P.S. Between John Roberts and the renminbi, today was totally a four paper (NYT, FT, WSJ, WaPo) day, and those are the best. days. ever.

Speaking of 7th grade, I've gotta say that King's Quest is as awesome as it ever was. Also PM Dawn.

My name is Matt, and I'm a mint-o-holic.

It started recently when I was socializing actively, and I started getting really obsessed with having fresh breath. I'd always have a tin of Eclipse mints on me. Then it became more about being really bored at work and just needing something to break up the strings of e-mails and phone calls that fill up my time these days.

Now it's a bona fide addiction. I realized this today when I was eating one Certs Powerful Mint (the ones in the flat plastic rectangle) every few minutes. What happened next was positively horrifying. I ate one mint before checking my Outlook, and then, upon seeing an e-mail from this really stupid lady who'd been bugging me all day, I reached for the mints again without even realizing it. Somehow, I've turned retsin into some kind of narcotic.

God only knows where this will lead. All I ask is that, if you see me on the street, with flavor crystals caked on my lips offering sexual favors to a Blonde British woman in tennis whites, remember that I was once like you.

2) Girls who read Krugman are so hot.

I think Yulia Tymoshenko has to be the hottest prime minister ever. She'd prolly still be even if there were any close competition.

In the interim though, if you don't have it, what's your freakin' problem? Don't you like good things? I bet you don't. I bet you're like, "No, I don't think it would be fun to have an awesome record. I'd rather repeatedly prick myself with a safety pin while I listen to The Downward Spiral on repeat."

Annie - "Heartbeat"
Belle & Sebastian - "Dear Catastrophe Waitress"
Calexico - "Crystal Frontier"
Big Black - "L Dopa"
Fog - "We're Winning"
Kelly Clarkson - "Since U Been Gone"
Cursive - "The Radiator Hums"
Erlend Oye - "Sheltered Life/A Fine Day"
Katamari Damacy - "Katamari on the Rock"
The Good Life - "Lovers Need Lawyers"
David Kilgour - "Today is Gonna Be Mine"
Edan - "Funky Voltron"

God damn, that's got my heart going just writing that. I definitely need to get back to the Joanna Newsom & Neutral Milk Hotel.

Also, I dearly hope that I'm the only person ever to put Big Black and Kelly Clarkson together on a mix.

Well, interminable wuss that I am, I think I can safely add a couple more to that list:

Lots of things from Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy. For some reason, Will Sheff's ultra-earnest delivery makes this line, which should be cringeworthy but isn't, not just bearable, but downright gorgeous and positively heart-rending (perhaps literally, if this tightness in my chest is anything serious...):

And I think I know the bitter dismay / of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day / when she turned him away /
to remember some knave / who gave just one rose one day years ago

Also, the way he says "Honey, you're murdering me" resonates like a tuning fork.

Nina Nastasia had a couple of bona fide tearjerkers on The Blackened Air. "Been So Long" and "That's All There Is" fucking kill me. Anybody who's ever been in one of those Mountain Goats-y relationships, where the force of your epic bitterness toward your SO could take out a city block, but you were constitutionally incapable of not being in love with him/her might feel similarly.

Now that I mention it, speaking of the Mountain Goats, I find that whenever I cover "The Mess Inside" at live shows, I get teary and my voice starts breaking up around about the verse about Grand Army Plaza.

Good times.

Okay, so I feel like something needs to be said about how cute the new crop of Mount Sinai med students are. I don't get over to the hospital/campus that much, but I had some stuff to do over there today, and yowza! Where are the awkward mousy bookish types? Apparently they're at Columbia or something. Seriously. Wow.

Now that I think about, yea and also please bless the 5 PM Girls that is sandwiched between 7th Heaven and a Full House rerun.

Amen.

Aside from my seasonal infirmity, I feel like I'm at the height of my powers. greenideas looks so sexy, I almost can't restrain my lust for it. Also, you can now get to hcb by pointing your web machines towards hotchocolateboy.com. I think that's very cool.

Um, okaybyebyeiloveyou!

On the one hand, I've got to give Chuck Schumer a lot of credit for pushing legislation to put some pressure on China to revalue the renminbi. Historically, the democratic party isn't the one that's most likely to crow about international monetary policy. The problem is that it's just not in America's best interests for China to revalue. At first blush, it may seem like the reason we have such a huge trade deficit with China is because, by maintaining their dollar peg at its current rate, they're making their goods so cheap for us that we can't help but buy them. The thinking then, is that a more realistic peg, or even a floating yuan would make Chinese goods less attractive to US consumers, and so narrow the trade gap somewhat.

There's nothing wrong with that reasoning as far as it goes, but it omits one important point. China has the world's highest concentration and largest amount of dollars in its forex reserves. This is mostly an effort to prop up the dollar. If China revalued or let her currency float, she would have no reason to artificially bolster the dollar, and would likely sell off many of its US currency reserves. A sell-off by China would cause other Asian nations to follow suit, with the result that the already ailing dollar would bottom out.

This is to say nothing of the fact that any unilateral action by the US against China on matters of trade and currency would surely fall in breach of the WTO. In order for the US strategy to pass WTO muster, we would have to demonstrate that China is manipulating its currency to keep it artificially low. Considering the Renminbi has a stable peg, that would be more than a little difficult to show.

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawerence Lau put forward an interesting alternative to revaluation in today's FT (Paid subscription required. Just pick up the print edition if you're interested. There's also an interesting comment piece on what the EU could do in the wake of a 'Non' in the French referendum on the EU Constitution at the end of the month). Their idea is that China should impose a tax on all exports. It would cool growth in their domestic manufacturing sector, thereby encouraging its trading partners (especially the US, EU, and Japan) to back off, and it would generate some revenue for the state.

We can't let the "obvious" (i.e. politically popular) solution to our widening trade gap with China get in the way of our big-picture thinking. If we're going to push China (which isn't necessarily wrong), we should be mindful what we're pushing her towards.

The weirdest part was how, when I woke up in the morning and saw him all over the Sunday shows, I was like "aww, it's John," like we'd actually hung out and been cool. Too weird.

*Note: While he probably isn't as bad a guy as he's being made out to be, he's most definitely not a good guy, and he has no business representing this country in the UN.