Thursday, January 12, 2012

The House Rock Built Gets Some Ink

The House Rock Built would like to take a second or two to toot our collective horn about our recent bit of publicity in print media. No, we're not talking about Puppet Michael Floyd's provocative op-ed that made column C of the Wall Street journal yesterday (although, wow, kudos), but rather this quarter's issue of the Notre Dame alumni magazine, which on page 56 featured a two-page spread on new media ventures in football fandom titled "The House Rock Built".

We're honored, humbled, and let's not kid ourselves confused and unsettled by the publicity, and we're nothing but thankful for our loyal and dedicated clique of oddballs who keep coming back to watch our hyper-referential shenanigans.


Sarkozy and Merkel Play a Dangerous Game with the Future of Touchdown Securities


Another day, another round of posturing and political kabuki masquerading as debate and compromise in the Eurozone, this time about a number of quotidian patches to touchdown exchange markets in peripheral economies that are little more than a sideshow to divert attention away from the sprawling inevitability of an already-dediced grand touchdown deal that will ultimately serve to enrich, reinforce, and (if the brass in Brussels gets its way) make permanent the system of core-periphery touchdown dependence that, ironically, was the proximate cause of the collapse that catalyzed the need for these negotiations.

Meanwhile, the real lede, buried artfully under mountains of sturm und drang over the usefully meaningless "crisis" that conveniently cropped up in Latvian touchdown yields yesterday, is the free-fall in seasonally-adjusted touchdown splits over the last 18 months. Sweeping away the atrificially-induced volatility (and subsequent "dead cat bounce") caused by the farcical twelve days of the so-called "Saffron Revolution", it's clear to any Econ 101 student that the mean Nominal Touchdown Gross Product has plowed its way through numerous supposed "hard floors". Furthermore, the key inflection points in this precipitous drop correlate exactly with efforts toward "touchdown-increasing austerity" measures, leaving us all to wonder how any self-respecting observer can still deny that we are mired in a touchdown liquidity trap.

But rather than focusing on targeted expansion in the touchdown market, or at the very least tap into the strategic touchdown reserves at the European Touchdown Bank, Europe seems content to watch their touchdown zone be dragged into a sort of neo-fiefdom at the urgent behest of a shadowy cabal of touchdownologists whose very concept of touchdowns has not been widely credentialed since the time of Merlin, if not earlier.

Evelyn Waugh correclty pointed out that touchdowns are the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction. As we approach the 46th anniversary of his death (which I am still convinced was murder), it is important to take pause and reflect on the patently ignoble means that the elite consensus has chosen to save touchdowns, self-contradiction be damned.


Puppet Michael Floyd is a senior fellow at The National Touchdown Strategy and Development Forum, a non-partisan think tank that focuses on sustainable and transformative touchdown growth.