A Little Signification

One investment I made, 20 years ago, has turned out very well indeed. It was then, at the tender age of 31, that I married Sue, who took me for better or for worse. Brave girl!

Today we made the final installment on a small memento to those two decades, and it looks quite dazzling on Sue's right hand. Whenever we look at it we can remember, in the sparkle, how well those "I do"s have paid off!

Stop the Badness!

As I sit here proofreading the lettering of a volume of manga (part of what I do for a living), I now pause to ponder that eternal question…

What the heck is going on?!

I greatly fear we're about to elect ourselves a new President whose administration will make the Shrub years look like a golden age by comparison. Seriously, whoever gets in office will either have more screws loose than the hardware bins at Home Depot or have to spend so much time defending who and what he is to the willfully moronic press that neither will have any capacity to deal with the very grim prospects confronting our beleaguered world.

Now, it's my expectation that the markets will calm down once the election's over, but there seems little likelihood that the crashing losses of the last several weeks will be recovered anytime soon, if ever. So many houses of cards have fallen in such quick succession that one begins to wonder if there was ever anything solid undergirding Wall Street in the first place. More and more it looks like the foundational mechanisms of investing will have to be reinvented.

OPEC promises new, lower production quotas, which is no surprise at all, since they're now aggressively determined to recapture the $100-plus price for a barrel of oil. Our addiction to cheap oil has, of course, kicked us in the teeth lately, and I just hope that we aren't allowed to forget that pain and return to our willful, My-Right-As-A-'Murikan gas-guzzling ways. In that spirit I find I dare declare, "Bring it, OPEC!"

Well, that's what I got right now. Back to the manga…

Apple Update

At long last I report in, and sad to say my wife's PowerMac G5 was terminal. Oh, it could have been fixed, but for the repair price-plus we just went ahead and got her a new iMac, which includes all the latest bells and whistles and allows her to have dual monitors (her 23" cinema display still works fine). Now we have a dead box to do something with…just not sure what yet.