2014 wheels are off the ground

The New Year is off and running and I'd say its a good start. New Year's Eve and Day were spent watching a fair amount of Twilight Zone episodes on SciFi Network marathon. Also took in a few football games. But mainly spent the day unpacking and cleaning up after holiday trip to see my folks in Louisiana.

Today is trash and recycling materials pick up day - and I put out our bins last night. This morning I had one last bag to put in trash before pick up. I noticed upon lifting the lid on the bin that a neighbor had filled our container with overflow from their house. As I reached in to grab a big bag to reposition it to make more room, a sharp thick wire poked through the bag and stuck me in the finger. Not sure I was punctured because I tried to squeeze some blood out but got nothing, and later noticed a good scratch on another finger. Went in to wash hands, and hopefully wash away all infections. So be careful out there.

Before leaving for Lake Charles, LA, my family here watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, on VHS no less, a version which is not intended to be a faithful rendition of the Dickens classic, but I rate it high on entertainment, and Michael Caine is terrific as Scrooge. (check Hypnogoria podcast for a rating of the Christmas Carol movies) As a result I decided to re-re-re-read the original story to refresh my memory on the variances between most "Carol" movies and the source material. So I downloaded the novella from Project Gutenberg, migrated it to the Nook, and casually read. I came across this paragraph in the second stave which I didn't remember:  (emphasis added at the end by me, and copied from the ebook I downloaded from Gutenberg)

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because “three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so forth, would have become a mere United States’ security if there were no days to count by.

Obviously the bold text intended to imply that Scrooge's assets would become worthless. I had no idea there was a US reference in Christmas Carol much less using its financial instruments as a metaphor for loss in investment. Scrooge has always been portrayed in the movies as a ruthless landlord ready to throw out his renters as soon as rent went in arrears. Apparently he turned cash futures that depended on timely execution of deals.

Hopefully the future contains no possibilities for this US security metaphor to be repeated, but I fear the likelihood of the opposite is increasing.