win categories are the De La Salle Owls (northern California) for their historical dominance, and numerous smaller-division teams like Richland Springs (Texas), Strawn (Texas), and Abbott (Texas) from the 1A classification.
The Southlake Carroll Dragons football team has been
highly successful in the past ten years, making multiple state championship appearances and winning a state title in 2011, though they haven't won another state championship since. They have continued to be a dominant program under head coach Riley Dodge, achieving nine district titles and maintaining an impressive overall record, consistently making deep playoff runs and establishing themselves as one of Texas's elite teams
De La Salle High School holds the national record 151-game winning streak spanning from 1992 to 2004. The streak occurred under the leadership of Bob Ladouceur, who began coaching at the school in 1979. It ended when they were defeated on September 4, 2004, by Bellevue High School (Washington), outside Seattle. De La Salle finished the 2007 football season 13–0 and as state champions. In 2009, De La Salle defeated Crenshaw 28–14 to win the state title again. In 2010, De La Salle defeated Servite, ranked #7 in the nation, 48–8, to win the state title game for a second straight year. De La Salle finished the season 14–0 and ranked #1 in the nation by MaxPreps.
The guys who approved $150/gallon aviation fuel made with algae, are now complaining that having the military's general officers and flag officers meet in Washington, DC, is "expensive." LOL. Link here. It gets tedious.
*************************** The Book Page
This next month or so, my main "recreational" reading will be Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley, c. 2022. I haven't taken many notes on the book yet, and probably won't, but what notes I do take will be posted here.
A Change Is Gonna Come is a song by American singer-songwriter Sam Cooke. It initially appeared on Cooke's album Ain't That Good News, released mid-February 1964 by RCA Victor; a slightly edited version of the recording was released as a single on December 22, 1964.
The song was inspired by various events in Cooke's life, most prominently when he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only motel in Shreveport, Louisiana. Cooke felt compelled to write a song that spoke to his struggle and of those around him, and that pertained to the Civil Rights Movement and African Americans.
Though only a modest hit for Cooke in comparison with his previous singles, A Change Is Gonna Come is widely considered one of Cooke's greatest and most influential compositions and has been voted among the greatest songs ever recorded by various publications.
In 2007, the song was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress by the National Recording Registry, having been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
In 2021, Rolling Stone magazine placed it at number 3 on its list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time", and in 2025, the magazine placed it at number 1 on its list of "The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time."
Shot and killed, age 33, south Los Angeles, at a motel on 91st and South Figueroa Street. Years later, my first address in Los Angeles was an apartment off York Avenue and North Figueroa Street, specifically Newland Street.
************************ Reminiscing
My first apartment in Los Angeles, 1973, at York and North Figueroa:
Six months earlier I had just had my interview at the USC School of Medicine and was now beginning my trek home. This would have been sometime in October, 1972. I had four dollars in my pocket and was hitchhiking back to Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I left on a Friday afternoon about 5:00 p.m. and arrived back at college (Sioux Falls, SD) early on the following Sunday, two days later.
In the map below, it shows the route I took walking from USC School of Medicine to stand at the ramp on I-10.
*************************** The Television Page
It looks like I may have found a new series to watch -- Clarkson's
Farm on Amazon Prime. A documentary of the joys of farming in an
over-regulated country, England. The series ran for four years. Wiki: Clarkson's Farm - Wikipedia. Discovered in Claremont Review of Books, page 5, Summer, 2025, link here.
It begins:
Millions of viewers around the world know Jeremy Clarkson as one of the hosts (“presenters,” they call them in the U.K.) of two amusing and amazing car shows, Top Gear (2002–2015) and The Grand Tour (2016–2024), the first produced with the BBC, the second with Amazon. I don’t watch car shows, even if they are funny and clever. I first saw Clarkson after he had become a farmer—at Diddly Squat Farm in the Cotswolds, as recorded on his show Clarkson’s Farm, currently the most humane and delightful unscripted hour on television.
The show, half comedy, half documentary, has appeared for four seasons on Amazon Prime and is Clarkson’s love letter to Britain’s farmers. The 65-year-old admires them for pursuing a laborious, unsung, unprofitable vocation threatened by local busybodies and national do-gooders alike. That’s why he calls himself a “libertarian.” As he told the Telegraph in a recent interview, “I believe in getting rid of all the legislation. There should only be one law in the country, which is ‘Don’t be a twit.’” The show tracks his long-running feud with the West Oxfordshire council, which prohibited him from setting up a restaurant on the farm, as well as his struggles against “Whitehall gobbledegook” when deciding which crops he could plant and “the government’s Pub Police” as he tried to buy one of the myriad closed pubs in the neighborhood and reopen it.
As usual with libertarians, there are deeper layers under the wish to be left alone. Clarkson admires not merely farmers’ sense of independence but also what they do, and long to do, with that freedom.
