8.5 Stars, $8.50 a Share July 16, 2007March 8, 2017 SiCKO Hey, so have you seen the movie? It’s funny, charming, wonderfully human – and, at the very, very least, thought provoking. Plus, the facts are right. I don’t know if you’ve followed the CNN flap between Michael Moore and their medical correspondent, but basically, even while saying that Moore fudged some of the facts, he largely agrees with Moore. And the ‘fudge’ turns out to be so trivial, in my view, as to be little more than ‘argumentative’ (as the lawyers would say). Here’s how the 10 movies playing at my local theater ranked this past weekend – out of a possible 10 stars – based on 123,171 votes by IMDB website visitors nationwide: Sicko 8.5 / 10 (9,857 votes) Harry Potter 8.1 / 10 (13,306 votes) Knocked Up 8.1 / 10 (25,021 votes) Transformers 8.0 / 10 (45,089 votes) Talk to Me 7.7 / 10 (232 votes) Ocean’s Thirteen 7.3 / 10 (19,498 votes) Evening 7.1 / 10 (869 votes) A Mighty Heart 6.6 (1,792 votes) Evan Almighty 6.0 / 10 (5,946 votes) License to Wed 5.3 / 10 (1,561 votes) Granted, this sample is biased in favor of bright people who actually use the Internet and care enough about movies to rank them. But you’re a bright person who uses the Internet – so see the frickin’ movie! BOREF From the latest weekly Borealis update comes a link to Friday’s AXI press release (‘Advanced Explorations Inc. Drilling Identifies Mineralized Zone of 230 Metres’) in which AXI ‘is pleased to announce that the Company has completed the first three holes of a proposed 15,000m drill program.’ It gets dauntingly specific (and, to the layman, entirely opaque) until you reach, ‘Drilling to date has identified two zones of semi-massive to massive banded iron formation’ – massive sounds good – and: ‘We are very encouraged by the drill results.’ Not to say one expects downbeat press releases from a Canadian mining company. But . . . Gary Williams P. Geo and VP of Advanced Explorations Inc is the QP within the meaning of 43-101. The geologic information within this release is in part extracted from a qualifying report filed on Sedar (Paul Palmer, et al of Golder Associates Ltd.). The content of this release has been reviewed by the QP who approves the content of this release. ‘QP’ is short for ‘Qualified Person’ and ’43-101′ refers to a Canadian regulation that requires Qualified Persons – engineers who have demonstrated their competence and integrity – to sign off on such things. So I tend to think there may really be a 40-man camp and two drills working away on our behalf up there, and that progress is being made. Meanwhile, the Roche Bay annual report is now on line – with a cover photo of our barren (not to say Godforsaken) landscape – as are the annual reports of the other Borealis subsidiaries: Chorus Motors (which notes that its revenues derived from sale of shares, not products), Cool Chips (‘We have enormous demand. But we don’t have product.’), Power Chips (‘over the past year, we have been working to explore the limits of the underlying theory’), Faraway (indeed), and Photon Power (‘another year of watching and waiting’). Also, the latest presentation from Avto Metals (‘It was shown that, ridged geometry of the wall leads to Quantum Interference Depression (QID), or reduction of the density of quantum states for the free electron. Wave-vector density in k space is reduced within the entire Fermi sphere. . . . Recent experiments demonstrated a reduction of work function in thin films of Au, Nb, Cr and SiO2. Experimental results are in good qualitative agreement with the theory.’) As easy as it is to make fun of all this, I haven’t sold a single share and continue to think that – as speculations go, at $8.50 for each of 5 million shares – this one is as intriguing (and surely as bizarre) as they come. But as with any speculation, there is the very real risk of losing all your money.