Shucks June 14, 2013March 28, 2017 John T.: “Given yesterday’s post [Summer Recipes], I’m assuming you haven’t yet seen what might well be the easiest shucking technique for microwave corn. After cooking, cut off a bit of the base, grab the tassel-end with a kitchen towel, and squeeze out a nice, hot, tassel-free ear of corn.” Mike Rutkaus: “Simplify even more, don’t shuck the corn, pull all the husk back over the stem—voila! It’s a handle.” Simpler still . . . Michael Myler: “You can eat corn raw, right off the plant. I just found this out a few years ago and is my favorite way to eat it now.” Greg Buliavac: “I’m currently in a weight loss program. (HMR Weight Management, if I’m allowed to plug.) In an amazing coincidence of timing, at last night’s class, they showed this Youtube. I think it elevates your “Cooking Like a Guy” corn recipe to the next level.” ☞ Validates everything I’ve been saying. Except . . . do two ears of corn really take twice as long to cook as one? I thought it was more like First Class postage, where the first ounce costs 46 cents and each additional is just 20 cents. BAKLAVA Chris Anderson: “In spite of having once enjoyed the taste, I no longer order, touch, or eat baklava because I am allergic to walnuts, so, in addition to the simplicity of the recipe, an added benefit of your Cooking Like a Guy™ method is that one can choose granola without walnuts! When is the Cooking Like a Guy™ (if using Windows, hold down the ALT-key and, using the numeric keypad, type 0153 for the TM symbol) book coming out?” ☞ As soon as I can figure out a manly way to make a souffle. QUOTE OF THE (YESTER)DAY Chip Ellis: “I don’t know if you see the Quote of the Day on your web page. I also do not know if readers gets the same quote as other readers on a given day. No matter, I am sure you will agree that yesterday’s quote was comment-worthy” . . . There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. ~William Jennings Bryan, 1896 Yes! It’s that Nick Hanauer clip you’d better all have memorized by now, a century and some before its time. As true then as now.
Summer Recipes June 13, 2013March 28, 2017 ICELAND WheelTug picked up its eleventh airline yesterday — Icelandair. I know the Arctic is not technically a continent — just frozen water — and that probably the folks at the Iceland Tourism Department would rather identify their country with Europe than with the Arctic anyway. But if the Arctic were the eighth continent, and the island of Iceland were on it instead of just sort of rising up out of the ocean near it, that would allow us to say “11 airlines on four continents.” QUICK CORN Just in time for summer, Cooking Like A GuyTM, part 63. I haven’t posted a recipe in a long time because since we switched to WordPress I haven’t figured out how elegantly to insert the TRADEMARK symbol. And still haven’t, but I trust you. [UPDATE: Thanks to Mark L., I now do! Cooking Like A Guy™.] So here, to compensate at least a little, two new recipes. Starting with corn. Step one: buy corn. Step two: microwave to taste. Seriously, it’s that simple. If it’s good corn, just three or four minutes, husks and tassles and all, and it should be amazing. When it cools down a little, shuck, salt, pepper, eat. INSTANT BAKLAVA The simplest way to cook baklava is just to buy some. But who ever thinks to do that? Instead: 1. Pour a little granola into a small bowl. Or corn flakes, raisin bran — whatever. 2. Dip a spoon into a jar of honey. I know, honey is not that manly, but everyone should have a jar – it’s honey. How can you not? Bears love honey, and bears are manly. You could name a football team after bears. So just dip the damn spoon into the damn jar and then . . . 3. Putting the base of the spoon onto the floor of the bowl, push some of the granola on top, and then – still holding the now-honey-and-granola-laden spoon level with one hand, take a small knifeful or forkful of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light (or actual butter, but I’m trying to delight you, not kill you) and dab it on top of the granola, scraping it off the knife or fork with the edge of the spoon. 4. Put the spoon in your mouth, close your lips, and, as you pull the spoon back out, leaving all the granola and ICBINBL in your mouth — but just some of the honey to swirl around and just make you crazy it’s so good, just as baklava does, but without having had to bake anything or clean anything (read on). 5. Repeat until all the granola from the bowl and all the honey from the spoon are gone and you’ve licked the spoon and any honey that dripped onto the bowl, so everything is perfectly clean, as if you were a cat – though, being a guy, you have a dog. By which I mean a dog – a large, sloppy Labrador retriever or somebody, not one of those dogs that really are so tiny and (let’s just come right out and say it) French, they’re barely dogs at all. And that, my friends, is how a guy makes baklava.
This Is So Much FUN! June 12, 2013June 12, 2013 QCOR Bought at $43 or so a year ago, it cratered . . . but yesterday rebounded, touching piercing the $50 mark at one point. With Guru’s blessing, I sold at a few pennies more than I had paid, earning for my trouble roughly what I would have earned if I had kept the cash in my interest-bearing checking account. (I have an interest-bearing checking account! It bears interest at the rate of five one-hundredths of one percent! For each million I leave sitting there, were I ever to find a million dollars someplace, I am paid $41 a month! Pre-tax.) GLDD Erich Almasy: “If you can’t raise the water, lower the bottom! NYTimes: “Water Levels Fall in Great Lakes, Taking a Toll on Shipping.” . . . Drought and other factors have created historically low water marks for the Great Lakes, putting a $34 billion shipping industry in peril, a situation that could send ripples through the economy. . . . If only we owned shares in the nation’s leading dredger. Oh wait — we do! BOREF Listen: we may lose all our money, but after 14 years of this, I’m just having so much fun. This yesterday from AirInsight suggests that the three competitors in the “etaxi” field may have been winnowed to two — one of which has 10 airlines signed up, the other none — though it may announce some soon. I like to think WheelTug will win the competition. Then again, the more elegant solution does not always prevail (see: Betamax). As always: only with money you can truly afford to lose. But if it works, and we win, parent Borealis will be worth far more than the $12.25 at which is closed last night.
I Feel Giddy. Oh, So Giddy . . . June 11, 2013 With our SODA LEAPS now up 130% in the two months since we bought them, I’m getting giddy. Never a good sign. If you haven’t already sold half, why not do it now — and then just sit back and see where SODA goes in the next year and a half? Meanwhile, there seems to have been no trading in Borealis shares over in Prague yesterday, but there it is, listed alphabetically right after a thing called BIGBOARD and before what appears to be some kind of bet on BRENT CRUDE OIL. Perhaps one reason an unusually heavy 10,688 shares of Borealis traded in the US yesterday was Czech market makers buying some to have in inventory, should European buyers come by wanting some. (But who knows?) Yesterday I mentioned the three principal goals of the loyal opposition: lowering taxes on the rich; economic austerity; and opposing anything — even things they themselves first proposed — that the President supports. I forgot the fourth: voter suppression. Making it as hard as possible for poor folks and students and minorities to vote. Their justification for that one is “voter fraud” — surely if you need photo ID to borrow a library book you should need it to vote — but this is a solution in search of a problem. In a chapter of The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies titled “The Voter-Suppression Project,” Jonathan Alter writes: After five years of investigations and prosecutions, the Bush Justice Department acknowledged in 2007 that no evidence existed of a widespread problem with vote fraud. In a nation of more than 200 million citizens of voting age, fewer than fifty people were convicted of voting illegally, almost all of whom offered convincing explanations that they had done so unintentionally. And don’t get me started on Chris Christy needlessly spending $12 million to hold New Jersey’s special election to fill the late Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat three weeks before the regularly-scheduled November election, just so all those folks likely to turn out for Cory Booker (who is African American) will not likely turn out again three weeks later to vote against Chris Christie and his Republican state legislative colleagues. To a Republican, that’s $12 million in taxpayer funds well spent.
Fun and Profit – The Center Holds June 10, 2013 FUN So Buyer & Cellar reopens June 18. As I’ve mentioned, I liked it so much when I saw the 99-seat version, I threw caution to the wind and invested. But see it anyway. Its star, Michael Urie, beat out five others — even including Bette Midler (“I’ll Eat You Last”) and Holland Taylor (“Ann”) — for the Drama Desk “Outstanding Solo Performance” Award. Here’s the story. “A fantasy so delightful,” says The New Yorker, “you’ll wish it were true.” PRA-HA-FIT Prague, in Czech, is “Praha,” which I know because I was a Slavic Languages and Literatures major in college (which meant reading War & Peace in English) and took Czech for a day. It turned out that all Czech words are stressed on the first syllable — PRA-ha — except, the instructor went on to explain, those stressed also on the second syllable. “What,” I asked, “are you just supposed to shout the whole word?” No, she explained, “listen to the difference.” After twenty minutes of not being able to discern the difference, I dropped Czech. And today Borealis begins trading on the Prague Exchange. Symbol: BOREY. Newsflash: there is a Prague exchange. Indeed, it is 20 years old. Here are current quotes. I don’t see BOREY yet, and I’m not sure when we first will, but I’m bookmarking this dollar-corona currency converter to be ready. Go ahead, laugh. Pra-ha-ha-ha-ha. But Gregor Mendel, founder of the science of genetics, was Czech, as were Franz Kafka and Antonin Dvorak, and as is Milos Forman, whose “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975 won all five major Academy Awards — and what company, I ask you, is more cuckoo than Borealis? Or, well, not cuckoo — I think it may have passed that stage. Let’s just say unusual. In any event, the more interesting near-term action could be in Paris, June 17-23, rather than Prague. Borealis will be at the Paris Air Show, Hall 5, E-264. THE CENTER HOLDS So the Republicans stand for basically three things: cutting taxes on the wealthy; austerity; and blocking everything the President tries to do — even if it was originally their idea. They justify the first by dubbing the wealthy “the job creators.” But as serial entrepreneur multi-billionaire Nick Hanauer shows so clearly in under six minutes, it is actually the middle class who are the job creators. They justify austerity by citing a “massively influential” study by two Harvard professors that turns out to have been massively wrong. And they justify the third — well, they don’t even try. They’re just determined to see the President fail, whatever damage that may do the country. For more on that, see Jonathan Alter’s The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, just out. Will someone please bring back the Grand Old Party? The party of Lincoln, who subsidized construction of the railroads (infrastructure!) and launched the first land-grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences . . . of Teddy Roosevelt, who busted the trusts and championed meat inspection and honest food and drug labeling . . . of Eisenhower, who gave us the Interstate Highway System (infrastructure!) and, lamenting a bloated military, warned of what he called the “military-industrial complex” . . . of Nixon (yikes!), who launched the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration . . . and so many moderate Republican members of the House and Senate. Virtually all gone. The center held this last time. But our friends across the aisle, with their three goals (and their four “pillars of deceit” — government, the media, academia, and science), remain determined.
Limit Orders June 7, 2013 Oh, God, oh God. One of you must have put in an order to buy BOREF yesterday morning without a limit, so it jumped from $8.63 to $11 on, like, 500 shares. I usually remember to say, “on thinly traded stocks, let alone one as thinly traded as this, be sure to use limit orders!” Forgot this time. Not that it much matters in this case: Two years from now, if the shares are $100, you’ll be quite pleased you snagged yours at $11. And if they’re 30 cents, your percentage loss will have been pretty much the same. Still, mea culpa for not reminding everyone: with a thinly traded stock — and few are more thinly traded than this one — always use “limit orders.” (With a limit order, you tell your broker — or click the appropriate boxes on his trading screen — that you want to buy 100 shares, say, but only at a price of $9 or better. If you set the limit too low, you may not get the shares right away, or ever. But neither will you find yourself involuntarily gouged. Similarly, with a limit sell order, the broker will only accept a price for you equal to or higher than the one you set. If you set the limit too high, you may not make the sale right away, or ever. But neither will you find yourself robbed. ) As it happens, more shares were traded as the day went on and the stock closed at $11 and change. But it was fewer than 4,000 shares that drove this 28% gain . . . so imagine if someone tried to sell 4,000 shares today. The gain could vanish. Let’s see where it is two years from now. SPEC-ULATION M.: “Just wanted to say thanks. I got fitted for new spectacles and bought a pair from a national chain. Cost: close to $400. As a backup (I have kids, who break things) I went to Warby Parker, per your post. Total cost: $125. The $400 pair are now my backups and I can’t believe the quality, speed to fill (faster than the national chain by 4 days) and the low cost. Not to mention the fact that another pair was donated to someone in need. These guys will be my go-to from now on.” SODA I hope they go much higher, but now that SODA LEAPS have more than doubled in the two months we’ve owned them, this is a reminder to sell half, if you haven’t already, so that from now on — as they say in Las Vegas — you are playing with the house’s money.
What – You’ve Never Seen “The Maltese Falcon”? Seriously? June 6, 2013 Following on yesterday‘s graduation speech . . . here’s a story about young graduates out to make a lot of money — but mainly to give it away. Do you know Peter Singer’s classic question about the toddler drowning in a shallow pond? Would you muddy your shoes and be late to work to save her if no one else were around to help? Do you know about GiveWell.org? If you have a minute, read the story. Hoping to make a lot of money myself one day, I’m still enjoying Tuesday’s airberlin announcement, wherein WheelTug picked up 110 more potential planes to retrofit. Trading in Borealis stock barely budged. But airberlin stock was up — choose the three-day chart here to best see it — even in the face of an unrelated sell recommendation (if I’m reading this translation right). You could say that the difference is that airberlin has some credibility in the financial market, so when it announced what it believed to be good news, some people bought shares; whereas Borealis, after 14 years of bold projections and no revenue, has earned a first class baggage allowance of skepticism. And yet . . . the thing works. Pick your magician: it’s one thing to make a jet vanish (it was a small jet, and, even if it really did vanish, how is that valuable?); quite another to drive one around for hours with no assist from the main engines, potentially saving a fortune (try that, David Copperfield). If the system gets FAA Certification, what airline would not want this money-saving capability? And because the system is not flight critical . . . and because so many airlines want it and so many experienced partners are working to make it happen . . . why is it crazy to think it may get certified? The system is estimated to save more than $700,000 a year per plane. Why is it nuts to think WheelTug (a subsidiary of Chorus Motors, which is a subsidiary of Borealis) could net $50,000 a year in profit from each leased system? There are something north of 10,000 jets that could be retrofitted with WheelTug. So multiply $50,000 times 10,000 planes and you get half a billion dollars a year. In profit. Assign that a multiple of 10 and you get a $5 billion value, which would make for a hundred-fold jump in the price of the stock. Sure, there could be competitors; but as of yet, no airline I know of has signed with one. And sure, I’m not taking into account that Borealis owns only most — not all — of Chorus Motors and that Chorus owns only most — not all — of WheelTug. But then again I’m also not assigning any value to the possible value of the company’s various technologies for, say, automobiles. Or its other potentially valuable assets. So I frankly don’t get why the stock isn’t higher. It remains highly speculative — and bizarre, with its headquarters in Gibraltar and all the rest. But is there not by now a reasonable chance — a 50% chance or a 30% chance or a 20% chance — the vision will be realized? If so, this is one heck of an under-priced lottery ticket. But I’m in no rush. What was that Sydney Greenstreet said at the end of “The Maltese Falcon” once he knew the real jewel-encrusted falcon had eluded him? “Seventeen years I’ve wanted that item, and have been trying to get it. If we must spend another year on the quest . . . well, sir, it will be an additional expenditure in time of only [he pauses to calculate] five and fifteen-seventeenths percent.”
How We’re Doing Vs. Other Humans June 4, 2013June 5, 2013 Monday, how we’re doing versus the S&P, with a little day-dreaming about Borealis thrown in. (I can’t help myself.) # Yesterday — which the service I pay to post these things just randomly decided not to post (grrrr) so here it is now — this Silicon Valley high school graduation speech by Nipun Mehta that starts out with what he calls the good news . . . You might be surprised to hear this, but you are about to step out into a world that’s in good shape — in fact the best shape that that it’s ever been in. The average person has never been better fed than today. Infant mortality has never been lower; on average we’re leading longer, healthier lives. Child labor, illiteracy and unsafe water have ceased to be global norms. Democracy is in, as slavery is disappearing. People don’t have to work as hard to just survive. A bicycle in 1895 used to cost 260 working hours, today we’ve gotten that number down to 7.2. . . . and moves immediately to the bad: This week, Time Magazine’s cover story labeled you guys as the “Me, Me, Me” generation; the week before, NY Times reported that the suicide rate for Gen X went up by 30% in the last decade, and 50% for the boomer generation. We’ve just learned that atmospheric carbon levels surpassed 400 PPM for the first time in human history. Our honeybee colonies are collapsing, thereby threatening the future of our food supply. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. What we’re handing over to you is a world full of inspiring realities coupled with incredibly daunting ones. In other words: miserable and magical isn’t just a pop-song lyric — it’s the paradox that you are inheriting from us. He goes on to pitch the joy in reconnecting through generosity. I found some of the specifics a bit dubious. (E.g., he cites a study on generosity that showed people — when suddenly given an unexpected gift — instinctively more likely to give it away than keep it. But I clicked the link to the study and it turns out the gift was trivial. Something tells me that if it had been $5,000, say, fewer would have instinctively given it away.) But you know what? It’s worth reading the whole thing. Just as every youngster (and every adult Republican and libertarian) needs to see “It’s A Wonderful Life” several times — and the rest of the Capra oeuvre — even if it may all be just a tiny bit simplistic. (You think?) Food for the soul nonetheless. # Today, back to Borealis again. They signed airberlin, Germany’s second largest airline, with 110 more planes for WheelTug. That brings the number of airlines with letters of intent to 10, on three continents, and the total number of planes to 549. So far as I know, no competitor has signed a single airline as yet.
How We’re Doing Vs. The S&P June 3, 2013June 2, 2013 Patrick Johnson: “At last I have finished the update I promised you weeks ago. I compared the return of someone buying and selling [the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, symbol SPY] on the same dates you recommend buying and selling your 194 picks. Here’s the file: Tobias v S&P v2 05 updated thru 04092013. The S&P is on rows 286 to 479. SPY grows $194,000 to $258,000. But your picks grow to $346,000. Both figures count dividends.” ☞ The only things about this I know for sure are: (1) This had to be a lot of work. Thank you, Patrick! (2) If it’s accurate and fairly constructed — as I know Patrick intended, but if the entire Republican case for austerity can rest on a faulty Excel spreadsheet, who am I to assume I really did beat the S&P? — then it’s worth noting that past performance is no guarantee of future success. Though I have to say that I’m more hopeful about that lottery ticket we call Borealis now, at $8 and change, than I was when I first suggested it 14 years ago at $3. Yes, in some ways, it just gets more and more laughable — e.g., it looks as though the stock will finally be listed for trading on a national stock exchange . . . in Prague. Click here for links to the prospectus . . . the 1200-page prospectus. Headquartered in Gibraltar, located in the U.S., traded in Prague, still sitting on hoped-for mineral wealth in Canada . . . you can’t tell me that, at the very least, this is not a colorful lottery ticket. But as faithful readers know, the company’s WheelTug subsidiary does seem to keep signing up airlines you’ve heard of, like El Al, Alitalia, and KLM, and partners you may have heard of, like Parker Hannifin. And you may by now have watched the video of the thing seeming to work. So I continue to imagine a $50,000 annual profit from what could theoretically be equipment leased to airlines with more than 10,000 planes — which right there would make the the company worth billions. It’s market cap today? Forty million. That’s barely more than the $35 million they’re asking for this gorgeous 4-bedroom penthouse at 55 Central Park West (I’d grab it, but the $157,006 monthly maintenance is a little out of my league) and just more than half the price to which the Versace mansion has been reduced (from $125 million to $75 million) on South Beach. But I digress.