Friday 4 January 2008

Holy Crap!

I need to invent fonts that express voices. Like the title of this post is meant to be heard in Peter (Family Guy) Griffin’s voice, which is a hell of a lot funnier way to say “holy crap” than the way you probably heard “holy crap” in your head when you read it. When Faulkner was writing The Sound and The Fury, he wanted each different character’s voice to be in a different color ink. If you’ve ever read it, you’ll know what a good idea he was onto. Anyhow, his publisher said “no, we can’t do that, it will cost too much,” to which he replied “well then don’t pay me for the book, but publish it that way.” His wishes fell on deaf ears and millions of students have been punished and made to feel stupid ever since.

So anyway, holy crap. New jobs report out today, not so good. Not so good at all. Dow plunges. S&P 500 plunges harder. Nasdaq plunges hardest. Whoops. Here’s the Tech Bubble Memorial “The Rules Have Changed” Gem of the Day: extrapolating the market losses YTD 2008, by March 15th, the three major US indices will all be at zero. Holy crap! Ides of March, indeed. Zero chance of this happening, of course, but when these are going up you hear this kind of drivel from people who stand to make a buck if you believe it, so a little fair and balanced courtesy of this guy. Welcome to the Chinese curse of “may you live during interesting times.”

A brief open letter to Hunter Allen:

Dear Mr. Allen,

While I am enjoying your training plan and believe it is doing me quite a bit of good, could you please get your shit together on editing your instructions? It is confusing to be given minute by minute details of a supposed 1:30 workout, which when you add up the minutes is only 58 minutes long. Am I supposed to eat nachos for 32 minutes? I think that’s what you meant, so that’s what I did. When you write in all caps “THIS ENTIRE WORKOUT IS TO BE DONE AT 80 RPM!” and then describe recovery intervals as “spinning easily,” that is also confusing. I do not spin easily “AT 80 RPM!” When the workout length is shown one place as 1.25 hours, and another as 1:25, it’s also – you guessed it – confusing. I know, we should have gone onto the metric plan here in the States two generations ago, but we didn’t, and oh by the way time doesn’t change between metric or not. The big promise of workout plans such as these are that they are effective and easy to follow, not confusing. I am sure that any edits you make for clarity will span across nearly all of the pre-built training plans, so it shouldn’t take too much to remove that certainty from the program.

Best regards,
Chuck Wagon

Off to the hills of Marshall tomorrow, then see which Skins decide to show up. Will it be the best team in the NFC since Thanksgiving, or the “if only the games were 10 minutes shorter we’d be 13-3” team?

3 comments:

Kyle Jones said...

Out of curiosity on my part. Would this be a prime time to purchase some stock in the market. I know the risk of things dropping happen all the time but when it is happening just shouts out to me. But I would think it would be ideal. You know buy low sale high. I am a firm believer in long term stock ownership and not being a day trader. I wish I had extra money to put in the market.

Chuck Wagon said...

I have no idea.

All I can say is that last week, in hindsight, looks like it was a bad time to have bought. I can tell you that I increased my 401(k) contribution for this year, which is going into energy, utilities and global stocks. The global stocks may take a wicked beat down as their best customer (us) goes through a challenging time with a weakened currency. Overall, things are holding up well for me personally although one small cap index fund I own (old investment, not 401(k)) hasn't done that well this year.

You are young, and are investing for the long haul. When those are the parameters, historically it is always a good time to put money into the market. Taking it out - now there's the challenge! But you don't have to think about that anytime soon and if history is any guide, which it usually is, what you put in now will be worth a heck of a lot more later.

Is that enough of a non-answer?

Kyle Jones said...

I used to listen to the motley fool, who's headquarters is a few blocks from your work, and learned the law of 7's. Your money doubles every 7 years at 7 percent interest rate(historically). I do not have enough money to put into my banks s&p right now(mf highly recommends that if you throw your money in the market blindly because it beats most). I have a couple mutuals that have performed poorly. I have only one stock(ma) and that has done great. Now that I work in solar energy I wish I would have known about first solar and solar power for stocks. Just amazing how those energy stocks took off and they will continue to grow.