Like Keats listening to the nightingale, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.” But I am listening to the snorting and oinking of bacon, not the avian cluck of doom in recent years past. The influenza that originated with the porcine staple of subsistence farmers, such as my grandfather, who relented to my mother’s pleas and didn’t slaughter the pig she had raised in the depths of the Depression, has put us in the slop.
Given the panic infecting the markets, I fully expect to see pedestrians with surgical face masks when I venture out for my bacon (make that steak) and eggs this summery, un-flu like morning. But I got a shot back in the Ford administration when the swine flu alarum first sounded. Hope it took.
Miss Market can turn on a dime from seductress to you know what with lipstick. I don’t mean you, Gov. Palin. I look forward to your presidency and admire you for sticking up for everyone challenged by the mess we make of things. Plus you look as good as Obama in a tailored suit.
The day is not over, but I remain cheered. Unlike Keats, whose psyche (to which he wrote another ode) was absorbed with the fleetingness of youth, my gaze is fixed on tomorrow. I remain in the green, thanks to F and SLV. Even the redoubtable PALM refuses to bend. The only virus it fears is the one that could infect its operating system.
The airlines are suffering. NYT is down after Ms. Dowd’s wry farewell address to her profession on Sunday. Oil is dipping, but precious metals could be a refuge.
And Yankees’ fans, your ballyhooed pitching staff is suffering from walking pneumonia. I’m stealing home on them and I’m having a BLT for lunch.
Showing posts with label SLV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SLV. Show all posts
Monday, April 27, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Yankee Ingenuity
Is the ball juiced? Is there some mysterious wind current in the new Yankee Stadium that makes warning track power Ruthian? Home runs are on a pace to double the number hit last year in the House that Ruth Built. Word is the Steinbrenners are consulting the engineers who built the new palace to determine what might be going on. Is there some flaw in the façade that allows broken-bat triples and pop-up round-trippers? Or does the old horsehide come from the flank of Secretariat?
Doubtless, many missed Posada’s video-reviewed home run yesterday because they weren’t in their $2,500 seats, preferring instead to spend a day at the ball park munching on raw fish or savoring the filet mignon. I see this as a good sign. “Hey, kids, let’s go to Yankee Stadium and have lunch; we can always see the game on HD, which will show the players watching themselves on HD.”
I say it’s a good sign because it connotes a certain insouciance about the present and the future, a necessary ingredient for playing bogey golf (the best I can hope for at my advanced age), finding love and happiness, enrolling in that yoga class, enjoying the two hardy tulips that managed to bloom this year in my garden. I’m going with daffodils next year. I’m told they are hardy perennials, and I love the way they bow to you.
Times change, but fear and greed persist in all but the rare Mother Theresa among us, waxing and waning with whatever wind blows our way. Is greed, like the baseballs flying out of the Bronx, getting the upper hand now? Talk of "green shoots" is nudging the needle that way, but the survivalists and conspiracy sisters resist it mightily, hoping that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse come galloping to validate all the pork 'n beans they've laid up in the root cellar. My guess is they will be sorely disappointed. The bottom is in sight. The next tea party will be held not to protest the "the govment" (as Huck Finn's Pap complained), but the great inflation sure to come.
Key this week are first-quarter earnings reports and Friday’s release of durable goods orders for March and home sales data. If within expectations, the green shoots should grow a bit.
Though the market is taking a tumble today as I write, PALM and SLV are keeping me afloat. Avoid the usurious bankers. With the Fed Funds rate at zero and 25% on credit card balances, their means of making dough is exposed. The return to Glass-Steagall and “bankers’ hours” is coming. Paul Krugman tells me so.
Doubtless, many missed Posada’s video-reviewed home run yesterday because they weren’t in their $2,500 seats, preferring instead to spend a day at the ball park munching on raw fish or savoring the filet mignon. I see this as a good sign. “Hey, kids, let’s go to Yankee Stadium and have lunch; we can always see the game on HD, which will show the players watching themselves on HD.”
I say it’s a good sign because it connotes a certain insouciance about the present and the future, a necessary ingredient for playing bogey golf (the best I can hope for at my advanced age), finding love and happiness, enrolling in that yoga class, enjoying the two hardy tulips that managed to bloom this year in my garden. I’m going with daffodils next year. I’m told they are hardy perennials, and I love the way they bow to you.
Times change, but fear and greed persist in all but the rare Mother Theresa among us, waxing and waning with whatever wind blows our way. Is greed, like the baseballs flying out of the Bronx, getting the upper hand now? Talk of "green shoots" is nudging the needle that way, but the survivalists and conspiracy sisters resist it mightily, hoping that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse come galloping to validate all the pork 'n beans they've laid up in the root cellar. My guess is they will be sorely disappointed. The bottom is in sight. The next tea party will be held not to protest the "the govment" (as Huck Finn's Pap complained), but the great inflation sure to come.
Key this week are first-quarter earnings reports and Friday’s release of durable goods orders for March and home sales data. If within expectations, the green shoots should grow a bit.
Though the market is taking a tumble today as I write, PALM and SLV are keeping me afloat. Avoid the usurious bankers. With the Fed Funds rate at zero and 25% on credit card balances, their means of making dough is exposed. The return to Glass-Steagall and “bankers’ hours” is coming. Paul Krugman tells me so.
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