Monthly Archives: November 2011

Shorting America

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Helicopter Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, in concert with the world’s other major central banks, stepped up to the bar and took action this morning. Worldwide, markets reacted positively to this sign of spine, actually, as Alan Greenspan might say, reacted with irrational exuberance. Whatever, the DOW climbed almost 500 points and all major indices were up a similar 4%. We here at RegenAxe are proud to announce that we have scooped the rest of the blogosphere. We have here a recording of Big Ben’s helicopter as it descended low over Zuccotti Park and hovered as Wall Street traders poured out from the surrounding buildings and let their cheerful voices be heard, almost drowning out the sound of the rotor blades. OWS (no octopi today) protesters were overwhelmed by the crushing onslaught of three-piece suits.

Irrational exuberance aside, not everyone was happy with the Fed’s surprise action today. Short sellers got caught with their pants down. They awoke to find the Fed holding on to their short hairs and in short that is not a pleasant position to find oneself. To them I say too bad, cry me a river. The stock market was intended to be a mechanism for corporation to raise capital, by publicly trading shares in themselves. It was never intended to be a Las Vegas style gambling house, where parasite investors can bet against American companies, nay the United States itself. It is alright to be a bear on Wall Street, if you believe that the market is in a downturn. Markets go up and they go down that’s what markets are supposed to do. Go ahead and sell. It is not alright to act bearish, if you do so to the detriment of the marketplace and for your own perverse gain. Various brokerages have or will pay fines for selling dubious securities and then turning around and betting against their own customers. This is an example of illegal activity, but on the sliding scale of human morality there is also immoral activity and that is where I place the practice of short selling. Just because you can place the bet, does not mean you should, “22, 22, 22, …”.

OWS

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Occupy Wall Street? No, Octopi Walks Shoreline. Checkout the YouTube video, Octopus Walks on Land at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. It is a pretty amazing home-made movie. This little guy, but not as little as the finger in the frame might indicate, crawls out of the primordial sea, crosses an expanse of land, deposits a crab carcass on shore and then slithers back into the water. The questions abound around this movie. Why did he/she leave the safety and comfort of the sea? What’s with the crab? It has gills, right? Does that mean it was holding its breath all through the movie? Is there a marine biologist in the house? The Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, where this movie was shot, is located at Moss Beach, CA, located just southwest of San Francisco. I was there a few of years ago and shot the following photograph of some of the tidal flats.

Continuing along with the meme line, I offer up this news item, courtesy of Facebook friend Josh, and the Onion. The gist (read jest) of this “article” is that the Labor Department has announced that the economy created 4 million new jobs last month, but unfortunately they were all created in Saint Louis. Still this job growth brings down the national unemployment rate to 6.5%. The article says that these jobs are being created in the high paying fields of engineering, medicine, and manufacturing. It goes on to warn that this employment boom means that all these people will have to actually move to Saint Louis, with its “high crime rate and lack of culture”. (What about baseball? That’s culture, sports culture) You know, there is a grain of truth to this article, at least where I work.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. – Voltaire

Last Week, the Oxford University Press (OUP) announced its global word of the year, “squeezed middle”. According to Slate author, David Haglund’s article, this word choice is neither global, a word, or of this year. Last year, British MP, Ed Miliband coined this phrase, which describes how the British middle class is feeling pinched during this global economic downturn. According to Mr. Haglund, in America, this phrase has more to do with cookie filling. I must agree with him on how poor a choice OUP has made this year. Going down the list of the other finalists, Arab Spring, Fracking and Occupy, all seem like better choices for the global word of the year, in my humble opinion.

A Bruised Cardinal Fan

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I know my team is the undisputed World Champions, but still the naysayers chatter. Like Al-Qaida terrorist they mutter. They plot their plans for the future. Mutter, chatter and plot all they want, the Saint Louis Cardinals are still the World Champions and will remain so until next year and then maybe even longer, the good Lord willing. Even my dear bro/sis-in-law from Seattle has taken to sniping. Don Denkinger even after two World Championships is still too raw a subject to speak about around these parts. These west coast prejudices only grow worst the further south you go. Why my two brothers could root for the Giants, against the Rangers, last year and then this year roots so fervently for these once disdained Texans against my beloved Cardinals, remains a mystery to me.

What really ruffles this Cardinal fan’s feathers is not the west coast, but that haughty coast to the east. I understand its sense of entitlement, but sorry folks, you just did not have enough to bring to the table this year. This is how I figure it:

Red Sox + Yankees + Braves + Phillies = FAIL

Did I get my math right?

There are snow flurries in the forecast for tonight, but think back to last August 25th. Saint Louis, as usual, had plenty of mercury to spare and the Cardinals were 10 ½ games out of a playoff spot. A month later and only on the last day of the regular season, they squeaked into the playoffs. They had the fewest regular season wins, 90, of any playoff team. The Cards were the National League Wild Card team, in every sense of the meaning. They went on to trail their opponents in all three postseason series, and then came Game 6 of the World Series. The Cardinals were down to their last strike, twice. They eventually won that game and then the series. Love them or hate them, even the most partisan of baseball fan must admit that this year’s Cardinals were the most improbable of champions.

I know that we are the come from behind team, the improbable winners, the underdogs, the small market, Midwest team, but that is what makes the Cardinal’s story this year so great. This reputation is also a little disingenuous. The Cards draw three million in attendance and have done so for decades. Baseball is not all about TV revenues, there still is thing called fan base. Saint Louis is a baseball town. Ask the owner of any other sports franchise in town about that. It was not by accident that the two FOX World Series announcers both have strong Saint Louis connections. Then there is the record book. This was the Cardinal’s eleventh championship, hence, the entire hubbub about 11 in ’11. This year further cements the Cardinal organization’s position as the second most championship winning franchise in history. It also draws us one notch closer on the most winning franchise, those damn Yankees.

The five clay tiles, pictured here, are relief sculptures inlaid into the new Busch Stadium’s outer wall.

The West

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I started watching Ken Burns’s PBS series, “The West”. Rey and I watched the first episode last night and I watched the second episode this afternoon. I’m a big Ken Burns fan, so I don’t understand how I could have missed this series. If you’ve seen one Ken Burns’s documentary, then you are familiar with his combination of historical images with modern-day photography. The modern live action helps bring to life the grainy black and white stills from the past. Burns also combines celebrity voiceovers, reading historical letters and text, with talking head interviews of subject matter experts. One such expert is Scott Momaday, an author and Kiowa. He tells the most marvelous story about the creation of Devils Tower that I’ve paraphrased below. It was featured in the segment, before the white man arrived, back in the time when dogs could talk.

A boy was playing with his seven sisters. Pretending to be a bear, he was chasing them. Miraculously, he was transformed into a Grizzly Bear. His sisters ran screaming from him. They ran by a tree stump that called out to the girls, “Climb on me and I will save you.” They did, and as the bear approached, it began to grow. It grew so tall that the bear could not reach them, scoring the stump’s sides, it could not climb it. The stump grew so tall that the sisters were carried into the heavens. They became the seven stars that form the Big Dipper. – Kiowa legend

Sunday has been a cold, wet and dreary day. We went out for brunch to the City Diner. The above picture was taken while we were waiting to be seated. Rey left for Tennessee from the diner. Anne knitted the afternoon away, finishing the second sock of a pair. Now she has to go back and finish the first sock. She worked it this way, because she was unsure of how much yarn she would have. She and Dave also watched the Rams lose. Dave is staying over tonight and not returning to Purdue until tomorrow.

I watched the second Ken Burns episode and then I thought that this afternoon would be perfect for making a movie. I could make my own little Ken Burns like [lite] documentary. I spent an inordinate amount of time noodling around the Library of Congress website, before I finally gave up in disgust. They have lots of great material, but almost all of it is still under copyright, and as such is not available online. Then by chance, I found Wikimedia Commons. I knew about this resource, but it didn’t immediately come to mind. I typed in a search for “Saint Louis” and was rewarded with ~2,500 entries. I’ve selected two to include with this post that I could never taken.

The first shows Saint Louis, Missouri, as viewed from the space shuttle (STS056) at night, on April, 1993. This is of course the year of the great flood and you can see some signs of it in the unusually wide dark spaces, north and south (left and right) of downtown. The flood didn’t hit full on until July, but I suspect that the water was up even in April. The second photo shows the U.S. 25th Infantry on bicycles, notice that they are all dabbing. It is captioned with, “On June 14, 1897, Lieutenant James Moss, U.S. Army, led his bicycle corps of the 25th Infantry, from Fort Missoula, Montana, up wagon trail and Indian path, to St. Louis, Missouri, arriving July 16, 1897.” After spending all afternoon researching this supposed documentary, I didn’t have time to actually make it, but you can expect that this will be a well that I shall dip into again.

Shop ’till Ya Drop, Locally

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Much has been made of the Black Friday hubbub. Many people go to pains to make sure that everyone knows that they do not participate in this event. I would expect no different. Only 20% of Americans that shop for the holidays go shopping on Black Friday. Not shopping puts you solidly in the majority. Shopping on Black Friday seems more sport then commerce to me and as of late it has become increasingly a blood sport. Today, Saturday, is supposed to be a shop locally day, counterpoint to yesterday’s big box excesses. This sort of humanitarian consumerism seems as pointless as Friday’s opposite extreme. No shop will succeed or fail on one day’s sales. I propose a more traditional business model, give from the heart. Don’t buy to impress. Don’t buy just to check off a name from your list. A great gift takes planning, it should be what the recipient wants, but it should also say something about the giver too.

I went bicycling today. I beat the rain that has now descended upon Saint Louis. I got 15 miles in the park. It was warm enough to ride in bib-shorts and a short-sleeve Kaldis jersey, not bad for late November. This will probably be the last time this winter that I can ride in such attire, but I’ve already said that before, so who knows. Other then that activity, it has been a quiet day. I think that everyone is as tired as I am, after all of yesterday’s non-shopping exertions. We watched “the game”, Michigan vs. Ohio State. Anne threatened to call her father every time Michigan made it into the red-zone, “Hi Daddy, what’s ya doing?” Dave and Rey proceeded to while away the afternoon watching college football. I took a nap instead, something about riding 55 miles this holiday weekend.

Yesterday, at Pi, I asked Rey, if his sister, Ashlan, had seen any celebrities in NYC. He answered yes, Jason Sudeikis, a cast member on “Saturday Night Live”. He had bought a sandwich in the shop where she works. Dan turned indignant at this turn of the conversation, “Why didn’t you ask me that question?” He proceeded to list the celebs that he has seen in LA. Danny DeVito and spouse, Rhea Perlman, who I already knew about, their daughter is a classmate of Dan’s. Likewise, I knew of his sighting of Jay Leno, driving around town in a Model A. New to me were Ellen Page (“Juno”, “Inception”, “Whip It”) who was having lunch with two unnamed actresses that appeared in the movie, “But I’m a Cheerleader” and Michael Cera also of “Juno” fame and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”. There were more, but I didn’t know them, so I can’t relay them.

Super 8 Point Pi Blues

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“Super 8”, new to DVD this week was our after dinner fare last night. While other families proceeded to gird their loins, step out into the November night and shop ‘till they drop, our family huddled around the flickering screen of our not so big and certainly not flat screened TV. Faced with the choice of facing Black Friday’s sale crazed shoppers, tripped out on tryptophan or space alien monsters, we choose the latter and are happy for our choice.

The title comes from the Kodak Super 8 film that the kids are using to make a monster movie. The protagonist is a boy who has just lost his mother in a factory accident. His grief-stricken father offers to send him away to baseball camp for the summer. Naturally, Rey thought the kid should have gone to baseball camp, but then there would have been no movie to watch, or maybe just a different one. Instead of “The Natural”, how about “The Extraterrestrial”?

With executive producer Steven Spielberg, and directed by Spielberg protégé, J.J. Abrams, a comparison to “E.T.” and/or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is inevitable. While, “Super 8” is not quite as good as either of these two movies, not quite as good as “E.T.” is not too bad. Elle Fanning, in her debut role, is as good as all the buzz around her claims. Be sure to watch the credits at the end of the movie, there is a great Easter egg there.

Friday morning, Anne, Rey and David played Bananagrams, while I bicycled in the park. I got 15 miles. Anne got the chance to play a word game that she dearly loves. I call this a win-win situation. We took the boys out to lunch at Pi and then we took Dan to the airport. Joanie happened to accompany us on this trip. She also tagged along when first we visited the [World Champion] Cardinal’s gift shop at Busch Stadium and then bought tickets to the Blues game at the Scott Trade Center. I muffed it on the tickets. I could have bought four tickets earlier in the day, but by the time we made it to the box office all they had was standing room only. We made a quick side trip to the Union Station food court, which has really gone downhill, then back to Scott Trade for the game.

The Blues played the Calgary Flames, so we got two national anthems for the price of one. We all stood through the first period, which wasn’t bad. What was bad was our view of the game. We really couldn’t see the goal just below us. Fortunately, all the first period’s action was at the far end. By the end of the period, the Blues were up 1-0. Joanie found a seat after the first period and later in the second period; Dave and I got seats too. Anne joined us next, but said that Rey didn’t want to leave Joanie alone. He is always the gentleman. I came back and told him that I would stay with Joanie. He went off to join Anne and Dave, but came back almost immediately. Someone else had grabbed the free seats. By the third period there were plenty of open seats, but Rey stood his ground. I sat in the row in front of Joanie. The Blues scored another goal and then the game was over. Returning home, we dropped Joanie off first. Dave and Rey left for a party and I wrote this post. It is now time for bed. I’ve gotten better at photographing the low light action of a hockey game, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Better seats would help too.