Blister in the Sun, by the Violent Femmes.

Girlfriend in a Coma, by The Smiths.

Head Like a Hole, by Nine Inch Nails.

Centerfold, by the J. Geils Band.

Any other suggestions?

Yeah, he acts just as grown up as he looks.

I Think We’re Alone Now, as made famous by Tiffany.

Overkill, as made famous by Men At Work.

Working in the Coal Mine, as made famous a second time by Devo.

Tarzan Boy, as made famous by Baltimora.

Now don’t you wish you’d heard covers of these songs performed by animatronic animals?

(This is an update to my November post about US job losses. For more information about where I got my data, please see that post.)

The US job market is definitely still sliding. Back in December I crunched some numbers to see how bad the job losses were as a percentage of the total number of jobs. Here’s what it looks like now that we have two more months of bad news.

Historical Job Losses

Here are the job gains and losses since 1960.

We’ve now had three months whose drop is nearly that of the single largest drop in December 1974, as is shown on this table of the top ten greatest monthly losses.

September 2008 isn’t on the list after its preliminary numbers were revised. Now October 2008 is on it instead, and November 2008’s non-preliminary numbers are worse than before.

Now let’s look at job loss as a percentage of the jobs that could be lost. That is, take the number of jobs lost in a given month and divide that number by the jobs you started out with in the previous month.

As before, the shape of the graph is about the same, but the fluctuations are now larger earlier in time. Here’s the top ten worst months by percentage of jobs lost.

The bottom of our list is filling up with recent months.

These are still all one-month drops, and the data shows a lot of single-month drops that are surrounded by gains. How does 2008-2009 compare to other runs of job losses? Between 1960 and now there have been seven times that we’ve lost jobs for four or more months in a row.

What a difference two months makes. Through November, we hadn’t lost as many jobs since January 2008 as we had from November 1974 to April 1975. Now we’ve lost far more than that. On sheer number of jobs alone, we’re in our worst run since 1960. What about job losses as a percentage of the number of jobs that existed before the losses?

I’d still rate the 1974-1975 recession worse, based on this list and the fact that the job losses there were sustained over a mere 6 months. But the situation’s bad, and not getting any better. Two months ago I said, “While we’ve experienced worse recessions, given another four or five months of this and we could move into the top spot across the board.” It may not take four months at the rate we’re going.

I’ve had the raw video of Eli reviewing “Super Mario Galaxy” sitting on my hard drive for forever, so I decided it was time to do something about it.

I didn’t used to obsess about productivity. Friends were welcome to get all wrapped up in methodologies for being more productive; I was getting things done just fine, thanks. I had an excellent memory, and seldom forgot to do what needed to be done.

Then I started getting older. I’d leave small tasks lying around, only remembering them when I re-found them or they blew up loudly in the corner.

Even that wasn’t enough to push me over the edge. Sure, I signed up for Remember the Milk, but I put tasks in it like an old man erratically handing out coins to his grandchildren. Otherwise I went on as I had before, mainly relying on memory and the kindness of others.

But then came the iPhone. Oh, goodness, what a difference having a computer in your pants can make. I started using Remember the Milk — really using it, instead of dabbling in it. I found how to create saved smart searches, a crazy feature that only crazy people really need. Then I realized I also wanted to note down random web pages that I wanted to look at later, as well as snippets of blog posts and random thoughts and, oh, hell, why not sign up for Evernote to remember all of this for me?

Wait: what if I’m driving and a particularly clever thought zips its way through my brain? I can’t type and drive at the same time? But I can talk and drive, as Misty will tell you while rolling her eyes. So I signed up for reQall, which has an iPhone app to transcribe voice to text.

I haven’t yet set up 43 folders to dump stuff into, and Lifehacker isn’t in my Google Reader subscriptions. But if I graph my use of productivity tools as a function of time, I should reach the productivity singularity in early 2010, at which point I will be so productive that I have no time to do anything.

The Golden Gate Bridge was gusty.

Fisherman’s Wharf was fishy.

Lombard Street was twisty.

Coit Tower was phallic-y.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a pretentious art school student but I was hampered by attending a regular high school with my good and very nerdy friends. In order to gain my pretentious art school street cred, I made all my friends participate in my daily creation of Lunch Deceased.

Lunch Deceased was half found-treasure sculpture and half performance art. I gathered up everyone’s left over lunch trash (McDonald’s packaging, cafeteria Styrofoam, and brown bag effluvium) and stacked it as high as I could. My lunch companions were allowed to add to the sculpture but I held divine right to nix the addition if it didn’t fit my ever changing vision of the day’s work. Each day the title for the work was “Lunch Deceased” and then a number. I seem to recall a very complex numbering system involving the date and the number of items divided by how many days until the weekend. I don’t remember the exact calculations but it added up to a suitably pretentious title for each work of “art”.

It was silly and made us all laugh and I recall my friends humoring my ridiculousness with much grace.

I’ve thought about Lunch Deceased quite a lot recently as Liza has taken to creating Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Deceased on a daily basis. This usually involves shredding the food she didn’t eat into crumb sized pieces. She smashes those pieces with her cup and examines the bottom of the cup. She then scrapes the bottom off and starts over. Repeat until I am so disgusted I make her get down and clean up the squishy mess.

Part of me is glad to see the tradition live on and part of me just wishes she’d move on to the next developmental milestone. Regardless, watching her create it everyday has brought back many fond memories for me.

Do you remember when I used to complain all the time about Liza’s lousy sleep habits? Well everything old is new again.

Liza’s current run of lousy sleep has me offering to give her to people I barely know. The rotten part is, several people have agreed to take her but decided against it when I tell them she’s regularly up two-five times per night and sometimes for more than two hours at a time.

The past three weeks I’ve subsisted on six hours of broken sleep per night or less. The first week Stephen was out of town. Last week was a bit easier because he was home, so he helped with the night time horrors. This week he is gone again and I am a barely functioning zombie of crankiness.

I thought it was her teeth. Then I thought it was an ear infection. Now I think she has redeveloped some terrifically lousy habits. I am also afraid that at least some of her nighttime awakenings are due to wanting to hang out with someone.

I ask all of you that tonight when you are falling asleep, think of Liza and pray to whatever sheep you count that she will stay asleep or failing that, will just stay in her bed quietly so I can sleep.

Today, while watching Duke’s basketball team feed Maryland’s into a wood chipper face-first, Eli started doing play-by-play announcing.

“Duke’s got it, and then other Duke’s got it, and he throws it in the air, and it hits the front and falls.

“And a red guy’s got it, and now another red guy, he throws it but Duke grabs it and now there’s another Duke guy, he throws it and it goes in!”

Sadly, I’d still rather listen to him than Billy Packer.