I recorded a Public Television show last night that was supposed to be "Lords of the Gourd" about gardeners competing to raise the biggest pumpkin in the world trekking across New York State to the annual Cooperstown weigh-off. I was looking forward to seeing it. Not to be, the scheduling info was incorrect so I ended up with a documentary about the Prague Jewish cemetery. It's very interesting, but a gloomy subject.

There was an article in yesterday's paper about the stock market going down when Wall Street figured out that consumers don't have any money to spend and they can't get credit. This is the reality that the fat cats of our business world, who consider $250,000 to be minimum wage, are going to have to face. Folks are still losing their jobs, and they are not going to be able to find new ones. The Baby Boomers who had worked their way up to good-paying jobs over 25 or 30 years are not going to find jobs as good as they lost, or at all.

Mr. Troutbend was at the Excalibur Casino in Las Vegas Halloween night. He said the place was swamped with too much drinking going on. He saw one Balloon Boy costume - the guy had an old aviator's helmet and goggles with a foil replica of the balloon on the end of a long stick which was stuck down his back so that it hung over his head.

The hoopla about the balloon hoax has mostly died down around here, although we've had several political cartoons that used that theme to poke fun at the President and Congress. It's unclear whether any criminal charges are going to be brought, the children are not going to be removed from the home, but if we're lucky the family will leave the area and go pull their stunts somewhere else. I think they are con artists who would do anything to avoid getting a real job, assuming there were any jobs to get. Our unemployment rate here in Northern Colorado is about 7% and it's 13% in Las Vegas, so they'd better not go there.