My Sick Mind

Today is Groundhog Day. I don't know where it came from - and I don't care. Embracing this stupid tradition only makes us look like a bunch of superstitious boobs.  I'm sorry if I'm not "down with it," or whatever the kids say nowadays.  I have no time or energy to devote to superstition or stupid traditions.  The idea that a rodent (or anything, for that matter) seeing his shadow or not determines the weather for the next month and a half is as ridiculous an idea as has been devised. The problem is that, sometimes we get so engrained in something stupid that it's impossible to let it go.  Beyoncé has more black people in her than President Trump has in his Cabinet. His Supreme Court nominee is yet another middle-aged white man.  Our government is full of them.  It's no wonder that we can't accomplish anything for the lower class and minorities - we have none of them in government or anyone who understands what it's like to live from paycheck...

For investors and people who love numbers, today was a big day.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed over the 20,000 mark.  Is it a big deal? Well, yes and no.  What it should do is make people pay attention to the power of compounding and how investing in stocks is the best way to build wealth over their lifetime. For some perspective, the Dow reached 10,000 in October of 2009. So, in roughly 17 years your money has doubled. That is just the average.  If you are a good stock-picker, your investment in The Home Depot would have gained about 400%, and your investment in Goldman-Sachs would have gained roughly 300%.  And, let's not mention Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix.  They are not members of the Dow 30, but have gained roughly that amount in the same time period.  What I'm telling you is:  Get your money out of your cell phone bill, cable company, or your ridiculous car payment and build your future.  That's free advice. ...

In cities across America, millions (?) of people gathered to protest the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. I suppose the center of the movement was women's rights and the idea that a mysoginist is now our President.  The movement is honorable, but leaves me with feelings that are probably going to make you hate me. So be it. The protest marches were organized in cities.  In those cities, support for Hillary Clinton was big.  Basically, they brought together a bunch of like-minded voters to say, "We don't like this" to something that has already happened.  It's easy to organize people in areas where they have a common goal.   I get the feeling that they didn't think it was possible for Trump to be elected, so their anger is retroactive, when it should have been proactive.  The pre-election rallies were coronations of a sort, and few believed that America would vote for Donald Trump. Well - it happened, and now we are supposed to say...

"You can observe a lot just by watching."  - Yogi Berra I've always said that the Business section is the most interesting section of the newspaper.  Following the stock market gives one an insight into what Americans are thinking, doing, and spending their money on.  Lately, the trends have been interesting. About a year ago, the casual dining industry began to struggle.  Stalwarts like McDonald's, Wendy's, Starbucks, Brinker, and YUM Brands struggled to draw customers to their restaurants.  Something was influencing people to stay at home and prepare food rather than spend money for the dining-out experience.  Generally, dining out is coupled with some other entertainment, be it a movie, show, or something to draw people out of their home and stop for food on the way out or the way home.  That ain't happening. Tonight, Netflix reported a stellar quarter, beating estimates on subscriber growth and their own high-quality content.  Some of it is in...

It has happened slowly, as complex things do.  Erosion occurs so slowly that we hardly notice.  One day, the stream is knee-deep, and before we know it, the stream is up to our neck.  The Grand Canyon was formed similarly.  What we are going through now is the geologic equivalent of stream erosion, and we now find ourselves at the bottom of the canyon. In the 1970s, when I was in high school, I heard my fellow students proclaim, "Why should I pay attention to algebra? We'll never use it in real life!"  Seemingly, they would never use high-powered math in their lifetimes.  Suffice it to say that most of them cannot calculate a 20% tip at a restaurant without a phone app.  Little did I know that they were not paying attention in English class either.  This is supported by reading their Facebook posts where their, they're, and there are the same word; and you're is replaced by your because those are the same, also. If I decide to correct their atro...

Much has been said about the Trump Administration, and what he will do when he takes office on January 20, 2017.  In fact, even more has been made about his "first 100 days" in office, and the effect of that on our stock market and the habits of companies that operate in the United States. He Tweets a lot of stuff - and I guess that's his right as a citizen - but I also guess that it's our right as a citizen to have a President-Elect who speaks rather than Tweets, but that probably labels me a Luddite, or something.  I like to be spoken-to. Lately, our Tweeter In Chief has been griping against Ford, Carrier, and Toyota about building manufacturing plants in Mexico vs. building them in the United States.  Conventional logic would argue that he prefers American jobs over runaway inflatiion . (See my previous post) Once you have accepted that idea, any investment you can make is minuscule in comparison.  If you accept the idea that American jobs is greater than consumer...

I don't know if you have to be an economist, a market theorist, or a expert in finances (all of which I am not) to know that a big change is in the wind, economically, with our new [cough] President Donald J. Trump. He talks a good game, or at least what he perceives to be a good game.  He has already taken credit for keeping 8,000 jobs in America by bullying large corporations from taking their manufacturing to Mexico.  The purpose of that, one surmises, is to save money in production, since the ratio of American to Mexican salaries is something along the order of 35:1.  Ford builds their small cars in Mexico, and brings them back to the United States to sell at a price that Americans of modest means (like me) can afford. When I was a kid (the time when Trump would probably tell us "America was great") if something said 'Made in Japan,' my parents would put it back on the shelf because it was cheaply made and wouldn't last as long as something that was made h...

A week and a two days ago Americans elected a new President.  Well, some of them did.  I cannot say that most of them did, because the majority of the popular vote was not a majority in favor of the eventual winner. True to my word, I watched a movie ("The Silence of Mark Rothko" - highly recommended) and flipped-off the TV at 9:30pm, which I suspected would be well in advance of declaring the eventual winner.  I wished to get one more good night's sleep. Much has been said about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polls and how some of the pundits should be made to apologize for leading us down the garden path where millions of Americans woke-up on Wednesday morning to President-Elect Donald Trump. And, so it goes.   Regardless of your (and my) objections, we are now living in a world where we are forced to say "President Donald Trump." It's akin to saying Mayor McCheese.  He is a cartoon version of a real President.  Sadly, that is what we ...

As Mr. T said in one of those "Rocky" films:  "I live alone, I train alone, I fight alone." I don't do a lot of fighting, but if you substitute "everything else" for fighting, you could say the same thing about me.  I don't have visitors.  The last time someone was in my home was November of 2013 when someone called the cops because they thought I had committed suicide. They were not invited guests. When I go out, it's almost always alone.  That gives me a lot of time to notice the things around me.  When your nose isn't buried in your cell phone, you can notice a lot of the world around you, and there is a lot of world around you.   Last Friday I was in New York, and Saturday I was in Philadelphia.  Both times, there were events tied into my travels.  Friday's event was a show at Carnegie Hall with Marc Maron and Nate Bargatze. Saturday's show was Gilbert Gottfried at Helium. Because I buy one ticket, I usually ...

I don't go to New York City very often.  There has to be a special event to get me to go, and even then, I reluctantly do it.  On Friday, it was a Marc Maron show at Carnegie Hall.  I've seen Marc before, but I'd never been to Carnegie Hall.   I plan it like a NASA mission. Every spare minute is accounted for, so that I can get in and get out without wasting valuable resources like money - which you need a lot of if you are going to New York City.   I like cities.   I love Philadelphia and Baltimore.  New York City makes them look like Mayberry.  The activity is relentless.   I don't drive, because it costs $15 to go through one of the tunnels, fifteen bucks on the New Jersey Turnpike, and $50 to park you car.  So, you're out $80 before you leave your vehicle.  I hate to sound like a frugal jerk, but that's ridiculous.   I take the train because I like trains, and I walk because I like to walk. It's ...

This is the popular meme going around Facebook and other social media, vis-a-vis Colin Kaepernick and his supposed disrespecting of our National Anthem over this past week.   The idea here is that he should be grateful for his huge salary, which has been provided on the backs of American citizens whom he is supposed to respect by standing for their anthem.   First - we can't be sure that Dr. Carson said this. There are too many brackets and parenthesis to suit me.   Second - if you took the time to read the lyrics to the anthem, you might have a different idea.   A long time ago, I stopped celebrating Christmas, because I found it to be a Pagan holiday perpetrated by modern society.  That was my choice, and not  a popular one.  If I had more friends it would have been a less popular choice.   The song (poem) is about a war we lost, and the idea that "the flag was still there" is human emotion creeping into an...

Much has been said about Ryan Lochte and his lying to Brazilian police over what he said was a robbery at gunpoint - yada, yada, yada ... I am not here to re-hash that nonsense or attempt to rationalize his actions.  I do have an opinion, as you could imagine.   We live in an age of entitlement, where parents of children feel that they are entitled to ... whatever ... a cell phone, expensive clothes, a college education; all that the teat of their parents who feel like they have let their children down if they do not provide these privileges - like the other kids get.   It's the highest and most invasive form of peer pressure .   I don't know any of the athletes who competed in Rio this year.  What I would assume however, is that somewhere along the line, they were given a break or three in order to pursue their dream of, I don't know, beating people from another country at something.  It is what it is - whatever it is.   The over...

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." - Ferris Bueller's Day Off It does, Ferris. It surely does. I've stopped and looked around a few times.  It's a nice thing.  Once, at the Grand Canyon, I had the fortuitous circumstance of being in the dark without the moon in the sky.  I laid on a block wall near the rim of the canyon, and once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see the Milky Way in all its glory, in the sky above me.  For a moment, I contemplated my place in the Universe.  It's a tiny place.   So, here I am, an old man of 58.  Marketing ignores me.  Women ignore me. I am left to my own devices.  I have idea whether I have 2 years left, 20 years, or 50.  It's part of the mystery of life.   It seems not all that long ago that I was a young man, full of dreams and habits of young men. It was long ago, but the "seems like" has been replaced by the r...

OK, so I decided I wasn't done writing about Keith Emerson. One of the things about being a fan of the so-called prog-rock movement of the 1970s was that it opened me up to other forms of music, specifically jazz and classical. It took me out of my little world of Top 40 radio junk and thrust me into a realm that I would not have otherwise been exposed to. It was fun.   A time before sampling and massive overdubs, there was an adventurous quality to it.  From one day to the next, you'd never know what was coming.  One day, Yes was interpreting Paul Simon's " America ," and another day, Focus was yodeling " Hocus Pocus " all over the place. Part of it was the innocence of the time, and another part of it was the necessity to find the stuff.  We had to hear about it though word-of-mouth or (God forbid) the radio, and then, travel to a local record store and hope that they had the damned thing.  Part of the fun was tracking it down. By the w...

I think it was 1972  - I was 15, and visiting a distant cousin in his family's Southampton, PA home.  Bored with the adults, I had wandered out to their garage, where there was a stereo system and a stack of albums. I remember listening to Thunderclap Newman's "Hollywood Dream," and Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" (thumbing through the newspaper that was inside the album cover) and ... Emerson, Lake, & Palmer's first album - the one with "Lucky Man" on it.  I'm not sure where the adults were, but I was having quite a time listening to some wonderful music. Perhaps that's where it started, I don't know; but at some point I decided that I loved the adventure of music.  Prior to that, I had been spoon-fed "pop music" on our local radio stations, and buying whatever records were available in the local W.T. Grant's record department - that is to say, the Top 40. If your musical tastes only go as hi...