It really is great when not much happens. Things happening is much over-rated. Makes for good copy, but that’s just because we love to complain. And not just because we are all whiners. A conversation that goes along the lines of, “What ho, isn’t it pretty nice?” “Oh yes, a perfect rain for the flowers.” soon dims if you aren’t a horticulturalist or a polyglot.
But “Did you read about that asinine city councillor’s __________ ? [fill in blank to your liking] can really get things going.
Wait, I know what has happened, and is happening:
It snowed and it snowed and it snowed. And on the third day, Piglet …
oh sorry, dozed off into the sweet nothingness. It is one of the excellent qualities of lots of snow. Finally, once everyone calms down, it imposes a slowness on life that should be embraced, not vanquished with salt. 24/7 is a fairly new phenomenon and creates its own buzz that keeps it going somehow, feeding off its own poop as it were in a ghastly perpetual motion machine. Except it isn’t perpetual motion, it is slowly fed at great cost. But wait, I was cheerful a minute ago …
It is absolutely beautiful outside is why. It looks like a Christmas card, right here in the middle of porktown [as in the capital city, location of the biggest trough], they didn’t toss Nana out into the street, and my tea is still hot!
Roof over head, check.
Down comforters and sheepskins nearby, check.
Wolf at door, sadly, no check.
No check in both senses, but sadly only in one. I do miss Wolf. Bag of hammers that he might have been intellectually
he was nonetheless a fine, if intimidating, pooch.
But back to my obvious meanderings, if not for the passing of Wolf, we wouldn’t have gotten [gotten? is that a word? self-doubt has arisen] Mouse, so silver linings do abound. And as to the other kind of wolf at the door, he is has gone hunting for easier prey.
So what’s to complain about? I am even tempted to suggest you have a nice day, but that must be the meds kicking in. I do however hope you have a relatively eventless day, unless you are due to give birth or win some enormous prize, or marry your sweetheart.
Speaking of which, I could complain about Valentine’s Day, and the time my poor youngest, on being told he was meant to bring in a Valentine for everyone in the class [does this make any sense?], asked me at home if it was okay to skip the boys. But then I would be complaining. And I do like the colour red, so that helps. But cards and cut flowers are an astonishingly silly thing to spend money on, in my books. Plants flower too and don’t whither and die, and a store bought card that says I love you? Why not just send an email, or better yet, a text. Must we have one day a year to love someone? What happened to the rest of the year? Like Mother’s Day. Isn’t every day mother’s day? Hmnnnn, Pet Peeve #3 might just be special days. On Monday we have a statutory holiday called Family Day coming up, and I will certainly have to complain about that, not just for good copy!. Sorry for the mini-rant. Back to puppies and unicorns.
Have a Happy ________ Day [it is fill in the blank day!], and always be kind to your loved ones, no matter the arbitrary calendar date!
morning all! yes, have a Happy Day! unless you were a disagreeable arschloch calling everyone an idiot because they did not understand Bitcoin!!! your day deserves to suck!
Schadenfreude right here folks…
“Over $2 million bitcoins were stolen and Silk Road 2 will not be making up the loss to those whose coins have been stolen.”
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/02/silk-road-2-hacked-all-bitcoins-stolen.html
OK, i’ll play nice and complain. the glass is half empty. you see, looks like the train is leaving the station, and all i have is a small carry on bag with a few silver coins in it. thank you so much, and you know who you are. and for you PTC guys, you were the voice of reason, but hidden so inconveniently out of view! so thanks for trying, OK?
snark off. see y’all later. i’m cooking all day for my lovely wife, who still has a job! she will pretend to be surprised when she gets home! we do Valentines Day here Xty, but no cards or fake flowers. 🙂
The train may have left the station look where it has to come back from.
A card is a small price to pay for the amount of (perceived) transgressions I mount up over a year’s time.
DP- you have no job, a wife with a job, more than one silver coin to jingle around, you plan to cook and eat all day today (today being the only day that matters)… and I know from previous writings that you can actually cook! (unlike ich here, who will be happily eating my usually experimental cooking)
You’re glass isn’t half empty, you just haven’t embraced having been promoted to the good life. Maybe you feel unworthy?? You’re Not!
You’re going to need a big comfortable chair, some slippers, a big fleece robe (get the one with a hood)… oh you have SO much to do!!
But you’re in the right place, Xty is royalty and her gracious ways will just kind of rub off on you! Like today, these corporate holidays? PpheTewey.. who needs ’em?
Actually, why did you even know today was one of those days? do you know day of the week this is?… I don’t, without stopping and referencing something. keeping track of the date is what DVRs are for.
Phillipians 4.8 my good man, early and often.
My day has already been a fortunate one.. having FINALLY knocked out level 147 on Candy Crush Saga, it had been a real bear.
It was good to read XTYs article. Reinforced my happy oblivion to whatever day Wal-Mart is pushing… and now to get productive!! do some reading, hit the gym, and then plan my omelette! Another day in paradise Muchachos.
thanks DN. i was being cheeky. i turned the corner in the last year, and my outlook is positive. i did lose a lot of money, but it has freed me. i truly believe that soon money will not matter. it is part of the illusory construct that imprisons us. once enough people wake up, poof, the matrix will sublime. (a lot like the fake snow) 🙂
making some black eyed peas today DN… using Junior Johnson brand smoked hocks! the house already smells amazing.
They keep asking my mum if she knows what day it is. The month and the year and the day are completely irrelevant to her life. She has no clue and why would she? What use is Valentine’s day to a woman who has missed her spouse for almost 19 years, daily, unable to stop missing him enough to enjoy all this long part of her life, mostly. But perhaps my cynicism comes from the knowledge that I am unlikely to get any thing much. Presents and such have never been the strong suit of my engineering hubby. But I got a kiss and a smile and a ride to the hospital. And just put a pretty fat pay cheque in the company account.
It is important to enjoy one’s kept status, and not fret. Just try to seem useful.
And as to gold, faked or not, I am happy to see the price rise. Still in the game, but not as fully.
advice is worth what you pay for it, and so are lessons. i just made that up. i think it’s a keeper.
and i just finished my omelot. what a great suggestion. pico de gallo and cheddar. i am going gonzo on the comfort food. only two more days of crap weather like i said yesterday. that rat faced groundhog was wrong!
all of you guys are awesome. especially the gal. Happy Valentines Day! 😀 😀 😀
Um, my advice is free …
Mine too.
and worth every pfennig.
Update on gold goings-on later after the close.
well, i thought my phrase was clever. and you should charge a fortune for your advice anyway, both of you. but a friend in Freeport Illinois sent me this and i thought it was funny. keep in mind that Illinois is to the south, in fact due south of Wisconsin. Wisconsinites are much tougher, in fact the saying up here is, “Wisconsin, where the men are men, and so are the women.” 🙂
DP, black eyed peas? On Valentine’s Day? Do you have a flatulence reducing recipe? Maybe you’re type A blood and it doesn’t affect you. My wife is type A and I’m type O. Gives a new slant to Jack Pratt and his wife. I just heard of this blood typed diet yesterday. Examples given for type O personality in link at bottom seem to fit me.
Type A blood: A meat-free diet based on fruits and vegetables, beans and legumes, and whole grains — ideally, organic and fresh, because D’Adamo says people with type A blood have a sensitive immune system.
Type O blood: A high-protein diet heavy on lean meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables, and light on grains, beans, and dairy. D’Adamo also recommends various supplements to help with tummy troubles and other issues he says people with type O tend to have.
http://www.dadamo.com/program.htm
http://www.dadamo.com/bloodtype_O.htm
yes, i know. black eyed peas for valentines day sounds strange. but we like what we like. and they do take all day, so there is some effort put into it. also making corn bread, salads with lots of “fixins”, and we already have a good leftover desert – peach cobbler. and it’s still supposed to drop below 0F tonight last time i checked, so some belly warming food appealed to us both.
i do plan on cooking something fancier this weekend on the grill. maybe i will try to find some decent seafood. good seafood is not always available in this town. next year i’m moving up by EO, and i will be styling… bigger city and a lot more culture. i have suffered here being a “foodie”.
i’m a type B. i will have to check that site out some more.
i soaked the beans overnight – that seems to lower the noise floor. 🙂
Well, it’s official!
It’s quantifiable, even. You don’t need your crystal ball, tarot cards, or any fearmongering permabull guru to tell you. Just look at the numbers. Today Gold at 1318 registered a weekly close north of it’s 200 day moving average, and in my world that’s a buy signal.
The last sell signal was almost exactly one year ago, when Gold closed the week ending 2/15/2013 at 1611. These models will never get you in at the bottom, nor get you out at the top, but anytime you can sell something and buy it back 18% cheaper, and have your money working elsewhere in the meantime, that’s a WIN.
Here’s a chart that covers most of the whole sorry episode, and a tune. Heading out for a Val’s Day fish fry with my sweetie. She’s buying!
didja mean? 🙂 🙂 🙂
Jack Sprat could eat no fat.
His wife could eat no lean.
And so between them both,
They licked the platter clean
For my wife, even though we eat differently and according to above we are supposed to.
Was heading down the road, thinking about the gold market, and this one came on the radio. It fit my mood, so I cranked it up. 😛
This one came on, and I thought about the miners. They are ripping too, but I don’t care. Never again.
Yes, EO, should have milked some of those miners and instead felt that idiotic “this one” excitement. Somehow this one, that everyone else missed, was the one. Emotion either way though to be guarded against – I still love my gold, and still am pretty pleased overall with what we own. It was the stocks that got me – and we did it with high tech too – not a disaster, but combined with family issues, what should have been just a drought of income was a little more like a drought + syphon. Both times emotion was the problem.
As to real or fake, a dead friend of ours once commented that everything was already in the price, and I didn’t understand him. I am beginning to. Other than the unfair information releasing, where some people find out faster than others, even by fractions of seconds, the price is the price. And the only way to plan for some sort of unexpected cataclysm of value in one sector is to be balanced about it. And if it were all to go to hell in a hand basket most choices would be irrelevant anyway.
And good morning. I hope.
And maybe it will all be in the Price, as in Carey Price, who opened in net for us against Norway. He is a First Nations fellow, and lived in a remote world, so his dad bought a small plane and learned how to fly it so his son could play hockey. So no whining.
cute little critter…
unless you’re a dog.
As Mouse has certainly learnt!
Some of them buried right into her poor lips:
But she is a very stoic dog
and we got them all out okay ourselves.
Yes, emotion. Fear and Greed, the bane of every investor’s existence. 99% of what one reads on the internet simply feeds our emotions, and makes our investment results worse, not better.
That is why I’ve gone 100% to totally emotionless quantitative systems. It doesn’t even much matter to me the specific details of which system one adopts, as long as you adopt one. Pick one that has a track record and seems workable for your lifestyle and just do it. Or equally well, as in your case, put the bulk of things in someone else’s hands, so as to keep our own grimy emotional paws off of it.
If my model says to sell it, I sell it. If my model says to buy it, I buy it. I’m married to nothing. No second guessing, no trying to be too clever. No sitting there saying “I think it’s going to buy soon, so I’ll buy now” or “It looks toppy, I think I’ll sell ahead of the sell signal that I think is coming”, or “This sell signal looks false and I think it will reverse soon, so it’s a dip to buy so I’ll buy, or at least not sell, not yet, blah, blah, blah.” That way lies madness…and losses. Been there, done that.
I have a rather weathered sticky note still grimly hanging on front and center on my computer monitor. It has a series of catch phrases on it. When in doubt I look down and see it. It says:
Let The System Work
The Trend is Your Friend
Don’t Fight the Tape
Buy Strength, Sell Weakness
Don’t Get Too Clever
update: USA 1, Russia 1, after 2 periods. Racehorse hockey at it’s finest.
And…Good Morning! My tea seems especially yummy this morning. Time for another.
None of ours ever tangled with a porcupine. But several incidents with skunks are tales still told around the campfire.
Mrs. O still says ” I can’t believe you brought her into the house!” Yeah, well, the bathtub (HER bathtub, btw) was in the house, so what was I supposed to do? I lost a lot of “points” on that one, but remain unrepentant.
It was so bad in the car on the way home that I drove with my head sticking out the window, fighting back the dry heaves. Worst. Ever.
Oh, we’ve lost a few battles with barbed wire as well. And muskrats too. Though more than one muskrat got much the worst of it. Oh, and raccoons. Nasty devils they are. We steer clear.
Buck, showing good napiform recently. 😆
The fellow to whom we have entrusted things uses a system, absolutely, that has a proven, steady track record. Dividends he is after, and dividends he finds – looked like a terrific balanced stock world, run through RBC, and slowly edging in. Leave the basement untouched, and let the experts do their thing. And finally, in this case, we feel that he is treating our money as he does his own, something that has never been true before.
I no longer think that the financial world will collapse soon. Eventually, yes, but Rome took 500 years to really decay, and things look pretty robust around here.
we do not have porcupines in Wisconsin, i had to check to make sure. but i know a friend told me a horror story in the last year or so – might have been a friend in Minnesota who has three German Shepherds. is it true that dogs will get into porcupine and skunk over and over again? i thought dogs were smarter than people! i do know they aren’t smarter than cats. 🙂
i was doing fantasticly for 15 years managing my own money. (i didn’t have any until i was about 30) but like i said above, about advice and lessons. and this lesson was a doozy.
do you guys remember this? funny thing is that i have stayed to the same degree libertarian, but i have moved from center to left. i believe it is because i am thinking more for myself now, and am curbing all the mindless rhetoric. so now go ahead and call me a libertarian socialist. but know what it means first…
http://www.politicalcompass.org/
unless we get serious reform, the financial system will collapse. so that is my caveat. the middle class is the producer that built the strongest economy(s) in the world. how’s that middle class doing in all “western democracies”? ask around! there is also the problem with the need for exponential growth to pay off interest on debt. can we continue to have exponential growth, with out killing the planet, and with energy becoming increasingly expensive? be careful not to swing too far back the other way. do not abandon your initial rational reasons for investing in gold. hedge your bets.
what is sad for me is how little press the situation in especially Greece, Spain and Italy is getting. where is the humanity? i am serious. the situation there is like a vat of gasoline waiting for a match.
Now that is showing excellent napiform!
I retook that political compass test, and I am basically right in the middle in terms of left right, probably having drifted to the left a bit lately, with a strong dislike of authority – imagine that.
It seems so obvious that some things can be better done through government, and some things can be better done without government and the trick is to reach a compromise amongst a disparate group. And it is only small, local government that can do that. We are inversely governed – the top should be listening to the bottom, not trying to direct things with a magic wand.
We were wondering the other day if it would work if the local government collected all the taxes the federal government had deemed you should pay, and then the local government could purchase services from the next layer of government, and so on, all the way up. Instead of the shower of benefits the federal government attempts to dish out, trying to do silly things like fight unemployment through manipulating interest rates, to pick a favourite of mine.
US-Russia going to a shootout. 😯
I haven’t forgotten that things are bad – it’s just the powder keg feeling has gone. It may return, but I had my antenna picking up bad signals before – it will be a while before people around the world look at a US twenty as useless. Things can retreat and dwindle instead of crashing – I have been consistent about how much of one’s planning should go to total disaster, and the answer is: not much! Food and water for a month, and some hard assets, and then live in the sunshine.
Go US Go – don’t want to face those Ruskies.
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
On the bottom of the 8th. Wow. Give credit to Mrs. O. She put $5 on the TV to buy that goal.
Now off to work. Tax returns await. Have a great day all.
Mrs. O. has those kinds of magical powers? No wonder you do her bidding.
agreed. moderation is the key! i spent a few years preparing mentally and strategically for doomsday, and all i got out of it is this lousy t-shirt. and a busted IRA. live each and every day. it is never tomorrow. 😛
i looked up napiform before noticing it is the new “word of the day”. i am relieved to find that my vocabulary is not necessarily limited.
no cable TV, and i didn’t feel like paying for the Olympics on-line. so sorry for being a stick in the mud.
is there any moral difference between being a charlatan, or believing your own bullshit? does anyone care? get the heck out of there folks!!! good grief.
I think it is worse to be knowingly evil than to be deluded. Worse morally that is – the actions can be equally devastating.
the more ego you have, the more you are able to ignore the consequences of your actions. especially pain and suffering that you helped cause. that is because ego is a defense mechanism – it handily prevents introspection. anyway that place deserves to die (miserable and slow) from a utilitarian perspective.
i know, i should quit going back to the pile of vomit.
and i will stop now, because my blood pressure is spiking, and i fear, yours also.
I dunno. I found my pass through The Swamp today to be quite entertaining. Thanks for the tip, DP.
Sounds like the fool is pondering a paywall for the whole site now. I would welcome that as the final kiss of death it deserves.
Monsieur Vert dit…
oops, that post wasn’t a reply to your post EO.
it really does come down to having an over sized ego, in fact it is almost pathological.
just look at this – unreal! do you remember Jim Jones! that guy also believed his own crap, right up to the very end. but he never did quite drink the Kool-Aid. the pussy used a pistol. but most of his followers were already dead, so they died still believing.
apropos. sorry for the repeat. great song and video nonetheless…
I also noticed one of the Swamp Creatures complaining about Trader Dan’s comments from Friday and Saturday. My general observation has been that the more the Swamp Creatures hate it, the more awesome it is likely to be so I checked it out. Awesome indeed! I tossed a comment in there as well, just for fun.
Trader Dan – Friday
Trader Dan – Saturday
You’ll all have to indulge me for one more picture of Bucker. I have the feeling that time grows short, and that I don’t have nearly enough pictures. I find myself spending more time lately just sitting and petting him for no particular reason. One day it will be too late. I took this shot today.
Long May He Run!
Herr Grün sagt…
aufdrehen zum elf.
Time growing short – there’s a lot of that going around. I even heard a nice Quebecois gentleman asking the doctor in emergency if he was telling him that “his time was shortening”. The doctor lied unconvincingly and then left. They don’t do death well in hospitals.
But dogs is too much – makes me weepy just thinking about it.
And I will refrain from commenting on the swamp, other than to say it is a sad philosophy that denies 99.99999999% of humanity.
Oh and a belated thanks for the explanation as to why it is often coldest right before dawn. There is a phenomenon at my in-laws’ cottage on Georgian Bay, that I have pretended to understand, where a heat inversion makes a distant island appear to hover above the water. Perhaps you could rest my mind on that one too, before I ask one time too many at home and reveal my napiform intellect finally.
I said I wouldn’t comment, but I was struck by the irony of the use of the term sheep by people who are getting fleeced.