Cleaning Up….

It’s close to year end and I am doing the required semi annual cleaning of my office here at World Headquarters. Confusion reigns and somehow I think that works for me. Something about a creative mind or at least that is my current excuse. Kathy leaves my cave alone. Not out of respect for my privacy but in fear of getting bitten by something even up here on the fifth floor.

I am a chronic note writer. I have tons of notebooks loaded with this idea or that. Waxing philosophically or just daydreaming. After I die and someone looks at all this crap they are going to realize what a whack job I am. There is of course my tome of “50 Great Ideas I haven’t Done Squat About”. A man has to have priorities. But it’s great to look back and see where I have changed and what stays constant.

In the corner there is a stack of bygone Wall Street Journals.I thumbed through several. I like this paper because there is a lot to it. I get the right bent and assimilate accordingly. Same as I would for the NY Times or my local Denver Post. Yet the variety of topics and analyses from the markets to latest trends is done rather bluntly and without much pretext that borders on zany. I like zany.

There was a blurb on single pilot commercial planes. Seems the aerospace industry has been at this for a while. From an engineering point of view it is close. Whatever cost savings they may realize might be off set by the cost of Prozac and booze in the back of the bus. Seriously, they want driverless cars, naval ships and now planes. What are we going to do in our spare time?

In the world of high finance Jaime Dimon has been cured of his throat cancer. He recovered quickly enough to personally lobby several congresspeople to do away with bans on derivatives. There was a fund manager from Black Rock in London who was banned from trading in the UK ever again after being caught turnstile jumping for an extended period of time on his daily trek from a trendy suburb to downtown London. They would have put Bernie Madoff in front of a firing squad. Lastly we are still dealing in the courts with the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy. I should have been a lawyer.

In Mansions there was the announcement of the listing of an educational entrepreneur’s Southampton estate for $140 million. It seems he runs a thing called Avenues, The World School. It is headquartered in Chelsea and charges $40,000 a year for primary tuition.I wonder if there is a teacher’s union?

On the same note schools are now hiring gourmet chefs for school lunches. It’s not what you learn but how you eat. I can remember a bologna sandwich on white bread wrapped in waxed paper that you downed in about 90 seconds so you could race out for the playground.

An article about Sony tugged at my heart strings. It seems they have been hacked by North Korea. Execs were caught redhanded trashing Angelina Jolie and Obama. The latter in a highly racist tone. No harm, no foul apparently. But in the height of hubris they took the press to task for printing private conversations saying the tabloids were breaking the law or at least the law of the jungle. And yes the saga of Bill Cosby goes on. Whatever side you are on it shows the seamy side of what we thought was innocence.

News becomes strikingly obvious. The recent rains in LaLa Land are mainly washing into the Pacific. Why? Because they paved over the Los Angeles River to prevent flooding. You wonder why this state is screwed up? This morning there was a picture of a coal train derailed and overturned spilling the contents into a river outside of Lexington, Kentucky. But then again the Keystone pipeline is a threat to the environment. You thought I was stupid until I craftily started connecting all these dots.

There is corruption in Haiti and various nations from Africa to the Continent. And right here at home we have the strangest of bedfellows in the persons of Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren. Representing the Atilla the Hun Right and Socialism at its best they have the microphone but I wonder if any one is listening. A recent articles suggests that at least a few are getting the message.

Well my fingers are dirty from all the newsprint I have transferred. I have to put out the trash and shape up my act before I succumb to any more revery. It’s good to look at day and week old newspapers. One of them goes back to November 22,2014. Right before the huge drop in oil prices. It shows the lack of predictability in our world. It betrays our schizophrenia as a human race.

I am putting things in piles not order. I will still pick from this or that. I will try not to take myself too seriously. Most of all I will go beyond the headlines and wander down dark alleys. It’s more fun that way. Cleaning up? Never.

As always
Ted The Great

Factoids:

The recent impasse on the budget brought by Senor Cruz actually helped Obama get some long held up appointments through. Seems the Surgeon General wasn’t passing muster because as the top doc he wasn’t properly equipped to handle Ebola and was for gun control. Aaargh.

Johnny Manziel crashed and burned in his debut. Andrew Luck of the Colts trash talks in a different way. He congratulates defenders on their great moves and hits. I read it in the paper.

A 35 year old something just got $355 million invested in his company providing small office suites for startups. That valued his fledgling company at $5 billion. Where did I go wrong?

You can rent a chalet on the slopes in Courcheval France for $60,000 per night. $500,000 is what one tenant is paying for a six-bedroom suite that occupies the entire 39th floor of Manhattan’s posh Pierre Hotel.The renter is not only renting the suite for the entire month of December, but also the separate one-bedroom Getty Suite next door for $150,000 a month. That’s overflow for guests.

Finally there was the sale of a Miami Beach condo for $55 million. Weren’t these places see throughs five years ago? “All the News That Fits the Print”