Revenge of the brain spider

Early November is when I start trying to knock the following year’s schedule into place. This time around it’s rough going. For starters, my wife hid my stash of Halloween candy, resulting in a very uncomfortable nutritional deficit. How can I face 2012 without a brace of Snickers bars at hand? How indeed? I’m starting to feel positively undermined.

And for another thing, many Saipan Tribune readers are going to have their pocketbooks undermined next year. I think 2012 will be the year when a lot of economic risks really start to show up and smack us around. So let’s glance at next year, out of nervous reflex if nothing else, and then we’ll take care of some recent business here.

It’s not just the world’s mainlining of toxic debt at issue now, but it’s the structural distortions created by the debt. So even if Santa Claus paid off all the debts in the entire world with a magic credit card, we’d still be left with a lot of economies that can’t walk straight.

And this debt thing isn’t just a phenomenon of Western democracies looting themselves into decadent oblivion. OK, it’s mostly that. But there’s also some debt weirdness lurking in industrial Asia’s realm, too. It’s likely that industrial Asia, 2012, is going to look different than industrial Asia, 2011, does.

There are other factors to heed, too, such as geo-political and military factors, as the world seems determined to keep the front pages lively. Our neighborhood in the west Pacific is growing potential flashpoints like zits on prom night. I hope everything stays cool, real cool, in this realm, but even if it does it will be a very tense cool.

If there’s one certainty for the coming year it’s that Saipan’s overall approach to economics will remain entirely emotional. So if you’re looking for some stability in this topsy-turvy world, some constant that you can always count on, well, there it is.

The emotional tone of things drives my colleagues totally bonkers. But I like it. I consider it a certain kind of Saipan charm, a magical rainbow of soaring unicorns and sparkling sunshine. Why not? Beats the heck out of staring at equations all day. But, as charming as it is, there can be pitfalls in the long run. Namely, from what I’ve seen in emotional venues, when economic scarcity finally becomes a reality, then everybody gets mad at everybody else, and that’s not very charming, is it?

So I’ll channel some Kipling: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Well, if you can, I think you’ll be better off than most.

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself now. So that’s enough glancing ahead at 2012. After all, we’ve still got some unfinished business to attend to, namely picking up the trail from last week’s column in a little project that took on a life of its own.

The whole thing got started when a reader e-mailed a query about one of the English language’s wackier eccentricities, namely its inventory of words that sound alike, but which aren’t spelled alike.

So I wanted to list a few such words. A few, I say. But the brain spider I unleashed on my head dug up 131 examples by last week, 65 of which I printed in this space.

Which brings me to this week. The list now stands at 152 examples. Enough already! I am going to run out and buy a celebrity gossip magazine so I can follow Kim Kardashian’s latest exploits, which will hopefully push this word list out of my head for good.

In the meantime, I’m going to post the entire list on my website. I’ll try to post it by this afternoon, which means I’ll have to find it first. That’s right, I have to find it. I suspect that my wife hid it along with the candy bars, since I’ve littered every car and every writing surface with scraps of paper upon which I jotted the words as they occurred to me. A day of that might sound fun, but doing that for a week is probably a very obnoxious routine.

So, drat, I can’t find my list. I can’t find my candy bars. And I think my pet brain spider is starving from a lack of caramel nougat. You know, for a man trying to square himself to face 2012, I think I’m off to a really bad start.