Larry Marano/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA

I got nuthin’ today. And I think I’m coming down with a cold, so I’m feeling sorry for myself. But I feel like I ought to post something today, so here it is: two perfect quotes. The first is about Donald Trump, from Peter Baker of the New York Times:

Mr. Trump considered [Bob] Corker as a candidate for secretary of state after last year’s election but was said to have told associates that the 5-foot-7 senator was too short.

That says it all about Trump. Next up is Hillary Clinton describing her typical day in What Happened:

Six a.m.: I wake up, sometimes hitting the snooze button to steal a few more minutes. Snoozing leaves you more tired—there are studies on this—but in that moment, it seems like such a great idea.

Of course there are studies on this. And of course she knows about them. This is Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.

It’s also why I like her. I like studies too! I like charts! I like knowledge! I like people who give a damn about the actual world instead of just relying on their own internal fantasies. Sadly, people like us appear to be out of fashion these days.

Donald Trump is really determined to keep the spotlight on black athletes who are protesting racial injustice on the football field, isn’t he? I’m not a fan of the endless theories that Trump is doing something to “distract” us from something even worse, but this a really obvious and calculated effort to sustain an empty controversy that otherwise no one would care about.

By now I think we all get it: Donald Trump is the savior of American values from the dusky hordes. Maybe it’s time to stop giving this transparent performance art the attention it so obviously doesn’t deserve. How many more weeks do we have to read about the latest desperate attempt to keep it in the news pages?

Twenty years ago I changed cell phone carriers to sign up with Nextel. I chose Nextel because their service allegedly worked in both the US and Europe (using a newly released Motorola handset). That turned out to be a hit-or-miss kind of thing, though. I think I managed to complete a few calls with it, but it was a pain in the ass and most of the time it didn’t work. It was also pretty pricey.

I’ve waited ever since then for a truly global phone service available from a US carrier. That is, one that doesn’t require me to call up and order a special plan for a month. One that doesn’t cost a small fortune. One that doesn’t require a local SIM. One that just works.

And I have to hand it to T-Mobile: that’s what they advertised and that’s what I got. When we landed in Dublin, my phone connected just like it would if I had landed in Atlanta. In South Kerry, it continued to work. In London it works. There’s no extra charge. And phone calls are 20 cents a minute, which is perfectly reasonable.

You don’t get 4G performance. Occasionally you don’t even get 3G. But most of the time you do, and it’s more than adequate for routine stuff like texting, reading email, posting to Facebook, etc.

All that’s left now is for America’s lame banks to offer a true chip-and-PIN card, and European travel will have finally entered the 21st century. I supposedly have one, but it gave Sainsbury’s fits last night. I shall investigate this more methodically and report back.

Ha ha ha ha….um, no:

Republicans have always been in favor of spending more on defense and less on social programs. They are still in favor of spending more on defense and less on social programs. And they have never cared about the deficit. Nothing has changed.

That is, nothing has changed except what they say. Surely the Washington Post knows that?

We’ll finish up our avian-themed day with this photo of a calico duck in St. James’s Park. I’ve always wanted a calico cat, but maybe a duck would be a good replacement?

So what kind of duck is this, anyway? To help you, I’ve posted a picture of a sign that allegedly identifies all the waterfowl in the park. I don’t see anything that really matches this duck’s coloring. In fact, I don’t see anything that even has a black head and an orange beak. But I’m not much of a bird person. Feel free to leave your educated guesses in comments.

UPDATE: Consensus is that it’s a common shelduck. But common or not, it’s still very pretty. I think a perfect household would have a pair of calico cats and a pair of common shelducks.

Let’s continue with our avian theme today. This is a rare photo of Gullzilla, about to make a light snack out of a police helicopter. Ever since these guys escaped from Skull Island, police work in London has become considerably more dangerous.

Actually, we were in Hyde Park and the helicopter was circling endlessly over the Natural History museum a few blocks away. A car lost control and barreled over a kerb, injuring 11 people. It was not terror-related, according to the Guardian: “However, the heavy and swift response to the incident by dozens of armed officers reflected the concerns about a possible terror attack in the capital after the Westminster and London Bridge incidents this year.”

We found these pigeons in a little park next to St. Paul’s Hotel in Kensington. They are the fattest damn pigeons I’ve ever seen. They look like they could explode any moment.

Unsurprisingly, they’re also lazy. They didn’t scatter when we approached. Nor did they flock over to us hoping for a bit of bread or something. As near as I could tell, their philosophy was simple: they wouldn’t bother moving unless you actually held out some food and they could confirm that it was worth the trouble to waddle over.

None of the other pigeons in the area look like this. Just these. The hotel folks must throw out absolute bucketloads of food to them.

I didn’t expect to find any cats in London, but I’ve already found three. Here’s one of them, a handsome orange tabby who was prowling around near Edwardes Square. He didn’t run away when I approached, but neither was he quite courageous enough to come over and make friends. However, he did jump up onto a wall and pose for some pictures. I thought that was jolly decent of him.

The American economy lost 33,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at -123,000 jobs. And yet, the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2 percent and the labor participation rate increased to 63.1 percent. What’s going on?

There are two plausible explanations. First, the jobs survey was scheduled just after Hurricane Harvey. Since much of Houston was underwater, businesses reported that no one was working, and that skewed the numbers.

The second alternative is that it’s just one of those things. There are two surveys: the payroll survey of businesses, which produces the jobs report, and the household survey, which produces the unemployment report. As the chart below shows, they frequently diverge significantly:

Over time, these two surveys generally even out, but September might have been one of those months where they happened to diverge a lot. Combine that with Hurricane Harvey and you get a very strange jobs report. It’s probably best not to pay much attention to it.

On the earnings front, there was surprisingly good news: hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees went up at an annual rate of 5.1 percent. Inflation is currently running around 2 percent, so that’s excellent wage growth. We’ll see if the Fed allows it to continue.

Donald Trump is bragging about the stock market again. As well he should: the S&P 500 is up 12 percent since he took office. That’s not bad! Of course, this is hardly the best first year a president has had in recent history:

Poor Donald. The ghost of Obama haunts him constantly. Still, I guess he needs something to take his mind off the fact that his Secretary of State thinks he’s a “fucking moron”:

Four senior administration officials said Trump first learned on Wednesday that Tillerson had disparaged him after a July 20 national security meeting at the Pentagon….Trump was furious when he saw the NBC News report, which was published shortly before 6 a.m. Wednesday. For the next two hours the president fumed inside the White House, venting to [John] Kelly, officials said. He left for Las Vegas shortly after 8 a.m., 20 minutes behind schedule.

This is the kind of thing a non-moron would probably laugh off. “Yeah, giving a campaign speech to a bunch of boy scouts was kind of dumb, wasn’t it?” But an actual moron will always go ballistic over something like this. Especially after a press conference where Tillerson pointedly refused to deny ever saying such a thing.

It’s no wonder Kelly decided not to go to Las Vegas with Trump. Trump had already bent his ear for two hours. Did he really need another five hours of being yapped at while he was trapped in a plane with Trump? Where’s Jared “Trump Whisperer” Kushner when you need him?