furtive explorations

16. I will ease up on the ellipses and start calling punctuation characters by their real names.
17. I won't keep telling people my New Year's Resolution is 1280x1024 since no one thinks it is funny.
18. No more sticking my LED flashlight up my nose. You can't see the blue well through skin anyway.
19. Less text about myself, more with links and sarcasm. (keep in mind this doesn't start for a couple of days so this piece is still fair game.)
20. I'm going to pretend you didn't say that. And I'll be more forgiving in the future when you say that sort of thing around me.
21. I'm actually going to finish a few things I started, like those fonts I mentioned weeks and weeks ago and the comic review thing.
22. It has been long enough so I'm going to stop grabbing my cheeks and yelling the way that Culkin kid did in Home Alone.
23. I won't become leader of a street gang, get into a vicious war with my rival gang leaders, attempt to solve it with a knife fight and get talked down out of the war my a young Michael Jackson. I'll just beat it or show them how funky and strong is my fight.
24. I'll will stop linking to pr0n sites just because I think it is funny.
25. I will never quote Elizabeth Taylor on my homepage. Not even if she is suddenly really funny about Linux or politics or Perl or something.
26. I will submit at least one module to CPAN so that I can really say I have contributed to opensource/free software. I further promise that I wont make all the internal variables curse words in that module. Nor will I pick amusing words for variable and method names so that people have to write humorous sentences to use the module.

In any event that sounds stupid, this isn't any event, it is a particular one I shall now share with you, my thriving public, both of you, my New Year's Resolutions!

1. I shall endeavor to not kick the power button on my UPS, thus twisting a safety feature I paid good money for to help prevent data loss into the instrument of total system failure.
2. I won't kick any puppies, even if they deserve it a whole bunch.
3. I will forgive all the dumb-shit actors who swore they would leave the country if a pretender like Bush were elected president, since they are after all, dumb-shit actors who's only real talent is convincing others that they aren't themselves. I also won't point out how ludicrous it is to walk away from your handlers, agents, makeup people, writers, directors, craft-service personnel, and unlimited retakes to snipe at a guy for getting help from his dad's friends.
4. I promise to pour my bitterness out on "paper" and not let it bottle up inside me, churning into a frothy bile that gnaws at my soul like a festering, gangrenous rat trying to suck down one last filthy weed before expiring in a pool of it's own pus.
5. We'll try to take it easier on the visuals, really.
6. We'll do our best to vacuum, well, some...
7. No more scathing political commentary disguised as humor. Also, we'll try to actually do humor.
8. We will avoid randomly switching from third to first person and back as I keep doing.
9. Less laughing like a maniac at something that wasn't even funny at the end of every half-hour.
10. If I wind up writing, directing, producing, and/or starring in a medical drama, I'll do my part to keep the show focused on medicine and actually feature a patient once in a while rather than building up so many one-night stands and secret romances and political intrigues turned sexual that when a major chracter announces that they have a STD you won't have to use multiple sheets of paper and a fine-point pen to draw out the flow-chart of relationships needed to guess the precentage of the staff that they transmitted the disease to in the office pool.
11. I'm going to try and do something about the run-on sentence thing.
12. 50% fewer references to Guam and Laos.
13. I'll admit that just adding the word "weasel" or "skeeter" or "nipplage" to a paragraph doesn't automatically make it funny. I may still hold out on "squirrel" and "pummel" though.
14. I promise not to drive to Atlanta and beat a CNN correspondent to death if the Bush and Dick jokes get to me later this year. I reserve the right to carve small effigies of night-show hosts and burn them though.
15. If I find out that I have any actual vices, I will at least try to stop doing them in the park, or at least make sure the squirels don't see me pummeling a nightshow host effigy with a rejected ER script about a Laotian actor. Oh yeah and I'm really serious about the run-on sentence thing...

Rational Madness always starts with a simple premise, in this case getting the in-laws together and getting through a wedding. You stick a basically normal (if a bit uptight) person in a serious of simple, easy to follow, one right after another situations that slowly get crazier and crazier. All the time, every keeps pretending that nothing is out of the ordinary and keeps trying to calm the one uptight person down, even, in this case, as people are shooting at him.

When done right, as in a film like this one, it builds and builds tension until you burst with laughs without ever having to resort to cheap in your face gags. There is a wonderful scene early on when Peter Falk (the already crazy one) starts telling Alan Arkin (your average uptight guy) about giant tetse flies in Africa that are as big as eagles and often carry children off. Our hero, obviously not believing this at all, presses for small details and gets a bigger and bigger story, ever more nutty as he must remain calm and polite. Mixing the subtle inter-personal situation humor with the nutty dialogue makes the scene three times as funny as either half would be alone.

How long has it been since a movie had you that excited even 3 months after you last saw it?

• Pimp Cow. A comic I MAY have to check out later...
• Little Gamers. A comic that is starting to grow on me...
• This game review made me laugh so hard I had to go get tissues to wipe my eyes and blow my nose with. I don't know why but it was just real funny for me today.
• Cute Wendy for Wednesday was extra special as well. This really happens folks! Also, read on to today.

A lot more exciting stuff happened today but I hate you all so I'm keeping it to myself. So there...

Haha, nevermind, their fancy-dancy little website shoved a cookie down my throat. Hit the website, look up Order Tracking and thar she blows!

BTW, ABC WNN got me through many a long night as a vampire geek. Aaron Brown was the greatest anchor they had. I once saw him do an entire night with a bad cardboard cutout for a co-anchor and it was better than the previous two weeks. The girls on NN above are thespians compared to a few of the people he had to work with!

As a matter of fact, we laughed non-stop until the Indian attack.

This time, we are going to look at a chart of 5 major stock market indexes. The indexes are:

TMW.X

The Wilshire Total Market Index which holds a capitalization weighted position in just about every publicly traded American headquartered company, more than 5000 or 6000 thousand!

RUT.X

The Russell 2000 is a medium to small capitalization index, of 3000 big stocks, it watches the bottom 2000. They make up less than 10% of the total market value. No Coca-Colas here, these are real down home American stocks.

COMPX

This is the Nasdaq Composite Index. 5000 American and international stocks on the Nasdaq are tracked here. Broad but flawed, 1/6 of the indexed companies are technical and make up more than 54% of it's value. If you add telecom in 1/5 of the indexed companies swing about 70%. Kick it in the internet and it drops like a stone. It is market value weighted so out of whack valuation also swings it about.

SPX.X

The S&P 500 is one of the grand-daddies of indexes. It follows 500 large, U.S. based companies that have strong market presence. A lot of people own these stocks and the companies aren't the close to the wire kind, they have liquidity and room to steer a bit. They also need to be market leader types. It is market value weighted and again strong value swings put hot companies near the top of the list and able to swing it about strongly. A wide variety of industries are represented though so there aren't a lot of wild internet plays dominating the top.

INDU

The old guard is well represented with the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It follows a mere 30 of the largest stocks in the U.S. It is price weighted and adjusted for splits and such to remain continuous. Once you could divide the price of the 30 stocks by 30 and get the average. It isn't diverse but it is the heartbeat of the mightiest giants. When they falter either the world is stumbling or the market is shifting mightily.

When you look at the chart, you will see that the black line is the Wilshire 5000, which makes a fine baseline. In the five year span of the chart, it has gone up 130% only to drop back to a mere 100%. Doubling your money every 5 years ain't bad folks, in fact it beats most Money Market accounts hands-down.

Below it you will see the Russell 2000 wobbling up and down as smaller companies have been tossed about. They've had a bad few years, over the decade they are right in there with the rest.

The INDU line that represents the Dow Jones Industrials shows why it is such a great market indicator, as it follows along with the broader market indexes quite nicely, dipping only as small caps and internet stocks boomed out of control. Amusingly for me, it rises even as the bubble bursts, catching back up to the more stable indicators as everything else dips. That is strength in size folks, people look to you for stability when things get bad. The market as a whole is ok if a big indicator like that rises as others fall.

The S&P 500 shows its strength as a market index by rarely wavering from other broad indexes. The 500 are the heart of the market. Down 15% on the year but up 100% in five.

The spoiler to all this is the Nasdaq Composite. See the past two years boom out of control valuewise. See it pull smallcaps along for the ride. See it correct brutally. Run Nasdaq, Run. For fun, try changing that chart to 1 year. Note what the small caps in the Russell 2000 do. Looking at the 10 year chart, look at the big trend.

Let us suppose, just for fun, that you invested a few thousand dollars a few months ago in some average money markets that are fairly broad in scope, say in September. If you invested $6000 you now have about $4600, since the market has dropped about 23%. Ouch. Now on the other hand look at that trend on the ten year chart. Notice how all the broad markets all basically double your money every 5 years? If you sell out right now, you lose. If you stay in the broad markets and keep your mouth shut, paying no fees and such, and wait till 5 years from last September where do you think your value will be? If you are paying attention, you'd guess $12,000.

The real deal here is patience. Pick any date or time, buy in, wait five or ten years. You basically never lose with a broad market index. And most periods you double down every 5-7 years. The broader the index the smoother the curve. The trick is to stop betting on societal trends, market segments and crazy stuff like that. Bet on civilization. That's the trick here. We haven't fucked that up in about 1000 years or so. It just keeps getting better and better, because that is what progress means. And if it gets worse, no bet will help. Just ask the Romans, or the Pharohs, or the Greek.

• BBSpot funny and often spot on with it's barbs.
• ErrorBoy is yet another comic I should examine more closely.
• Acid Reflux another comic with a great name and a real need to be read. Gotta look at this one closer too.
• Ifilm's best of in the opinion of one critic. Some gems on here. Also head back to the main page for the popular top ten and recent favorites. There are a lot of budding film types out there...
• Space Oddity is one film I liked minus a few scientific howlers. Gravity in ship? Asteroid just bounces them to a halt rather than smearing the inhabitant over the inside of the shell of the ship in a thin, thin paste? Vaulted ceilings? That sort of thing gets to me after a while. Great look and feel though.
• Bunny Grenade isn't a site you found here. Really. And if the name makes you at all nervous about what you will find there, you ain't going to like visiting. Luckily, since you didn't hear about it from me, it isn't my problem...

The way I see it, once we have a "00" day we need another just called "0". Now we can play roulette on the calendar on leap years. Also, why stick with the 7 day week? We could have 12 months of 30 days with 10 day weeks, (3 day weekends every week works out to 5 more days off a year!) and a special year end 5 or 6 day mini-week. And his lame-ass idea of naming the days one-day won't fly. It needs more poetry, or at least ordinals... Firstday, Seconday, Thirday, Fourthday, Fifthday, Sixthday, Seventhday, Barday, Gameday, Hangoverday. Better still, a little break in the middle of the week would rock too. Like take Fifthday off and work Barday. Your choice, take the Fifth't at home or head out drinking on Barday.

Oh yeah, this guy is some sort of Guinness math wiz. He said, "What boggles my mind is how much the list of positives outweighs the list of negatives." First off, you don't weigh numbers bozo, you add them. Secondly, a list like that "boggles" him and we are just going to jump on bandwagon with him? Hmm. He says, "Everyone says it's a great idea, they just don't think it's possible. Hallmark won't return my calls. Bill Gates won't return my calls." A couple of days ago I mentioned to my friends that it would be great if there were flying robots we could hand trash to and get freshly charged batteries from. Everyone agrees that fresh batteries are a great thing and that less litter every where would change the world for the better. And yet, with a great idea like that, I'm completely positive that neither Hallmark nor Bill Gates would call me back either.

Science, technology and societal power are advancing in leaps and bounds even as common sense evaporates. I sometimes wonder if it is an evolutionary thing. Easy life == breed back to stupid. If this trend continues in another 50 years the only remaining life on earth will be inner-city gangs using plasma weapons to fight over the few remaining Twinkies and Ho-Hos.

Have you noticed that a lot of the favorite snack foods of your sugar-laden youth are now gay or pimp slang? How did that happen? Besides the aforementioned I can name a few more: pie, ding-dongs, oreos, zingers, dark chocolate. I swear if I find out next week that M&Ms or Milky Way are some unspeakable act performed in road-side men's rooms I'll just start crying like a little girl. Really, it's like having your favorite puppy knifed and gutted with your own baby spoon.

Mmmm, Phoebe Cates...

I'm not mad at anyone. Nothing makes me so furious that I just lash out with blind anger, wounding those I love most like Poppa Jackson in a cheap made-for-TV biopic about The Gloved One. Nothing hardens my heart till it distills pure, crystalline hatred in a convenient suppository form that the whole family can enjoy.

I can't even get real worked up dropping random culture references and excesses on you all. I really need to hit the Mall again for a few after Christmas to cover a base or two I missed but I got all my shopping done. And it looks like the current job won't fire me three days after Christmas like the last overlords did. And the family is all well and the friends are adequate (if still unemployed in a few cases...) Heck, I guess everything is just peachy. This might turn out to be a nice little Holiday. It's creeping me out bigtime!

Oh wait, I have to fucking work from 3 to midnight tonight. Shit. Now I'm angry again and all is right with the world... =)

Happy Holidays!