Tonight for boys’ night out, we saw Appaloosa. I really liked the details of the characters and the acting, and the story had some good twists. I found myself fascinated by the costumes and sets, and most especially the railroad. The train and tracks looked an awful lot like the one I ran from San Francisco to Salt Lake City in the game Railroad Tycoon.

The only thing that wasn’t believable was the not-very-good pianist. Bad piano playing sounds clumsy. Here, the virtuoso Holllywood session pianist didn’t disguise himself at all; he or she played wrong notes with immense grace, precisely in time, without hesitation. Actually, that was pretty funny so I didn’t mind it being unbelievable.

Sometimes, the TV news oversimplifies events without venturing anywhere past the surface. The truth remains obscured.

Lately, it seems that every time I catch a TV news story about the financial crisis, it’s illustrated with stock footage of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing presses churning out reams of bills.

Sometimes, the TV news manages to capture the essence of events with a single image.

(It’s hard to find pictures of those rolling printing presses online! But I like this one even better, taken in Oct. 2006, when Paulson examined a new series of $20 notes bearing his signature for the first time. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

It occurred to me yesterday that the stream of credit solicitations in the mail has ended. No more offers for home equity lines, credit cards, debt consolidation. The only exception in the last month or two has been the couple of banks from whom I do have credit cards: they try to get me to use cash advance checks.

I remember being disturbed 5 or 6 years ago when my stream of email spam expanded from porn and male enhancement products to include mortgages. The junk faxes tacked on the wall at work expanded from timeshare/vacation solicitations to include mortgages.

So I am sorry if this appears un-American or something, but I consider it a good thing that those solicitations and that era of promiscuous lending is over.

In Compelling Banks To Lend At Bazooka Point, Mish writes:

We are in this mess because banks lent money to anyone and everyone including those with no possible means of paying the money back.

The US is in a recession, consumers are cutting back discretionary spending, there is rampant overcapacity in every sector but energy, and there is no reason to go on a lending spree. Furthermore, there is no reason for any qualified buyer to want to borrow. Why would any responsible party want to expand in this environment? The only people who want to borrow significant sums of money now are the very people banks should not want to lend to.

Thus the best thing banks can do with that money is sit on it. Yet the penalty for sitting on it is the difference between what the Fed will pay on bank reserves and the 5% interest banks have to pay at bazooka point for borrowing money they did not want in the first place. If banks do start lending like Paulson wants, defaults are guaranteed to increase dramatically.

What I do find in my mail are many solicitations from charities. It seems that every charity I ever gave money to is desperate for me to give them more. It makes me sad; how much of the money I gave them do they use to send me more desperate pleas? (Yes, I can go research that and factor that into my decisions.)

The same goes for catalogs (three in Tuesday’s mail alone). I guess the manual for How To Have A Good Christmas Shopping Season includes sending a catalog to everyone who’s bought something from you in the last 3 years.

One of my friends just posted a Facebook update suggesting that everyone buy stock now. I idly mused about buying Apple today. If I’d pulled the trigger then, I’d have lost 3% by the end of the day.

My question to those who think we’ve reached the bottom is this: Do you believe that right now the level of fear is more irrational than the level of greed a year ago? Right now I feel that fear is a very rational response and that the levels of euphoria (greed) over the past several years have been an irrational bubble.

I just looked at Google Finance and there’s a front-page story, GM, Ford Shares Fall on Cash Concerns. Their stocks aren’t plunging because of irrational fear. Their stocks are going down the drain because there are serious questions about their ability to survive the recession.

My uncle sent me a link to a Boston Globe story about photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From Above exhibit. It’s coming to the US for the first time.

I marveled at the pictures for awhile ...

... and realized: I saw many of these photos at an outdoor exhibit in London in 2003.

Beautiful.