Ummagumma

“Bet not thy whole wad.” Basic investment tenet. Three weeks ago, in an admittedly weak moment of “irrational exuberance”, I thought the market was heading up despite the news. But, this is the Great Recession. I didn ’t even follow my own advice. Investment newsletters that I pay a lot of money for every year said there was a "strong case” that the Dow had formed a base. I could see their point. But the November 20 Dow Theory bear market confirmation is still in effect. We have no contrary signal to indicate a change to a bull market. So, I’m heavy in cash. On January 6, I put about 15% of my cash position into DIA s and considered dollar cost averaging in to the potentially revived market. I haven’t added a dime to the position since. “Bet not thy whole wad.” No one knows. According to Richard Russell , right now selling pressure has declined dramatically but no one wants to buy into this market. That is a very bad sign . The market cannot rally without buyers and right now no

Space is an interest of mine. This recently released photo from the Hubble Space Telescope is a speechless beauty. Compare this image with a previous earth-bound telescope image and you'll see why the Hubble project has been such a enlightened expression of humankind. I have little background light around my land. We are surrounded by many acres on all sides of mostly woods and pastures. Within, say, a quarter mile in either direction there are only a half dozen houses. The nearest subdivision development is about a half mile away from my house to the north. In every other direction from my house there is no development at all but for sporadic houses separated by thousands of acres of woods and fields. This makes the sky remarkably bright and clear where I live and many nights I stand outside gazing at planets and constellations. What ever else there may be, our universe is a marvel of gas and light amidst unfathomable darkness. And silence. NGC 2818 is the death of light,

Note: This is an extremely long entry for my blog. But, length is relative. What follows is actually incredibly brief. Warning: If you don’t know the story of the TV series Lost my post contains tons of spoilers. I don’t watch many television shows. The one series I currently follow is Lost. When Lost won the Emmy and the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Series back in 2005 it caught my interest. Jennifer and my daughter were going on an all-girls family trip to the beach so I decided to pass the weekend they were away with buying the first season on DVD . I watched the entire season in two days. I literally couldn’t stop. It is obviously intended to be a “popular” series and has all the trappings of that…a love triangle, a lot of mystery and suspense, gripping action sequences, a gorgeous beach on a tropical island. But, there’s more. A lot more. So much more that now, as Season Five starts, it is pretty much impossible to summarize the program except to say that there has never been

Last night Jennifer and I went to Mark and Eileen’s home in Atlanta for what has become an annual tradition with some of our closest friends. We call it the First Feast because the gathering is centered around a scrumptious array of appetizers, main courses, and desserts that everyone brings. Though closely proximate to Christmas and New Years, it is technically the first time in the year we get together like this. Music and conversation permeates all of our gatherings. We enjoyed a KFOG radio stream then switched to all sorts of tunes from a nice Pat Matheny mix to old Van Morrison . Beethoven even made a brief appearance. We’re a rather eclectic bunch. Lively discussions were scattered through the dozen or so people there and could leap and change topic without a moment's notice. I had a great talk with Clint about Proust and looked at some photos he had recently taken, with Erin about digital cameras, blogging, and what it might be like to be in a plane crash , with Mark and

As I mentioned in a recent post, I had no Blu -ray discs when I purchased my PlayStation 3 . Since then I have purchased a few. One is an excellent BBC documentary series on Planet Earth , another is the superb final cut of Blade Runner , and third is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . The high-definition beauty of these discs is a real feast for the eye visually. Everyone knows about the improved quality of image (and sound) in Blu -ray. I was a bit skeptical, however, when it came to 2001 . That film came out in 1968. How good could you make an image look that didn't have the benefit of today's computerized technology? I was impressed. The clarity brings back the original, almost breath-taking, richness of one of my favorite films . Kubrick , with Sir Alfred Hitchcock , David Lean , Ridley Scott , and - more recently - Christopher Nolan , tops my very short list of favorite directors. I have all his films either on VHS or DVD. I remember when I first saw 2001. I

Today the Braves let John Smoltz go to the Boston Red Sox . The last bastion of former Atlanta pitching glory is gone. Time was when the thought of facing Smoltz along with Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine put fear in the minds of any opponent. Maddux and Glavine have been gone for years (though Tommy tried to make a go of it with us last season). So, the Braves really have no pitching of that caliber left and today many Braves fans vented their frustration , including Chipper Jones . With all that has happened to the game and to the organization, Smoltz's exit seems just another symptom of why I prefer to live my baseball in the past tense. I remember the first time I went to an Atlanta Braves game. It was August 28, 1966 . You might not believe that I remember that game but I do. Back then the Braves had a huge four-story (or so) smiling Indian brave in right center field that would move its mechanical arm with a tomahawk up and down whenever the Braves did something good in the

The NOAA Storm Total Map indicating 6+ inches of rain in our area for today. The drought is over for now. Over the past couple of weeks we have gotten regular rains and I've witnessed local ponds rising. Today it rained over 6 inches here. I don't remember getting so much rain in 24 hours. More is due tonight. One local pond on a nearby farm that I use as a gauge for how low we are on rainfall was about two feet below its banks at the beginning of December. Today as I drove home the entire pond - banks and all - was underwater along with about 4 acres of pasture surrounding it. We needed the rain desperately after what has effectively been a two-year drought. But we didn't need to make up for it all at once! My daughter is so excited. About 8 tonight all her friends started texting each other. School has been cancelled tomorrow due to flooding in some areas. We were fortunate. A torrential downpour early this afternoon washed some of the gravel from the end of our drivew

View of Delft , Jan Vermeer, 1660 Marcel Proust wrote a truly epic novel about ordinary life infused with a richness of experience. Of nature, of sensual pleasure, of jealousy, of habit, of desire, of loss, of philosophy, of art, of every passing moment of being aware. Art is experienced in Proust at a technical, emotional depth as an inherent part of being human, though his character Francoise offers the reader a humanity without much taste for Art. Certainly, Proust was one of the most intimate writers in western literature, surpassing, say, Hemingway (another brilliant writer I should become better acquainted with). This respect for the human expression of Art into Being is, to me, fundamental to my enjoyment of In Search of Lost Time . One of the best Christmas presents I got this year was from Jennifer’s parents. It was a book of paintings that Proust either refers to or discusses in some detail through the long course of his novel. Paintings in Proust contains well over 300 co