What I Know For Sure,,,,,Is Within These Parentheses ( )

I keep seeing books and blogs by people who have apparently found all the answers or even some of them.....Titles like "This I Know For Sure"  and "Two True Things" or whatever, and I'll tell you, I take my hat off to those people who can state unequivocably  that they are sure about something.

Now I, for instance, have recently realized that I am not sure of anything any more.  Strange, because when I was Forty something I was sure I had everything figured out.  (I was really an arrogant prick for a while back then)  I look back and see so many of my absolute truths that have gone bad on me over time and that I have had to discard or thought I had discarded......, kinda like those small containers of food that get pushed, forgotten,  to the back of the fridge shelf and, when discovered, are displaying questionable spots of green or red mold making it impossible to even guess what they once were.  All you can be pretty sure of is that you probably should get rid of them .........at once.

The other day I  was thinking that the time has come when a person cannot read a publication or listen to a news program and have any confidence whatsoever that what is being told to us with the utmost false sincerity is anything but just hype....a bundle of lies concocted by spin doctors with nothing but the prepositions in the sentences remaining trustworthy and at all dependable.    (Really....how wrong can after, at ,by, down, for, from, in, on,  etc. be ....without a noun or a verb I believe we can be fairly sure they remain blameless?)    I suddenly realized  something shocking .  There are so many things that we accept as "absolute truth" that are so obviously absurd and insane that I don't understand why we haven't all risen up in riotous protest, burned books and stoned the offenders who have implanted these devilish worms of thought in our brains. 

With nothing making any sense to me at all any more my deep introspections have revealed to me something I should have thought of a long time ago....... we have completely accepted premises that our minds and our senses tell us is a bucket of bull crap.  I think I have finally arrived at one new truth.
 
Ladies and Gentlemen........THE WORLD IS REALLY FLAT.

Now just think about it for a minute.


Never mind  Christopher Columbus and all that shit.  He could have very easily have sailed right off the edge of the earth if he hadn't been lucky enough to bump into America or the islands off the coast. I'll bet a lot of those guys who sailed west to get to the East Indies and were never heard of again DID sail right off the edge of the earth.

Hell, just go for a drive across Arizona.......is the world round or flat, just tell me?  Take a cruise and convince yourself and me that the ocean that you see stretching endlessly out there is really on a curved surface.  Climb the highest mountain and when you peer out into the distance, aside from a few protruberances like other mountains,  what is out there?  Nothing  but Flat, flat, flat.

Now just think about this for a minute.......there are only recently a handful of human  beings who claim they have zipped out into distant space and looked back and seen this blue marble thingy and sent back pictures of it and have established beyond doubt that the earth is round..........yeh, yeh.....and we are supposed to believe them 'cause pictures don't lie.  Ha!(What about PhotoShop? )  And how do we know that  blue marble is the Earth?     I am not sure they are any more  believable than the people who claim that the moon landing never happened and it was all done on a movie sound stage in Burbank.


Just think for a minute  about the fact that we are told that, with the earth being round and all, that about half of the people on the planet are actually living their lives hanging upside down by their feet.   Got the picture?   And what is holding them on and keeping them all from flying off into space????  An invisible thing called gravity, we are told.  Can't see it, can't feel it but that is what makes Australians think they are right side up and perfectly fine, when, in fact, none of them have ever been right side up except  possibly Crocodile Dundee who visited NY and the one or two Aussies who may have vactioned in Maine or Canada.  What is keeping all those Aussies from having a constant dizzy, headachey feeling is also a puzzle to me. It, too, is attributed to gravity, but I know how I feel when I have been in an inverted Yoga pose  for just a few minutes and I don't know about that gravity thing at all.

And it gets even worse..........the Scientists tell us we are wrong in thinking the sun revolves around the Earth.  In truth,they say,  the Earth and a bunch of other big rocks all revolve around the sun which does nothing but just sit there burning away.  Well, if that is true how come I see the sun come up just beyond my lime tree in the left corner of the back yard every morning and I often watch it set way out on the right edge of the Pacific Ocean in the evening...down it goes.....plop.......day after day probably just about the spot where the ocean is fighting to keep from running off the edge of the earth.  (I haven't figured that part out yet about the oceans.)    So who is crazy?

They tell us that the Earth not only revolves around the sun, but that it spins on its axis and does a complete turn on itself every nite (that supposedly explains sunrise and sunset) while it is also spinning in it's orbit around the sun, a feat that takes a year to complete and that explains Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter because one part of the orbit is closer to the sun than the rest of it, making summer hotter than winter.   As  far as I am concerned that doesn't explain anything especially, with all that spinning around, how come we aren't all staggering off the sidewalks and falling down in the gutters all the time  without having imbibed a single drop of intoxicating beverage?

Hmmmmm.  Pretty tatty....all of it, I'd say.    I think we have all been seduced into believing a lot of garbage even before this current crop of Fox news hit the fan and I have decided I am going to start making up my own truth from now on.  Anyone who cares to join me is more than welcome.  I'll bet we can create a better reality than the one we are stuck in.  How could we not?

Humph ! Fickle Followers......Can't a Person Just Sit Down and Rest?

Yes, yes, I know it's true......I have been invisible and silent in the blogosphere recently and I apologize to all you beloved folk who keep checking in eagerly and have to leave disgruntled and unsatisfied.

What's worse ....today will not  be much  better but I notice that followers are deserting me by the handful....ingrates, wretches.......and I decided I had better utter a few small grunts and squeaks to let you know I have not traveled on through that dark tunnel to the light....not yet.  Just  been busy with several projects.

To the faithful few, I will be back soon, I promise.

And to the others I say......Feh!  (not what I really want to say, but "feh" looks more civilized than what I really want to say.)  Love ya' all.

Not Plagarism....Sharing Anonymous Genius With the World

Forgive me if you have already seen the following piece.  I just received it from my old and dear friend, Bruce Simkins who happened to be the brother of my beloved friend Anita ....sadly, now no longer with us.  They were my first friends in California and without them I surely would have died of loneliness or just walked into the Pacific and kept going.  However, that is another story.

I do not know if Bruce wrote this.....he may have....he is quite brilliant.  However, to whomever wrote it I give credit and praise.  I think it is wonderful and deserves to be spread as widely as possible.  Feel free to copy and forward it to anyone you know who needs a laugh.  And, if you know who wrote it, please advise me so I can give proper credit.

By the way...I had to work like hell to try to fit the type into my space so please forgive any choppped off words.
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DRAFTING GUYS OVER 60

No -  idiot !!  The subject does not read dating guys over 60 -  Put on your glasses & read it again !!

Begin forwarded message:

Subject: Drafting Guys Over 60

Date: October 8, 2011 12:40:34 PM CDT

Drafting Guys Over 60 This is funny & obviously  written by a Former Soldier... New Direction for any war: Send Service  Vets over 60! I am over 60 and the Armed Forces thinks I'm too old to track down terrorists. You can't be older           than 42 to join the military.  They've got the whole thing ass-backwards.  Instead of sending 18-year-olds  off to fight, they ought to take  us old guys. You shouldn't be  able to join a military unit  until you're at least 35. For starters, researchers  say 18-year-olds think about sex every 10 seconds. Old guys only  think about sex a couple of times a day, leaving us more than  28,000 additional seconds per  day to concentrate on the enemy. Young guys haven't lived long enough to be cranky, and a cranky soldier is a dangerous soldier. 'My back hurts! I can't sleep, I'm tired and hungry.' We are impatient and maybe letting us kill some asshole that desperately deserves it will make us feel better       and shut us up for awhile. An 18-year-old doesn't even like to get up before 10am. Old guys always get up early to pee, so what the hell. Besides, like I said, I'm tired and can't sleep and since I'm already up, I may as well be up killing some fanatical son-of-a-bitch. If captured we couldn't spill the beans because we'd forget where we put them. In fact, name, rank, and serial number would be a real brainteaser. Boot camp would be easier for old guys.. We're used to getting screamed and yelled at and we're sed to soft food. We've also developed an appreciation for guns. We've been using them for years as an excuse to get out of the house, away from the screaming and yelling. They could lighten up on the obstacle course however... I've  been in combat and never saw a  single 20-foot wall with rope  hanging over the side, nor did I  ever do any pushups after  completing basic training.  Actually, the running part  is kind of a waste of energy, too...  I've never seen anyone  outrun a bullet. An 18-year-old has the whole world ahead of him. He's still learning to shave, to start a conversation with a pretty girl. He still hasn't figured out that a baseball cap has a brim to shade his eyes, not the back of his head. These are all great reasons to keep our kids at home to learn a little more about life before sending them off into harm's way. Let us old guys track down those dirty rotten coward terrorists. The last thing an enemy would want to see is a couple million pissed off old farts with attitudes and automatic weapons, who know that their best years are already behind them. HEY!! How about recruiting Women over 50...in menopause!!! You think MEN have attitudes?? Ohhhhhhhhhhhh my God!!! If nothing else, put them  on border patrol. They'll have  it secured the first night! Send this to all of your senior friends... it's in big type so they can  read it.

Not a Crock of YouKnowWhat......Here's a Different Crock Altogether

Well, dear souls.....face it.....when you get  to be an octogenarian your options for amusing yourself narrow a bit..... The way it works is, first you try to pick something that doesn't hurt, does not require you to cover much ground  and doesn't compel you crawl around a lot on your hands and knees.

That is why I got so excited a  few weeks ago when I discovered the world of stock options........it allows you to sit at your computer for 24 hours without getting up, especially if you take your laptop into the bathroom and get one of those soft toilet seats to sit on all day.   (Incidentally, that new hobby is working out well.....I am learning a lot and am only down about $47.....and by tomorrow I may even be in the black.  A blog about that will surely follow soon)   However, the markets do close early in our time zone and are not open on the weekends and just how many candlestick charts can a person examine for bullish or bearish flag formations before screaming obscenities and rushing into the street to be run over by a car?......so I really needed another reason to get out of  bed in the mornings.  Happily a cousin of mine is getting married and I was browsing Bridal Registries for a gift when I was reminded that I had always wanted, of all things, a Crock Pot Slow Cooker thingy and had never treated myself to one...........until now.  A real life-changer, I'll tell you.

Hoopty=doo.......I have a new toy for practically no money   (I found a great sale  bargain) and I have a new reason to spend time in the kitchen assembling fabulous dinners.  (I hope).  With my very first effort I have learned an important lesson which I could have figured out by myself had I not been so excited.  Do not expect the same results from a crock pot that you get with a saute pan.  However, if you follow the recipe and put in extra wine the results can be delicious.  Hence I had a fabulous bowl of Chicken Marsala for dinner last night and could not stop licking the spoon and the bowl.    The sauce, replete with basil, oregano, garlic, cream cheese (?) and lots of marsala, was so good I would have gladly eaten my shoe (or even someone else's  shoe)  if it were cooked in that sauce.   As for the chicken......well, it sure as hell was tender!   I can see why these pots are superb for making barbecued pulled pork and beef.  Now that I have that lesson learned I am working on a soup  which should definitely  benefit from long slow cooking.....French Onion Soup with some dry Vermouth and perhaps a slug of Brandy in the 3rd hour.  I have my baguettes all ready to top with Parmesan cheese to float on top and will put the little crocks of soup under the broiler before serving/devouring.  What a good thing I didn't give all of those French Onion Soup crocks to the Goodwill  a few years back.

That whole story just exacerbates one of my problems though..........after spending the last 18 months  convincing myself that most of the contents of my kitchen cabinets and drawers will never  be used again and might as well be disposed of, here I come up with a use for those damned oven-proof soup crocks which have been taking up a whole shelf in my cupboard for 40 years.   Now I undoubtedly will never be able to dispose of anything again.  Sigh.

(I do realize that those slow cookers were really invented for the poor unfortunate souls who have to rush off to work in the mornings and needed a way to find dinner all ready for them when they came home.  The fact that I am home all of the time doesn't matter one whit.......it is a new skill and I intend to acquire it and enjoy it.)

Now, you will have to excuse me.....I have a few more candlestick charts and 50 day Moving Averages to examine before I prepare my strategy for tomorrow's market opening.  Tenks Gott this new hobby has not bankrupted me yet nor has my head  exploded spraying the countryside with numbers and strange symbols and abbreviations, but please............ don't stop praying for me.

The Cats Take Over

I have had a very harrowing day coping with my electronic and technological gadgets all of which defied me at every turn and left me a broken shell  of a person flung into the corner of the room like a pile of dirty laundry.  Consequently, you don't get very many words out of me tonite, but I will try to fill up the column with a few pix.

One of the things which confounded me was the simple (?) task of trying to download some pics from my camera.  Two hours and a bucket of tears later I finally found the pro blem.....I was using the download cable from my old camera not  my new one.   If the prongs all fit the various holes I cannot for the life of me understand why the old one should not work, but at least the correct one did work and enabled me to display this somewhat undistinguished Picture of the new and improved, softer  version of Baskin in his favorite perch giving you the "look deeply into my eyes and I will turn you into a pumpkin" stare........otherwise known as the "Don't Fuck With Me, Kiddo".

This is supposed to  be a pic of Winnie co vering her eyes with her paw as she tries to nap.......ny vision is poor so all I can  be sure of is that it is a furry creature.

Same pose, perhaps a bit clearer but I know it will never win any prizes.

A view of my marvelous red trumpet vine blossoms.......too bad you can't see how huge they are but you can catch a glimpse of one of my numerous hummer feeders.  The funny thing is that the trumpet vine flowers used to be a feast for the hummers till they tasted Lo's Home Brewed Nectar.  Now they spurn the flowers for my offerings.  I hope I have not ruined their lives....

And finally, a pitifully inadequate shot of the livestock lounging by the pool........I took 2 or 3 of these and none of them was any good, but being that I am merely a limp pile of dirty laundry thrown into a corner by my tech devices,  I guess you should consider yourselves lucky to   be getting even this dubious stuff.

And now, my precious followers, I must rush off to  bed so I can arise with the dawn and see what is happening to the spreads, straddles and naked puts and calls in the Options Market.

G'nite.

Anyone Up For A Naked Put?

I am not sure if I will ever be able to blog coherently again.  For a week I have  been immersed in a rare, esoteric language which nobody in their right mind really speaks, but in order to participate in my new hobby it has  been critical that I learn it.  My brain is reeling and I am  beginning to think I have made a huge mistake.  (won't be the first and I sincerely hope it won't  be my last....if you know what I mean.....)

Well, my darlings, if you consider that first paragraph a bit of  an enigma just wait till I start spouting whole sentences, paragraphs, yea pages even  that don't make any sense whatsoever.  I have spent hours bruising my brain with decisions like whether a covered call framed in a  vertical spread is a  better tactic than entering into a short straddle whereby I must  be willing to accept exercise or assignment on either leg.... (of the transaction, that is).

Or perhaps I might dare  venture into the dangerous world of the naked call or put.  (Believe me, it's not what you think)   I am warned that if I enter a naked put and the market moves against me and the stock's price is lower than the put's strike price upon expiration (whose....mine or theirs?)  I might indeed have to clench my teeth and suffer having the stock put to me whether I like it or not. That somehow sounds like it might  be uncomfortable, painful or even a bit maiming,  no?   Well, that just gives you a taste of what I have coping with trying to fathom the intriguing, incomprehensible and totally frustrating world of stock options.    Aaarrrrggggh.

I am all for continuing to learn even into one's dotage, but I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew this time.  It all began a few weeks ago when I woke up and decided there was absolutely no incentive for me to get up at all.........no challenges awaited (except for those like cleaning out the closets which I have  been putting off for 5 or 10 years but am sure to get to one of these days.  No happy surprises were in store for me.........I had already received my last internet order of those storage bags which promise to compact your fluffiest possessions down to the thickness of a microchip with the help of using your vacuum to suck the air out and found that they do a passable job but no ecstasy results from it.  I have been forced into the unenviable position of having to give away some of my afghans due to no room left in any closet (despite the promises of those sucky bags) (No...this is writer's rhetoric....I love to give away my afghans.....the problem is I just can't stop making them).  Face it......I, who rarely in my lifetime have been bored (except at cocktail parties) was suddenly bored to tears  because I cannot physically do the things which used to keep me amused......like building a 6 foot blue velvet couch or a stained glass window etc.  Life, as I knew it, was over.  Sigh.

And then I happened to accidentally read a piece of junk email (not quite spam) which begged and pleaded with me to realize the huge opportunities that Stock Options offered in a Stock Market such as we are experiencing.   Being weak and vulnerable I fell into the trap and read the whole damned thing (usually a disaster) and it really offered a nugget or two of interesting information.  Before I knew what I was doing I found myself on Amazon checking out the various "How to" books on stock optionsand ordered one.......used, of course.

You see, the truth is that may years ago I had what you could call "dabbled" in stock options and fortunately had enough sense to shake the whole thing from my fingertips like a 200 degree shred of melted mozzarella when I saw the column labelled "net profit/loss" contained too many negative numbers.  I realized I didn't know what the hell I was doing and felt lucky to get off so easy.  But the lure of a process where you could be naked in a transaction (figuratively, of course) never totally left me and I decided that perhaps if I studied I could learn enough to do it right this time....I confess it is the hardest subject I have ever tackled with the possible exception of "Deductive Logic" in the Philosophy Dept at UCLA.......a subject which I naively assumed would be fun like solving mysteries and found, to my horror, that it was 2 parts incomprehensible math type equations blended with 3 parts something like breaking down sentence structure in 8th grade English.  I fear I will never  be able to erase from my mind the memorable prime example of diagramming and proving the truth of the sentence "If it rains, the street is wet."  ugh.......quell horror.......But I digress.......

I am still feeling my way gingerly into this new endeavor and pray that it will turn out to  be both exhilarating and profitable.  So far I am not sure whether it has touched or even come close to either of those goals.  The thing it did do was to get me out of bed at 7am (the market opens in New York at some awful hour  and we are 3 hours earlier) and had me staggering and tripping over my cane as I made my way to the computer to check on some paper trades I had entered (mythical trades....no money involved).  This totally confounded the cats who never expect to see me before 10;30 on my best days, not to mention what it did to my daily naptimes.  The household has been in total disarrangement.  No one knows when to eat or sleep.

.Then there was an interruption to the process when I discovered that my blood pressure, which is normally incredibly perfect, was going through the roof.  I put my book and pretend option tickets aside and made my way to my magnificent cardiologist who saves my life regularly just with a hug and occasionally with an angioplasty and some stents.  After reviewing every thing I had eaten, drunk, inhaled or coughed up for the past 3 days we were no closer to an answer till I thought to mention my new activity and, after he finished laughing, we decided that excitement and stress and naked puts can have a resounding effect on blood pressure, especially when the 2nd most exciting thing in a person's life has  been hummingbirds for the past 2 years.  Well, who knew?

So there you have it.......Lois is galloping off in yet another direction and who knows what adventures will ensue.  Let us hope that bankruptcy won;'t  be one of them

Next blog I will tell you all about bull call spreads and straddles and strangles and collars and some strategy I  can't recall which is named after some kind of butterfly.....I can't remember how many legs it has and whether you can be assigned or exercised if you do it wrong.  I think I will stay away from that one for a while.  I certainly don't think I want to  be exercised........I had enough of that with the broken hip and the damned physical terrorists.....and if you are very good I will tell you more about naked puts and calls.....I know that is really all you care to hear about.

And, please, either wish me luck or pray for me....probably both if you can manage it.

This Belongs With My Previous Post

I fully intended to look up the following quote and include it in my modified rant against the pathetic  attempts some people make to hang on to youth and beauty far beyond their expiration dates. I just found it, so here it is.  It comes from one of my favorite authors, the wonderful George Bernard Shaw and goes something like this:

"Youth is a wonderful thing.
What a crime to waste it on children. "
                                                      George Bernard Shaw

                                                   And, even though the main message of my rant was hopefully implied throughout,  I realized that I never came right out in that post and stated the obvious .......... the bit of comfort we all can apply to our twinges of loss and regret......... that the appearance of the package will never be the main thing... ....it's what's inside that counts.