J. Michael Andresen

For a New Year’s party, I made a prognostication quiz, with prizes to be awarded at next year’s New Year’s party. I want to open it up to everyone, though! If you want to play, send your answers to jmandresen at gmail. 1. January Every year The Economist creates an index of democracy for each of the 167 sovereign nations on the globe. The five least free countries are listed below, with their democracy index number from 2006. They all beat out Turkmenistan (sixth from the bottom with an index of 1.83), Libya (seventh from the bottom with an index of 1.84), and Uzbekistan (eighth from the bottom with an index of 1.85). (Sweden is at the top with an index of 9.88. The U.S. is 17th with 8.22.) Which will rise from the bottom of the 2007 Democracy Index? a. Myanmar (Burma) 1.77 b. Togo 1.75 c. Chad 1.65 d. Central African Republic 1.61 e. North Korea 1.03 f. none of the above: all will be at the bottom again 2. Early February The New England Patriots are the strong favorites to win the Sup

As promised in my last post, here are the photos from the 1994 Halloween party at Epsilon Theta: From left to right: Stephanie as LISP (represented by Daffy Duck ), Albert as C++ (represented by a seaman with several allusions to the language), me as G-code (represented by my faux G-string ), Cherry as Blue (represented by her monochrome), and Kari as Logo (represented by a turtle, complete with hard shell in back). And here's another of just me: If you're wondering why my fingernails are painted black, it's because I was going later that evening to another party with people from work. I figured my cow costume would be safer for that than the Speedo.

Today I have a guest post from my lovely wife, describing a recent outing we had with some friends of hers to see Rocky Horror: The Musical at the Ordway Theater in Saint Paul: This past Saturday (October 27) Beth and I went to aerobics (as we usually do) and then to her favorite antique store (as we often do). The owner of the shop knows Beth (and me too I guess) fairly well. I imagine that he assumes I am her closeted lesbian partner because of my successful encouragement of her frequent and large purchases (this Saturday he said “your paycheck is in the mail”) and frequent presence when he later delivers these purchases. I was not there when he delivered the antique sofa this time, however. (I am a Grinch about Halloween this year, largely due to the failure to be invited to any parties and disinterest in hosting one.) My absence was because—while they were not Halloween plans per se —we had plans nonetheless. In fact, I had told the antique shop owner about these plans. He had be

The concept is rather logical and yet so disturbing at the same time.

I've sold the house at long last! We are closing on Monday. It has been a stressful process selling the house in this market. The final selling price is 14% below what I paid for it in June of 2005. That's sad, but such are the vicissitudes of capital investment. You can't buck the larger trends in the economy. I recall having a conversation with Ken about this at one point: a company can work so hard to improve its stock price, but the larger economic picture plays such a huge role, and in particular the availability of capital. Imagine a company as a sailboat with the best crew and the best equipment: the main factor determining how fast the boat goes is still the wind, entirely out of the crew's control. A funny thing happened yesterday. I've been trying to sell the furniture very quickly, since we're closing on Monday. For a while, it wasn't clear that the sale would go through. The buyer runs a small business where she buys houses and turns them into fo

I was in Boston for a week, from August 5 to 12. I had some business to do, and Katie joined me for the final weekend to hang out some more with my friends from Boston. First, some photos of my Boston friends who were able to make it to the wedding. This is my wedding party, consisting of my brother Jeremiah along with Boston friends Ekrem (best friend from college) and Sandy (best friend from high school): Can you find them in the large group photo below? A few people needed to climb onto the rocks: Some people wore impossibly tenuous, gossamer footwear that necessitated assistance on descent: The pictures taken on the grassy hill were moderately less strenuous: Unbenknownst to me, my college friend Alyse occupied herself with a large outdoor art project as a part of a " collaborative production game ." (This actually greatly intrigues me - I may yet join in.) She and two other people in the game spent the morning and afternoon coloring over 300 feet of the sidewalk with

This is a really frightening graph published in The Economist a month and a half ago: This is scary because China is set to overtake the U.S. as the largest overall producer of greenhouse gases and yet China produces less than one-fifth the amount per person. Imagine what the situation will be like when they catch up to us in per capita carbon dioxide emissions. They will then be producing 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to 6 billion tons per year for the U.S. China argues, quite reasonably, that the U.S. and Europe are responsible for the vast majority of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, so they should be responsible for reducing that level. The West became rich through continued economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. That was fueled in part by cheap and dirty energy. Why shouldn't China have the same opportunity to increase the standard of living for its people? Most embarrassing for the U.S. government, China outperforms the U.S. on a num

Last week, Katie was assigned to depose a witness in Connecticut on August 7. We decided to coordinate that with the trip to Boston I need to take sometime in August. I therefore bought plane tickets to spend a week in Boston, arriving Sunday morning, August 5 and returning home a week later. The initial plan was for Katie to fly with me the first Sunday, do her deposition in Connecticut on Tuesday, and return to Minnesota on Wednesday. In an amusing plot twist, Katie will no longer needs to do the deposition. It turns out that the defendant (Medtronic) has decided to buy the plaintiff (Kyphon) That certainly obviates the need for any further patent infringement litigation between the two! This makes Katie's professional life a bit more complicated, since she was expecting to spend much of the next month working on this project. Now she will need to latch on to a brand new project, which will force an annoying level of uncertainty. Plan A (Katie traveling to Boston for the depositi

We had a bird fly down our chimney into our fireplace a few days ago. By today, it became clear that it was trapped and would not be able to get out again. Though the cat enjoyed the glass-enclosed spectacle, I felt something should be done. This is Katie's recounting of the events to a colleage of hers: ===================================== From: Katie Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:46 AM To: Samina Subject: The bird is now dead. Michael killed it this morning it to put it out of its misery. (I saw both the bird and the cat watching the bird last night.) His description of the affair that I just received has left me very disturbed. So I felt the need to share. (I spare you the details, however, which I assure you are worse than your imagination.) Katie ===================================== From: Samina Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:53 AM To: Katie Subject: RE: The bird Oh my! I'm sorry that the situation worsened with an intentional killing. I trust it had to be thrown

First, some wedding photos! (No, I am not the geezer. The geezer appears later in the post. Katie is, in fact, four months older than I am.) Here's one of the happy couple: Here's one with the wedding parties and immediate families in front of the waterfall that was immediately opposite the reception site: This one is a favorite of ours. While traipsing about in the grass, a number of small insects had gotten caught in the sheer netting of Katie's dress. We realized this after the posed photos were done and it was a group effort to remove them all as quickly and efficiently as possible: And now back to our regularly scheduled post. Katie and I went to see the musical Chicago last weekend. We arrived at the Ordway Theater about 40 minutes before curtain so that we could share a pre -show cocktail before sitting down. That meant that we went to find our seats just five minutes before the lights went down. I led Katie ahead of me as we wended our way to the seats in the m

Still no more wedding pictures (we're getting them this afternoon), but that won't detract from me telling about our honeymoon, since I didn't have a camera. The battery died and wouldn't accept the recharging I tried to give it the morning that we were to leave. I rummaged around in the closet and found my old camera. It charged fine and I could view the batch of old photos on the display screen, but the shutter wouldn't open to take pictures. Sigh. You'll have to go to the Canoe Bay website to see a few pictures. It's an idyllic retreat in Chetek , Wisconsin on a private lake. They think they're all that, too. No children are allowed, for example: they cater to adult couples. And although the website says they're somewhere in Chetek , it doesn't give directions, or even an address. They only disclose that information after you've made a reservation. The first thing to hit you upon driving in to the secret resort compound is the architectur

I am achingly close to accomplishing one of my life goals! I am marrying the love of my life in just under a month now. I may have had some false starts, but Katie was certainly worth the wait! I love being with her and being a part of her. I'm so happy to be spending the rest of my life with her, and I'm very excited to be celebrating our marriage in front of 200 of our friends and family in just four weeks! More on that later. This post is about my life goals. I started my list fifteen years ago after reading a magazine article on an airplane. The article suggested that keeping an up-to-date list of goals was a good way to keep some perspective on life. It seemed like a neat idea to me, so I started right away. Although I could have populated my list with things like "finish college" or "land safely," I wanted my goals to be longer term and involve significant effort toward something that I might not normally take. I started with three goals and added more

In advance of my nuptials, I need to divest myself of some real estate. It's a bit sad that I moved to Minnesota and needed to buy my house at the same time the Federal Reserve dropped the prime lending rate to 1% to battle inflation and unemployment. The very low interest rates tempted the banking industry to experiment with an idea they thought might make them money in the circumstances: extend mortgage credit to sub-prime borrowers. Banks thought they could charge interest rates high enough to cover the probable default rate for borrowers with poor credit ratings. These poor credit risks were out there buying houses when I was buying mine, pushing up demand and pushing up prices with it. The great banking experiment failed miserably. The banks had greatly miscalculated. The banking industry is awash with defaulted loans, and the housing industry is awash with foreclosures. This is a doubly bad situation for me now, since (a) the demand for houses had dropped drastically since th

Yesterday during the Super Bowl, I asked Katie to marry me and (after a long but unintended delay) she said "yes"! Her mom (June) and dad (Tom) and sister (Laura) came over to watch the Super Bowl with my mom (Cherie) and siblings (Missy, Tina, Jeremiah). It was the first time that our families had met, so it seemed like a good time to make a spectacle. Here's the video (it's 7 minutes long, so beware) followed by a brief play-by-play explaining some of the jokes and filling in bits that might have been hard to hear: Jeremiah was nice enough to agree to take the video. Before the video started, I told Katie (and everyone else in attendance) that she had to sit in front of everyone because I wanted to play a prank on her. That explains (I hope) her expressions of horror at the start. Jeremiah starts out at what turned out to be a non-optimal angle but catches me taking a knee before he gets up and runs to the other side of the room. You can hear Katie's mother say

Over Labor Day weekend, Dad and I played bridge at the Fargo Regional. We teamed up with a father-son combination from the Fargo area. We entered two knockout events with them, coming in first and third. Not too shabby! We might even team up again next year. I rounded out the bridge year with two sectional tournaments played with my sister Tina. Also in September, we went to visit my sisters' cabin in Kettle River. We had a good time enjoying the fall foliage and talking around the campfire: Later in September Katie and I went to Paris! Details from that trip are in a separate entry. Through the rest of the autumn, we've partaken of Minneapolis/St. Paul culture as much as we could. We saw three musicals ( Ain't Misbehavin' , Cats , and Chess ) saw three art exhibits (Old Masters of the Wadsworth Museum, Alexander Calder, and some photographer that Katie wanted to see), and signed up for a series of lectures on modern scholarship in American history that has been very en