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Showing posts from December, 2008

Child-like Mischief

Some things are just too troublesome to write about in detail when you stand so close to the events in question. Suffice it to say that this year I decided to get a Toy for Christmas. I purchased a Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3). In a way this was an act of madness. I bought the player but I owned no games, no Blu -Ray discs, and no HDTV . I bought it out of anticipation for the release of the Neil Young Archives in 2009. I plugged the PS3 into my stereo and listened to samples from my music collection. Just by replacing my old DVD player with the PS3, the same music on the same stereo with the same connections sounded better. Significantly better. I was amazed and it was out of that amazement in the improved quality of sound (not image) that I became a child again. I was spontaneous, in the moment, blazing a karmic path to maximize my PS3 experience. The path soon included a 42-inch HDTV. This brought with it some complications that I don't care to flesh out. Let's just say a

This Bag Is Not A Toy

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Boink! (At the 50-day Moving Average)

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No one knows. After receiving a very bearish Dow Theory confirmation in November the stock market immediately turned sharply upward. I was hoping to buy in to a major rise in the markets but I just didn't realize it would rebound so quickly in the face of so much significantly dire global economic news. I'm certainly no professional at this. But, as I mentioned in a earlier post, this is the other edge of a high VIX . The market can jump in either direction rather rapidly. From October into November the Dow essentially lost 2500 points. Then from November 21 to December 8 it gained back about 1500 points. Like a bouncing ball. A very quick simplified course in chart reading: The chart above was created by me with BigCharts . It shows Dow activity from late September until today. The "blocks" are candlesticks , ways of showing how much the Dow was up or down on a given day. Dark blocks are down days, clear blocks are up days. The two blue bands framing the blocks are

Time for the (Rain) Deer Flag

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I put out our seasonal holiday flag last weekend and we got five or six inches of rain here over two days soon afterwards. I don't remember the last time it rained like that. So, thanks to the flag for bringing us plenty of badly needed rain. With the holiday season, I lean toward Rudolph (with his nose so bright). Been decorating the house and playing some Christmas music. My Favorite Christmas CD is a classic from the Vince Guaraldi Trio - the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas . Very relaxing but with a nice, jazzy groove to it. - The other CD I enjoy is Burl Ives : Have a Holly Jolly Christmas . I have danced to the title track with my wife and/or daughter at the start of every holiday season since my daughter was born. She used to love me carrying her and twirling around to the music. Now that she's a bit older she acts somewhat disinterested and we have to dance semi-ballroom style. She ends up giggling anyway at the end, however. - So, you put up with the feigned co

Whadayahav?...Whadayahav?

Well, it being a very substantial dessert, GMC’s fruit cake is still putting up a fight at our home but we are slowly whittling it down. I must confess that the longer it sits the better it gets. We keep several tablespoons of bourbon sealed in the Tupperware container with it. When you open the container now your olfactory organ is treated to a delightful fruity aroma more potent than it was more than a week ago. The stronger tinge of bourbon while eating the cake is most satisfying. Yesterday, my daughter attended her cousin’s spend the night birthday party about 2 hours south of here. To save time in retrieving her, I met my sister today a little over half way at the locally (and regionally) famous Varsity Restaurant in Atlanta for lunch. It’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of dining at the Varsity. The old joke among my friends was that you need to periodically eat at “the greasy V” (as we call it) to recalibrate your taste buds back to zero. The Varsity used to s