Good Morning Stuff

The old Volvo blew its alternator, which is  the Volvo equivalent of pancreatic cancer.  So, off to the repair shop.*  Meanwhile, a couple of really great morning reads:

• Felix Salmon's piece about the microlending meltdown in Andrha Pradesh offers some interesting stuff about microlending but it is really a story about bloggers and the changing nature of journalism--about how a fully informed blogger in his mother's basement some thinktank somewhere can do more to clarify a story than a reportorial bigfoot who parachutes onto the scene and harvests a few random quotations.
  
  
• Remember Cliff Clavin on Cheers and the buffalo-herd theory of how beer makes you smarter (hint: the weakest go to the wall)? Barry Ritholtz reminds us that it worked for GM, could have worked for banks. Sadly, it may not work for beer, though.
  
  
• Oy, men: Prince William and his Kate "were flatmates in a group house, just friends, they said, until suddenly 'they became more. The 'more' was rumored to happen when Kate was wearing less, strutting the catwalk in lingerie for a student fashion show."
  

*What, get rid of an old Volvo?  You nuts?